Abstract
In the “General Preface” to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey wrote: “The imaginary model which I have always kept before me is of the writings of some English man of science of wide education born in the middle of the nineteenth century. And I should like, in an explanatory and no patriotic spirit, to emphasize the word ‘English.’”1 It is an amusing, seemingly pointless, question to ask: whom did Strachey have in mind as his model? And it leads to another parallel question: since Strachey actually did create, through his translation, an imagined “English Freud,” a man of science of wide education born around 1850, can we pinpoint an actual English man of science who corresponds closely to this figure? This “English man of science” would have to have an inclination for bold speculation and adventure. He would have to be bold, courageous, imaginative, and empirically immersed through firsthand experience in the construction of a new human science or sciences. Once one specifies these characteristics, a plausible candidate comes into focus: W. H. R. Rivers.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
James Strachey, “General Preface,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I (1886–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, Standard Edition, 1 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), xiii-xxvi, at xix.
L. E. Shore, “W. H. R. Rivers,” The Eagle (1923), 2–14 at 9.
Alan Costall, “Dire Straits: The Divisive Legacy of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35.4 (1999), 345–358.
W. H. R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923), 86, hereafter abbreviated as CD.
For biographical information on Rivers, the best source is still Richard Slobodin, W.H.R. Rivers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusion: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and “W.H.R. Rivers and the War Neuroses,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35.4 (1999), 359–378.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962).
Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Viking, 1991); The Eye in the Door (London: Viking, 1993); The Ghost Road (London: Viking, 1995).
Rivers’s student Myers was cofounder of the Cambridge Laboratory; see John Forrester, “1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London: Myers, Jones and MacCurdy,” Psychoanalysis and History 10.1 (2008), 38–43, 45–47.
L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, 1840–1940 (London: Methuen, 1964), 180; Cyril Burt, Psychologist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 26.
Colin Crampton, The Cambridge School. The Life, Work and Influence of James Ward, W.H.R. Rivers, C.S. Myers and Sir Frederic Bartlett, PhD, University of Edinburgh, 1978, 142; Forrester, “1919,” 37–94.
John Forrester, “Remembering and Forgetting Freud in Early Twentieth Century Dreams,” Science in Context 19.1 (2006), 65–85.
W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 159–160.
Tracey Loughran, “Shell-Shock and Psychological Medicine in First World War Britain,” Social History of Medicine 22.1 (2009), 88.
C. S. Myers, “The Influence of the Late W.H.R. Rivers,” in W. H. R. Rivers, Psychology and Politics and Other Essays (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1923), 169.
Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “‘A nice type of the English scientist’: Tansley and Freud,” History Workshop Journal 48 (1999), 65–100.
Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell. The Spirit of Solitude (London: Vintage, 1997), 495–496.
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), 138.
Philip Sargant Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (eds.), C.K. Ogden: a Collective Memoir (London: Elek Pemberton, 1977).
Damon Franke, Modernist Heresies. British Literary History, 1883–1924,(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895–1926 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986).
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon. The Making of a War Poet. A Biography (1886–1918) (London: Duckworth, 1998).
Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London: Folio Society, 1974 [1936]), 13.
Sassoon’s principal contacts with the Magazine were Edward Dent, the musicologist, who initially advised Sassoon in early 1916 to publish in the Magazine, and A. T. (Theo) Bartholomew, under-librarian at the University Library, both part of a homosexual circle in Cambridge. Being a regular reader of the Magazine, Rivers would have seen these (e.g., “A Subaltern,” on February 24, 1917; “The Optimist,” April 21, 1917; “Base Details,” April 28, 1917; “News from the Front,” June 2, 1917; “Supreme Sacrifice” and ‘In an Underground Dressing-Station,” June 9, 1917). The Magazine produced a separately sold pamphlet entitled “To Any Officer,” containing Sassoon’s “To Any Dead Officer” in August 1917. Four poems published in the Magazine in 1917 were also published by Ogden in pamphlet form in January 1918 (“Dreamers,” “Does It Matter?,” “Base Details,” and “Glory of Women”). Some of these poems were not published in the collections Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) and War Poems (1919) that made Sassoon immediately famous as a war poet. See Wilson, Sassoon. The Making of a War Poet; and Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon. The Journey from the Trenches. A Biography (1918–1967) (London: Duckworth, 2003).
Siegfried Sassoon, “Supreme Sacrifice,” Cambridge Magazine, June 9, 1917, 691.
The most peculiar and confusing of these was Rivers’s decision to reserve the term “repression” for “the process by which we wittingly endeavour to banish experience from consciousness” (Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 17), proposing the term “suppression” for “unwitting” elimination. In other words, Rivers interchanged the meaning of the (Freudian) terms “suppression” and “repression.” For “unwissentlich”— see W. H. R. Rivers, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Vol. II Physiology and Psychology. Part I Introduction and Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 6–7.
For Jones’s acute comments, see E. J. [Ernest Jones], “Instinct and the Unconscious. A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses By W. H. R. Rivers, M.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., (Cambridge University Press, 1920. Pp. 252. Price 10s. 6d.),” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 1 (1920), 475.
Frederick Bartlett, “Review. W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream,” Mind 33 No. 129 (1924), 94.
E. J. [Ernest Jones], “Review, Rivers, Conflict and Dream,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 4 (1923), 499.
Siegfried Sassoon, War Diaries. 1915–1918, ed. and introd. Rupert Hart-Davies (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 183.
Patrick Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of the War Poetry (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 152.
Siegfried Sassoon, War Poems (London: Heinemann, 1919) 75; see Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon, 151–161.
