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.
Kuhn, whose reconstruction focuses on the reception and integration of psychoanalysis into the lively activities of early twentieth century Britain’s indigenous psychotherapeutic culture, places the overwhelming majority of blame at Jones’ door. ‘This book argues’, Kuhn finger-wags at the start, ‘that the entry of psychoanalysis into British medical culture was far more complex than the Jones Account long since bankrupt by its forger’s counterfeit coin’ (xiii). Kuhn’s stern verdict is that it was his ‘terror of subaltern obscurity’, that ‘impelled Jones to write the early history as a cover story for his absurdly implausible claim to have started practicing psychoanalysis in 1905 or 1906’ (ibid).
I wonder, however, whether Kuhn ironically comes close to falling prey, in an inverted fashion, to what Forrester and Cameron identify as a consequence of the need by the early psychoanalysts for tales of frontiersmen heroics, a need that has since encouraged either sycophantism amongst followers or predictable ad hominems from sceptics. This is what they identify as psychoanalytic histories having resulted in being ‘overly influenced by two crude models’ (2017: 2). Such models, when compared to the epistemologically sophisticated historiographies of other disciplines, are as frequently methodologically naïve as they are laughably self-congratulating or zealously character assassinating.
The first, is what Forester and Cameron call the ‘Great Man’ model, ‘in which specific individuals have decisive influence in turning history their way’. The second, is ‘the bureaucratic transplant model, in which the oversight of the International Psycho-Analytic Association (IPA) and its sub-committee the International Training Committee determined the forms and procedures for establishing psychoanalysis throughout the world’. In Britain, the two accounts dovetail in the figure of Jones, ‘as the individual though his campaigning, through his writings and through his incessant organising, created the British Psycho-Analytical Society (BPaS) in 1919 and founded the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London in 1926’ (ibid). Both the Kuhn and Forrester and Cameron studies, reject such blunt models in favour of foregrounding what Kuhn describes as ‘a series of interconnected and disconnected histories differently articulated from that monocular, teleological account of the early history of British psychoanalysis first laid down by Ernest Jones’ (2017: xiii).