Christine Dunbar and I went to the Anna Freud Centre and the Freud Museum in September 2008 to celebrate the publication of a 20th anniversary edition of my Anna Freud biography. During our London visit, we also went to the Tate Modern, where we were fascinated by a timeline of 20th century art installed as a 50-foot long mural in the entrance hallway. Later that day, examining a miniature of Sara Fanelli's timeline which we had bought in the museum store, Christine Dunbar announced very emphatically: “Psychoanalysis needs one of these.”
This seed of inspiration fell on the ground of a conviction we share as former candidates and current teachers: The great weakness of most psychoanalytic institute curriculums is that the articles and books assigned are organized only by topic (or course title) and sometimes by author. There is no attention to historical context or to how the story of psychoanalysis's history is, tacitly, being told. If there is an acknowledgement of the field's history, that usually means only a required course on Freud. A candidate may eventually begin to get a sense of intellectual and clinical lineage over time. But, until that point, “the field” is just something overwhelming, like a jigsaw puzzle without its picture. A timeline, we thought, could be that missing picture.
But how could a timeline render such an exceedingly complex and embattled history? Could we do it without being simplistic, without producing just a “one damn thing after another” picture? Sara Fanelli had represented 20th century art without any context—art for art's sake, as it were—and we knew that would be completely impossible for our field, which has had such a two-way interaction with world history.
We felt that a timeline of psychoanalysis should be Darwinian, showing descent from an original ancestor, Freud; and showing graphically the evolution, by the mechanism of splitting, of different groups and concerns. But it should not accept the assumption of so many Freudians that the early schismatic history of psychoanalysis produced groups—Adlerians, Rankians, Jungians—that simply had no place in the later history or stopped evolving or became extinct. However, we did not want to imply that the sub-speciation of psychoanalysis was a “survival of the fittest” phenomenon; so we did not use the Darwinian tree trunk with branches metaphor.
Further, we did not want to fall into any metaphor of Progress beyond Freud (or Devolution from Freud) or fall into accepting any kind of a successor to Freud or true inheritor of Freudian ideas. So we organized
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Christine Dunbar are members of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and co-founders of Caversham Productions in Toronto.
our story on what might be called Plutarchian principles, showing “parallel lives” or lifeforms of psychoanalysis. The basic parallel relationship shown is among groups that concentrated theoretically on intrapsychic life; groups more focused on social/environmental influences upon people; and groups that tried to explore interactions of inter-psychic and intrapsychic life. The nature/nurture controversy (and our own sense of the falseness of that dichotomy) subtends our big picture.
Our first draft was made by Scotch-taping together 10 heavy watercolor pages (“the decade panels”) and making entries in pencil along banner-like bands of color. This was not a success, but we learned a great deal from the failure, particularly about how important it would be to show clearly the two periods in which psychoanalysis went into semi-moratorium in continental Europe, during WWI and during WWII. These traumas had defining impact upon how different analysts and schools of analysis related to the role of environmental influences in human development. We wanted our graphic to suggest the importance of trauma.
With a new set of relations among color bands, which had become like Anna Freudian “developmental lines,” we started again. This time we were satisfied, and could then work by accretion and adjustment, adding more and more entries from our “cannot imagine the timeline without X” files. Then, in a crucial meeting with our designer, Isabelle Rousset, we were prompted by her remark that we could, you know, use the verso of this thing. We did not have to follow the Sara Fanelli precedent of making a beautiful fold-up scroll, perfect to be mounted on a wall. “You are thinking too much like book people. This is not a book, it is an object in space, you can walk around it, like in a museum.”
So, on the verso we offered a narrative introduction which sets out our organizational principles and accounts, frankly, for our bias (which is toward contributors in the Anglophone world after WWII). After the introduction, there are 19 brief narrative histories of particular topics that we think are key to understanding how psychoanalysis has evolved. These, we thought, would be particularly helpful for students coming at this history without much preparation and thus unable to interpret at much depth the timeline itself. The narratives also extended our ability to argue for historiographical consciousness; they could prompt readers to reflect, as we ourselves had tried to do, on how this story was being told. You can visit the final result on the Web at .