Revolution in Mind - Softcover

George Makari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0715639625 ISBN 13: 9780715639627

Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

How did Freudian Theory come together as a body of ideas, and how did these ideas attract followers who spread this model of mind throughout the West? Makari contextualises Freud's early psychological work amid the great changes occurring in late-nineteenth-century European science, philosophy, and medicine, showing how Freud was a creative, inter-disciplinary synthesizer whose immersion in pre-existing domains of study led to the creation of Freudian Theory. He looks at how Freud's followers built a heterogeneous movement in the years leading to 1914, at the growth of the movement, and its subsequent collapse with the departures of Bleuler, Jung and Adler. Finally, Makari examines the critical, but neglected, Weimar period, when there was an attempt to rebuild a more pluralistic psychoanalytic community. This reformation resulted in the broader theoretical reach of psychoanalysis and its greater acceptance across the Western world outside Europe, where the rise of fascism was to lead to the destruction of psychoanalysis and the culture that once sustained it.

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 Publishers Weekly

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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Edition details

• Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0715639625
• ISBN 13: 9780715639627
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624