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Published online: 19 February 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
In their book Freud in Cambridge, the late historian and philosopher John Forrester and historical geographer Laura Cameron present an epistemological argument about what it means to trace the dissipation of enthusiasm. They open a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the disappearance of psychoanalysis from the university and the move towards science. Freud in Cambridge presents us with a surprise: Freud never went to Cambridge but nonetheless his views were essential for the formation of academic study away from religious study. Much like first love, the once passionate interest in psychoanalytic ideas gradually dies down and the project of the book is both the question of disappearance and the encounter with psychoanalytic traces that continue to haunt the university. What are the conditions that brought interest in psychoanalysis to Cambridge? And why has this interest disappeared? Psychoanalysis is a study of subjectivity, and the condition of study is transference. In this way, it has no external perspective - the very resistance of inquiry into subjectivity can only be understood in relation to what is resisted. This idea is closely linked with the way in which Cameron and Forrester approach their study of psychoanalysis in Cambridge, from the vantage of the ways in which the university is affected by the very ideas it dismisses.
The history of psychoanalysis is important because psychoanalysis is already a problem of history: things that are avoided, displaced, things that we are not ready to receive. Forrester and Cameron’s project is a tracing of change that came about in Cambridge, which started through a dream. The Cambridge men that sought Freud’s advice, were accomplished botanists, anthropologists, economists, educators, physicians, literary figures, and philosophers. They included the likes of botanist and ecology pioneer Arthur Tansley, anthro