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Hitzige Kämpfe tobten in der Folge des Zweiten Weltkrieges um das Erbe Sigmund Freuds. Die verspätete Aufarbeitung des Nationalsozialismus, die sexuelle Revolution und die Dekolonisation stießen fundamentale Transformationsprozesse in der psychoanalytischen Theorie an, die ihrerseits auf die Kultur zurückwirkten. Von den USA über Europa bis nach Lateinamerika schildert Dagmar Herzog die Deutungskämpfe einer Zunft, deren konkurrierende Theorien über Begehren, Angst, Aggression, Lust und Trauma mal konservativen, mal subversiven Zielen dienten - und hält damit ein innovatives Plädoyer für die Psychoanalyse als Erkenntnisinstrument im Dickicht der Verflechtung von Psyche und Gesellschaft.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Leaving the World Outside: 1. The libido wars; 2. Homophobia's durability and the reinvention of psychoanalysis; Part II. Nazism's Legacies: 3. Post-Holocaust antisemitism and the ascent of PTSD; 4. The struggle between Eros and death; Part III. Radical Freud: 5. Exploding Oedipus; 6. Ethnopsychoanalysis in the era of decolonization; Afterword; Notes; Index.
About the author
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and has published extensively on the histories of religion, gender and sexuality, and the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. She is the author of four previous books, including Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), and the editor or co-editor of six anthologies spanning issues of war, sexuality, religion and historical theory.
Summary
Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. She reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure were mobilized in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human psyche.
Report
'This is surely a history of the Cold War world as we did not know it, in which psychoanalytic conformists and rebels flex their way through the controversies of the era - Auschwitz, My Lai, student protests, postcolonial insurgencies, the culture of narcissism. Partly about the collapse of psychoanalysis in its bid to be the regulating body for Christian American normalcy, it is even more so the story of psychoanalysis resurgent and radical. Fiercely relevant.' Matt Ffytche, author of The Foundation of the Unconscious
