After Freud Left

“The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time—including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. . . . In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins.”

“[A] fascinating volume.”

 “All too often the history of psychoanalysis has been written from polemical standpoints, leaving us to lurch between uncritical hagiography and categorical repudiation. After Freud Left avoids these pitfalls, locating the rise and fall of psychoanalysis in the United States within broader social, political, cultural, and international developments. The result is a lively and intriguing set of essays, which offer refreshingly new, often surprising, insights into the history of this important intellectual movement.”

“With a superbly nuanced and reflective introduction by this collection’s editor, John Burnham—the doyen of the history of American psychoanalysis—the papers explore, with remarkable erudition and display of previously unexplored sources, the arrival of psychoanalysis in the United States, symbolized by Freud’s one brief visit, to Clark University, in 1909, and the long arc of its rise and decline across the hundred years from 1909–2009. Emigration, transformation, distortion all played their part in the production of American psychoanalysis, which was infused to a remarkable extent in midcentury American life and now appears to be evaporating as quickly as it arrived. Does it leave traces? The historians and critics whose fine papers are collected in After Freud Left give nuanced and original answers.”