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Freud believed that understanding human beings was an interdisciplinary affair. Thus he recommended in “The Question of Lay Analysis” (Freud, 1926) that the best education for a psychoanalyst included the history of civilizations, literature, biology,
sociology, anatomy, religion, anthropology, and so forth. Freud applied psychoanalysis to art, myth, literature, religion, and anthropology and wrote psychobiographies and psychohistories. Many of his contemporaries, including Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, Abraham, Jones, and Bonaparte, continued this tradition.
Of course, the relationship between psychoanalysis and the humanities has often been troubled, rather than mutually enriching. Psychoanalysis as a discipline has often viewed itself as a master discourse, able to understand what literature, religion, and other complex human creations really mean. From the eminent art historian Meyer Shapiro (1956), who objected to Freud's (1910) study of Leonardo, to anthropologists who have challenged the universality of the Oedipus complex, humanists have rejected psychoanalytic interpretations. Psychoanalytic imperialism has bred insularity within psychoanalysis and antagonized thinkers from other disciplines.
Humanists in academia have often been defensive rather than receptive to psychoanalytic perspectives. In the United States psychoanalysis has traditionally been segregated from the humanities on an institutional level. Psychoanalytic training always occurs outside academic contexts. Traditional academies' emphasis on rational processes and conscious, external determinants of behavior has been rejected by psychoanalysts, who favor dynamic unconscious, transference, and countertransference.
Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, a collection of essays by artists and scholars with some psychoanalytic training, intervenes in this important and neglected terrain. The essays in this volume explore such topics as Freud's philosophical ego ideals; anthropology and psychoanalysis; Cezanne;