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There is a conundrum to this absorbing collection of essays, one of central interest to readers of Psychoanalysis and History. Psychoanalysis is invoked, and seemingly crucial to the project of this volume, and yet at the same time it is displaced from the title (which pairs ‘history’ with the more classical ‘psyche’) down to the subtitle where its position in the
middle of the listed terms - culture, psychoanalysis, the past - hardly centralizes it. I say ‘displaced’, because this volume is very much a product of the ‘Psychoanalysis and History’ seminar series, running for over fifteen years at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and convened by the book's editors, Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor. In fact, the seminar's presence on the intellectual scene runs deeper than that, as it grew from earlier discussions about psychoanalysis held in the mid-1980s under the aegis of the London History Workshop Centre for Social History. One might hazard the statement that, over the last decade, almost anyone who is anyone in the UK academic world, who might situate themselves as a historian interested in psychoanalysis, has delivered a paper there, while it has provided encouragement for shifting communities of young researchers in the field.
One obvious reason for this reluctance stems from a prevailing diffidence towards psychoanalytic enquiry amongst British historians. Many of the articles here begin with a similar observation concerning ‘decades