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Freud made love, ‘the most spontaneous emotion’, into a ‘slow-motion picture’ which showed the victim an alienating ‘mechanics of something more than native to him’. Thus wrote the pacifist, poet and sufferer of wartime neurosis Max Plowman, in the journal Adelphi in 1930. Even more, Plowman argued, Freud developed a ‘technique’ by which the spontaneous emotion of love can be ‘artificially produced’: ‘Small wonder Freud is instinctively hated’, Plowman concluded. In a sense, Plowman serves as the main informant in Uffa Jensen's engagingly written global history of early psychoanalysis - an epigraph of Plowman's quote opens the study and is reiterated in its conclusion (p. 416). Like Plowman, Jensen discerns an ‘emotional technique’ (p. 22) or an ‘emotional practice’ (p. 31) at the core of psychoanalysis. Focalizing his object of historical analysis in this way, he follows the institutions and the therapeutic practices psychoanalysis developed, as well as the emotions it aroused and the politics it triggered. Spanning the period from 1908 to 1940, the study zooms in on three localities: Berlin, London and Calcutta. In contradistinction to the early hubs of Vienna and Zurich, in the three selected cities the psychoanalytic movement first had to find a way to establish itself.
Jensen presents psychoanalysis as ‘a system of multiple, mutual, and trans-local entanglements’ (p. 26). The four thematically arranged chapters, each of which covers all three research sites, are punctuated with short vignettes. These ‘keyhole texts’ are intended to disrupt the macro perspective. Jensen's main claim is that psychoanalysis was invented globally - that is to say, at different places, albeit not simultaneously, but temporally dislocated at different places because it tied in with pre-existing forms of knowledge current at all three locales under review; temporally dislocated because of differing local circumstances and therapeutic problems.
The first chapter, ‘Institutions’, recounts