This course will examine the dialectics of psychoanalytic theory and modern history.
it is hardly possible to understand the development of psychoanalytic theory and its dissemination throughout the Twentieth Century without considering the conflicting intellectual, cultural and political “climates of opinion” in which psychoanalysis took root. The history of psychoanalysis is thus replete with examples of the relationship between ethnic, socio-political, and cultural tensions and the emergence of particular analytic subcultures. This includes, for example, the influence of communism on interpretations of the Oedipus Complex in Soviet Russia, the influence of pragmatism on Ego-Psychology in post-World War II America, or the part played by anti-Americanism in the development of French, and in particular Lacanian, psychoanalysis.