Customer Reviews

The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis: Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

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Suzanne Kirschner's Religious and Romantic Roots of Psychoanalysis is another installment in the cultural history of psychoanalysis, and it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this topic. Her argument is that the social/historical setting of Sigmund Freud and his followers--in Germany and elsewhere--shaped ideas about child maturation and adult personality. While one might expect that the Jewish background of Freud and many early analysts was a powerful influence (and this is surely the case), Kirschner wants to point out how neo-Platonism, Protestant Christianity, and other European ideologies outside Judaism shaped analytic theories of sexual development, early childhood relations with caregivers, and individuality. Well written by an astute anthropologist, the book never descends to the level of psychobabble, but remains an informative and evocative intellectual history. Unlike post-Foucault studies that presume major paradigm shifts and incommensurabilities between historical ages, Kirscher's sense is that there are both transformations and continuities in the thread from later Greek thought through Protestantism and finally to psychoanalysis. There remain other elements of this story to be worked out, but Kirschner has contributed an important piece.

Suzanne Kirschner's book is a balanced and scholarly investigation of the Protestant cultural background of current psychoanalytic theories. Her argument that current object-relations theories are secularized, "interiorized" interpreations of earlier mystical Protestant narratives about the soul's alientation from -- and return to - its divine source, is presented thoughtfully and convincingly. This book is an invaluable source for anyone concerned with the social and historical context of psychoanalysis.