You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The late British historian John Forrester noted in 2014, ‘Much of the history of psychoanalysis really is lost from sight - because we have been looking for too long in the wrong places.’ He added:
we have been taking on trust not only the official histories of psychoanalysis, suffering from all the distortions that winners' history always introduces … but also the presumption that key figures in later history were also central to the earlier phases of its history. (Qtd in Herzog, p. 9)
In the last few years we have seen a surge of new books on the history of psychoanalysis that recover and reconceptualize the history of this discipline (e.g. Robcis, 2003; Linstrum, 2016; Damousi & Plotkin, 2012; Guenther, 2015; Lunbeck, 2014; Shapira, 2013). All of them point to the fact that psychoanalysis should be looked at as knowledge and practice operating in relation to particular sociocultural settings, and that in this sense each country has ‘its own psychoanalysis’. The prominent historian, Dagmar Herzog, shares this assumption and adds a key contribution to this research of the new history of psychoanalysis. Aiming to recover the theories of experts such as Robert Stoller or Kurt R. Eissler, Alexander Mitscherlich and Paul Parin, whose work was forgotten or misunderstood, Herzog restores them to the canon of psychoanalytic, intellectual and