W. H. R. Rivers and Henry Head, “A Human Experiment in Nerve Division,” Brain 31.3 (1908), 324.
W. H. R. Rivers, The Influence of Alcohol and Other Drugs on Fatigue (London: E. Arnold, 1906), 20.
Ted J. Kaptchuk, “Intentional Ignorance: A History of Blind Assessment and Placebo Controls in Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72.3 (1998), 419.
John Forrester, “Dream Readers,” in Forrester, ed., Dispatches from the Freud Wars. Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 138–183.
John Forrester, “Introduction,” Sigmund Freud, Interpreting Dreams, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2006b), vii-liv.
James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Auto ethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9–10.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things ([1966] 1970) (London: Routledge, 2002), 413.
Rickman to Róheim, letter dated January 22, 1923, BPaS, Rickman Papers, CRR/FO7/12. On Rickman, see Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “Tansley’s Psychoanalytic Network: An Episode Out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in England,” Psychoanalysis and History 2.2 (2000), 192–195.
Ian Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology. W.H.R. Rivers and his Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898–1931 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981), 52 & 340n7.
Jeremy MacClanchy, “Unconventional Character and Disciplinary Convention: John Layard, Jungian and Anthropologist,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others. Essays on Culture and Personality. History of Anthropology 4 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 50–71.
W. H. R. Rivers, “President’s Inaugural address. Medical Section, British Psychological Society,” The Lancet (May 24, 1919), 892.
Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists. The Modern British School, 2nd revised edition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), ix.
Michael North, Reading 1922. A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 42.
George W. Stocking, Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 271.
Radcliffe-Brown, who came up to Cambridge in 1901 and took the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1904 and 1905, was very much Rivers’s student until their estrangement before the war (Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology, 244–300). Langham argues vigorously that Radcliffe-Brown’s self-presentation as entirely indebted to Durkheim for his advocacy of the structural-functionalist method conceals the fact that, in the period 1912–14 he developed this method explicitly as an extension of Rivers’s work. Rivers was then systematically excluded from the discipline-founding accounts by later students of Radcliffe-Brown’s. Malinowski was formally Seligman’s student, but looked to Rivers as the unquestioned leader of British anthropology (see Stocking, After Tylor, 267–268; Michael W. Young, Malinowski. Odyssey of an anthropologist, 1884–1920 [London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004], pp. 88, 161–162, 165, 233–237, 245, 251, 265, 349–350, 369, 373, 408, 558–559 passim).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Do Dual-Organizations Exist?” (1956), in Structural Anthropology [1958], trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (London: Penguin, 1972), 162–163.
James Urry, “‘Notes and Queries on Anthropology’ and the Development of Field Methods in British Anthropology, 1870–1920,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland no. 1972 (1972), 45–57.
W. H. R. Rivers, “Anthropological Research Outside America,” in Reports on the Present Condition and Future Needs of the Science of Anthropology (Washington: Carnegie Inst. [Publ. 200], 1913), 7.
W. H. R. Rivers, “A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics,” J. Anthrop. Inst. 30 (1900), 82.
Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology, 64–93; Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 140–149.
George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski,” in Stocking, ed., The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 27.
Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, “Introduction: Cambridge and the Torres Strait,” in Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, eds., Cambridge and the Torres Strait. Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.
Graham Richards, “Getting a Result: The Expedition’s Psychological Research 1898–1913,” in Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, 136–157; Graham Richards, “Race,” Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History (London: Routledge, 1997).
J. L. Myres, “W.H.R. Rivers,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 53 (January-June 1923), 16.
Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 160; see also W. H. R. Rivers, “Sociology and Psychology,” Sociological Review 9 (1916), 1–13 and “An Address on Education and Mental Hygiene” [1922], in Psychology and Politics and Other Essays, with a Prefatory Note by G. Elliot Smith and an Appreciation by C. S. Myers (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1923), 95–106.
W. H. R. Rivers, Dreams and Primitive Culture. A Lecture Delivered in the John Rylands Library on the 10th April 1918, reprinted from The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 4.3–4 (February-July 1918), 14.
George W. Stocking, Jr., “Anthropology and the Science of the Irrational: Malinowski’s Encounter with Freudian Psychoanalysis,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others. Essays on Culture and Personality. History of Anthropology 4 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 29–31.
George W. Stocking, Jr., “Books Unwritten, Turning Points Unmarked. Notes for an Anti-History of Anthropology” [1981], in Stocking, Delimiting Anthropology. Occasional Essays and Reflections (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 344.
Erwin Ackerknecht, “In Memory of William H. R. Rivers, 1864–1922,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 11 (1942), 481.
Sigmund Freud, “Letter from Freud to Fliess, February 1, 1900,” in J. M. Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 397.
John Forrester, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1980).
R. G. Goldstein, “The Higher and Lower in Mental Life: An Essay on J. Hughlings Jackson and Freud,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 43 (1995), 495–515; Young, The Harmony of Illusions.
Hugh Carey, Mansfield Forbes and his Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 42.
Sylvia Payne, “Dr. John Rickman” Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 33 (1952), 54.
C. S. Myers, “A Lecture on Freudian Psychology,” The Lancet 207.5364 (June 19, 1926), 1183.
C. S. Myers, Present-Day Applications of Psychology, With Special Reference to Industry, Education and Nervous Breakdown (London: Methuen, 1918), 28.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Forrester, J. (2012). The English Freud: W. H. R. Rivers, Dreaming, and the Making of the Early Twentieth-Century Human Sciences. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-11385-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-09242-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)