Publisher's Synopsis
Suggesting that Freud's version of the history of psychoanalysis has triumphed by default, this book presents what aims to be a more balanced view, taking account of the ideas of his dissenting followers and forgotten adversaries.;Articles by a number of contributors are included in this volume addressing subjects such as the late 19th-century debate about racial identity. It shows how biological concepts of race became transformed into psychological categories. For Freud and his fellow analysts, being "Jewish" meant participating in a shared set of intellectual and emotional attitudes. The problem for psychoanalysts, as for ethnopsychologists like Lazarus and Steinthal, was how to separate the psyche from the body. The problem was compounded by turn-of-the century debates which associated Jewishness with femininity - with the female body. Freud never entirely resolved the difficulties arising from this rhetoric of race, which had a distorting effect on his conceptions of gender. Attitudes towards Jewishness and femininity are explored from another angle in a commentary, drawn from a small number of Freud's letters to his fiancee, which reconstructs some of the patterns underlying Freud's choice of wife.;Further articles deal with the reactions of Viennese feminists during Freud's lifetime; Otto Rank; the divergent responses of literary authors to psychoanalysis; and further exploration of the cultural context of psychoanalysis.;Each volume of "Austrian Studies" is designed to make the results of specialist research more accessible through a range of book reviews, as well as to offer a close focus on one specific field.
