Cassandra's Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and America (Allen Lane History)

"Schwartz's estimate of the intellectual significance of Freud may be ridiculously overblown, but psychoanalysis is of more than passing importance for the history of the twentieth century. Though at first only one of a number of psychologically oriented challenges to the blinkered biological reductionism of mainstream psychiatry, it was psychoanalysis that mounted the most sustained challenge to those orthodoxies, and during the 1950s and 60s, its language and its practitioners briefly dominated American (though not British) psychiatry. for much of the century, psychoanalytic ideas have had an enduring appeal for some segments of the intelligentsia and the chattering classes, and, in bowdlerized form, they have spread widely into popular culture. The fin de siecle sees the whole enterprise foundering, its apparently imminent demise postponed by the perverse decision of some of its opponents to launch a war against an already defeated force.
But here is a rich and fascinating subject, and one would welcome the appearance of a serious and sustained synthetic treatment of its history in twentieth-century Europe and America. Regrettably, that is not what one will find here. Throughout Schwartz's book, one searches in vain for a thoughtful comparative examination of the sharply varying fates of psychoanalysis in Britain and the United States (not to mention Continental Europe)...."Joseph Schwartz is the author of 'Cassandra's Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and America (Allen Lane History)' with ISBN 9780713991581 and ISBN 0713991585.