Thinking in cases, by John Forrester

John Forrester tells us that he may have gone as a graduate student to Harvard, rather than Princeton, had he not clashed in the interview with Isaiah Berlin over eighteenth-century Newtonianism. I should like to have been a fly on the wall on that occasion. Forrester refers to the encounter as a “brush,” a particularly apt term for the minor but extraordinarily generative fights that tend to crop up in the interstices of his thought. The history of psychoanalysis seems to have impressed upon him, among other things, the value of “controversial discussions.” Forrester, in turn, has helped one see that the history of psychoanalysis is, to a large extent, a history of controversies. Skirmishing as a way of thinking, however, is not equivalent to all-out intellectual warfare, which is something that Forrester, with his rationalist English temper, did not go in for; he was not a zealot (he never joined that club).

How should we understand the skirmishes? I can offer a more prosaic, workaday example of the “brush” in my own case, an example (as we shall see) that keeps us squarely within Forrester’s ken. Many years ago, I was faced with a rather supercilious professor of sociology on an interview panel who wondered how anyone could be positively inclined towards psychoanalysis and Michel Foucault. Are we getting ourselves into a bit of a muddle? The question might have been more challenging had it been less condescending. It was, and is, perfectly obvious to anyone, with more than a passing interest in the matter, that Foucault was never going to do justice to Freud; the professor, however, was not inviting a discussion of the case. Needless to say, I did not get the job.

Meanwhile, although psychoanalysis and Foucault have proved to be decidedly odd bedfellows, my positive inclinations have not exactly condemned me to a life of splendid isolation over the past 40 years. Indeed, John Forrester has long been among the very best and most scrupulous of intellectual company—I