Abstract
The emigration, voluntary or enforced, of psychoanalysts from central Europe to Britain and the United States from the 1930s onward has been explored in depth and detail over the last decades, with important work on, among related topics, “Freud in exile.”1 Less fully documented and explored are the experiences, in the 1920s and 1930s, of those British analysands and training analysts who traveled to Vienna, Berlin, or Budapest in order to be analyzed by “the masters,” including Freud in Vienna, Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest, and Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs in Berlin. While it is recognized that this was a familiar pattern in the training of early British analysts, the particularities of their experiences abroad (as well as those of analysands who were “patients” rather than “pupils,” to use Freud’s distinction) appear not to have been a significant focus of interest. This chapter is a preliminary exploration of this topic, and focuses on the activities of the Stracheys, particularly Alix Strachey, and of the writers Bryher and H.D., in the Berlin of the mid-1920s and the Berlin and Vienna of the late 1920s and early 1930s, respectively.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See, e.g., essays in the volume Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes, eds. Edward Timms and Naomi Segal (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988).
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 40–41.
Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 78.
Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 139.
For discussion of the clinic, see also Sally Alexander, “Psychoanalysis in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century: An Introductory Note,” in History Workshop Journal, issue 45 (1998), 135–143.
Paul Roazen, Oedipus in Britain: Edward Glover and the Struggle over Klein (NY: Other Press, 2000), 33.
In Ella Freeman Sharpe, Collected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1950), 136.
H.D., Tribute to Freud (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), 3. Berggasse is in fact in the ninth district of Vienna, not the nineteenth. At that period, Freud sometimes saw patients - for example, the American Joseph Wortis - in a house in Döbling, in the nineteenth district; this may account for H.D’s confusion. My thanks to Ritchie Robertson for this suggestion.
Susan Stanford Friedman, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher and their Circle (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2002) 177.
Sigmund Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XII (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), 136.
John Forrester, “Psychoanalysis: Gossip, Telepathy and/or Science,” in The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 243–259.
The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 431.
For detailed histories of the Cambridge psychoanalytic networks, see the work by Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “‘A nice type of the English scientist’: Tansley and Freud,” History Workshop Journal, issue 48 (1999), 65–100; “Tansley’s Psychoanalytic Network: An Episode out of the Early History of Psychoanalysis in England,” Psychoanalysis and History 2(2) (2000), 189–256.
See also John Forrester, “Freud in Cambridge,” Critical Quarterly 46(2), (2004) 1–26; “1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London—Myers, Jones and MacCurdy,” Psychoanalysis and History 10.1 (2008), 37–94.
See Barbara Caine, “The Stracheys and Psychoanalysis,” History Workshop Journal issue 45 (1998), 145–169.
Bryher, Development, in Joanne Winning, ed., Bryher: Two Novels (Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 2000), 136.
Jay Prosser, “‘Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition’: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well” in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, eds., Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 129–144.
Quoted Maggie Magee and Diane C. Miller, Lesbian Lives: Psychoanalytic Narratives Old and New (New York: Analytic Press, 1996), 26.
See Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, eds. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (London: Continuum, 1998); and Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Ernest Jones, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 8 (1927), 459–472.
Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).
R. Andrew Paskausas, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993) 716.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marcus, L. (2012). European Witness: Analysands Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. 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_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_6
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)