Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis - Hardcover

Makari, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061346616 ISBN 13: 9780061346613

Publisher: Harper, 2008

Synopsis

A masterful history of one of the most important movements of our time, Revolution in Mind is a brilliant, engaging, and radically new work—the first ever to fully account for the making of psychoanalysis. In a sweeping narrative, George Makari demonstrates how a new way of thinking about inner life coalesced and won followers who spread this body of thought throughout the West. Along the way he introduces the reader to a fascinating array of characters, many of whom have been long ignored or forgotten.

Amid great ferment, Sigmund Freud emerged as a creative, interdisciplinary thinker who devised a riveting new theory of the mind that attracted acolytes from the very fields the Viennese doctor had mined for his synthesis. These allies included Eugen Bleuler, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, all of whom eventually broke away and accused the Freudian community of being unscientific. Makari reveals how in the wake of these crises, innovators like Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, and others reformed psychoanalysis, which began to gain wide acceptance only to be banished from the continent and sent into exile due to the rise of fascism.

Groundbreaking, insightful, and compulsively readable, Revolution in Mind goes beyond myth and polemic to give us the story of one of the most controversial intellectual endeavors of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

George Makari is director of Cornell's Institute for the History of Psychiatry, associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College, adjunct associate professor at Rockefeller University, and a faculty member of Columbia University's Psychoanalytic Center. His writings on the history of psychoanalysis have won numerous awards. He lives in New York City

From the Back Cover

A masterful history of one of the most important movements of our time, Revolution in Mind is a brilliant, engaging, and radically new work—the first ever to fully account for the making of psychoanalysis. In a sweeping narrative, George Makari demonstrates how a new way of thinking about inner life coalesced and won followers who spread this body of thought throughout the West. Along the way he introduces the reader to a fascinating array of characters, many of whom have been long ignored or forgotten.

Amid great ferment, Sigmund Freud emerged as a creative, interdisciplinary thinker who devised a riveting new theory of the mind that attracted acolytes from the very fields the Viennese doctor had mined for his synthesis. These allies included Eugen Bleuler, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, all of whom eventually broke away and accused the Freudian community of being unscientific. Makari reveals how in the wake of these crises, innovators like Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Melanie Klein, and others reformed psychoanalysis, which began to gain wide acceptance only to be banished from the continent and sent into exile due to the rise of fascism.

Groundbreaking, insightful, and compulsively readable, Revolution in Mind goes beyond myth and polemic to give us the story of one of the most controversial intellectual endeavors of the twentieth century.

Reviews

Makari, the director of Cornell's Institute for the History of Psychiatry, provides a comprehensive early history of psychoanalysis from 1895 to 1946. Although his early colleague Josef Breuer justifiably claimed that Freud was a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations, the great Viennese thinker's revolutionary understanding of the psyche evolved quite a bit, shifting away from psychosexual theory toward the tripartite division of the psyche (ego/id/superego) around 1920. Discussing the steadily growing community of psychoanalysts in Vienna (and, successively, in Zurich, Berlin and elsewhere), Makari notes that the Freudians could sometimes be intellectually insular and sectlike, resulting in the expulsion of Alfred Adler and C.G. Jung from Freud's circle between 1907 and 1913. Makari succinctly describes developments after Freud's influence peaked, especially the prominence of what came to be called ego psychology as developed by Heinz Hartmann, and the bitter intellectual dispute between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Makari tries to cover so much ground that some sections get a bit sketchy, but most of his ideas come across clearly in this challenging but rewarding intellectual history. 31 b&w photos. (Jan. 8)
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With psychoanalysis under intellectual siege in recent decades, Makari retrieves its original radicalism in this history of its formative decades. Establishing the context of its origin, Makari discusses thought current in Europe in the late 1800s about the nature of the mind and mental illness. Introducing Sigmund Freud, Makari depicts the guru of psychoanalysis feuding with rivals and acquiring acolytes as he found his calling and steadily gained prominence as a medical and psychological innovator. The disputations that developed in Freud’s wake impel Makari’s narrative and inform his readers of the deep divisions that developed within the psychoanalytic community, ranging from the qualifications to be a psychoanalyst to what theories and techniques had a claim on being scientific. Consequently, schools of variant theoretical casts sprouted in Vienna, Zurich, and Berlin, while Ernest Jones imported Freudianism to Britain. From a scholar deeply informed and perceptive about psychoanalysis, this work will well satisfy a curiosity about its historical development up to Freud’s death in 1939. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061346616
• ISBN 13: 9780061346613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 624