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Published online: 12 January 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023
John Forrester was a major British scholar of the history of science, based in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, which he headed from 2007 to 2013. Of his many interests (including Darwinism, Foucault, thermodynamics), it was the history and standing of psychoanalysis that he was most devoted to and that he served both in his writings and in editing the journal Psychoanalysis and History for many years. He was clearly committed to psychoanalysis, but in an attractively ambivalent way rather than as a ‘true believer’. As a non-analyst taking psychoanalysis as his object of study, he had no professional axe to grind and could appreciate both its limitations and distortions, on the one hand, and its immense contribution to the study of mind and culture on the other. Since his sad, untimely death from cancer in 2015, which itself was the topic of his wife Lisa Appignanesi’s 2018 memoir, Everyday Madness, three important books authored or co-authored by John have appeared. The first, Thinking in Cases (Forrester, 2017), was an exploration of the epistemology and practice of writing case studies, one of the fundamental vehicles for research in psychoanalysis. Its defence of the method against claims of non-scientificity and its contextualising of the psychoanalytic case along with others (especially legal cases) is radical in its extension of the scientific ideal and methodologically valuable in offering legitimation and guidance to researchers seeking to draw on the intimacy and intensity of the social scientific ‘case’. The second book, Freud in Cambridge (2018), co-authored with Laura Cameron, is an immense study of the take-up of psychoanalysis in the intellectual circles centred on Cambridge in the early to middle twentieth-century. I regard Freud in Cambridge as a masterpiece in both content and style: not only