Introduction: Gathering the Residues
Abbreviations
Part I: Forging the Early History of British Psychoanalysis: For
the Love of Truth
Chapter 1: "A Pity to See History Thus Unnecessarily Distorted"
Chapter 2: Debateable Borderlands
Chapter 3: The 1898 BMA Hypnotism Debates
Part II: Mind Cures
Chapter 4: The London Psycho-Therapeutic Society (1900–15)
Chapter 5: Walford Bodie and the British Institute for the
Investigation of Mental Science
Chapter 6: The Medical, the Clerical, the Spiritual
Part III: From the Psychical to the Psychological to the
Therapeutical
Chapter 7: The Medical Society for the Study of Suggestive
Therapeutics
Chapter 8: The Evils of the Unqualified Medical Practitioner
Part IV: Four Psycho-therapists
Chapter 9: Edwin Ash
Chapter 10: T. W. Mitchell
Chapter 11: Ernest Jones
Chapter 12: Montague David Eder
Part V: Disseminating the Works of Freud
Chapter 13: The British Medical Journal, 1904–8
Chapter 14: The Journal of Mental Science, 1898–1911
Chapter 15: Some Early Practitioners of Psychoanalysis
Chapter 16: T. W. Mitchell, Discovering the Works of Freud
Chapter 17: Bernard Hart, Charles Spearman, and the British
Psychological Society
Chapter 18: Disseminating the Works of Freud: T. W. Mitchell and
the SPR
Chapter 19: T. W. Mitchell and the Psycho-Medical Society
Chapter 20: Jones Returns to London
Philip Kuhn is an independent scholar who studied at King's College London and Birkbeck, University of London.
There is a great deal to be enjoyed in the vast range of densely
researched histories and personalities here, which together make up
a kind of kaleidoscopic grab bag of ideas, quotations, debates, and
stories. . . [a] prodigious amount of research and scholarship . .
. has gone into this book. Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893 to 1913
will be of interest both to historians of psychoanalysis and to
anyone wishing to learn more about the wider history of mind
healing at the turn of the century.
*Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences*
Kuhn’s book is the first in-depth study of this gradual
infiltration of psychoanalytical ideas into Britain during those
early years. He has trawled back issues of The Lancet and the
British Medical Journal not to speak of the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research or a host of other obscurer sources.
(His 36-page bibliography can be treated as a chapter on its own,
well worth studying.) Armed with this exhaustive research, he is
able to reassess the prevailing climate in and around the medical
professions and to demonstrate that, alongside the notorious
hostility towards psychoanalysis, there was a much wider measure of
interest and involvement in the new method than had hitherto been
assumed on the basis of Jones’s version.
*Psychoanalysis and History*
Philip Kuhn has written a much-needed and insightful analysis of
the formative years of psychoanalysis in Britain. The key period
before the outbreak of the First World War has remained obscured by
myth and obfuscation. By scrupulous research and questioning, this
lucid and measured study brings a new understanding of key
individuals and the impact of psychoanalytical thought on the
broader medical community. It is highly recommended to anyone with
an interest in the evolution and politics of psychotherapy in the
United Kingdom.
*Edgar Jones, King's College London*
The story of the arrival of psychoanalysis in the United Kingdom
has usually been told as a kind of missionary adventure: a tale in
which Ernest Jones and a handful of farsighted colleagues
scandalized Edwardian society with the news of Freud's discovery of
the unconscious. Philip Kuhn's new study reveals a far richer and
stranger history. He shows how in the years before the First World
War, Freud's ideas were taken up and reworked around older
psychotherapeutic traditions by spiritual healers, asylum
psychiatrists, stage hypnotists, suffrage campaigners, magnetic
aristocrats, educational investigators, and psychical researchers.
Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893–1913 is a detailed and provocative
portrait of a lost world of psychological healing that will compel
readers to rethink their ideas of the medical and the human
sciences in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
*Rhodri Hayward, Queen Mary University of London*
It is this psychoanalytic impulse, to insist upon a long overdue
conversation around the unknown-known, that gives both the Kuhn and
Forrester and Cameron studies their sense of urgency. In what, for
both books, is otherwise a thicket of document and dusty detail,
their narratives are brimming with sparkling little novelties,
alive with anecdote and animated by a compelling readability.
Partly, this is due to the wealth of biographical material they
offer, the delight the reader has in being plunged into the
subterranean and eccentric lives of the famous and the long
forgotten alike. But behind this is the real urgency, the quiet
indignation as to why this history has been neglected for so long
in the face of so much readily available and widely accessible
evidence, both inside and outside the archives.
*Sitegeist*
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