But Forrester’s stress upon a ‘history from above’ or a ‘history driven by elite tastes’ model in this interview, as indeed in much if not all of Freud in Cambridge, is really only a small part of the story, giving a select few far more significance and influence than they probably in fact had in the grand scheme of things. Instead, it is when Kuhn is not busy score settling with Jones, that his exhaustive research on long neglected early British ‘Mind Healers’, allows us to appreciate the multifarious ways in which psychoanalysis established itself in Britain. This was not only via elite intellectual life, but also through the long-forgotten practices of what might be called more modest women and men of medicine – those often dismissed as ‘quacks’ – working at the margins of established medical culture. Whilst psychoanalysis was to remain something of a hoped-for ‘theoretical’ answer amongst the intellectual elites, it rapidly declined in ‘clinical’ popularity amongst more bread-and-butter practitioners seeking to practice large-scale psychotherapeutics amongst the less lavishly incomed, if in fact incomed at all. Mostly, this was because of the now-familiar reasons that psychoanalysis demanded daily sessions, long treatments and charged hefty fees, making it both clinically impractical and financially unaffordable to all but those with larger salaries and leisurely schedules. After a brief moment as the new Weltanschauung for British intellectuals and a possible new tool for the jobbing psychotherapist, psychoanalysis quickly faded from view again, its dream being kept alive by a handful of the more literary and artistically inclined even if many of its core sentiments continued to persist in everyday speech and wisdom.
The stories and wealth of information contained in these two, vast works of scholarship, will take at least a generation of further debate before they are even partially assimilated into psychoanalysis’s sense of itself. If there is one lesson I would like to see learned from them, it is that we finally have the hard evidence – at least in the British context – to definitively disrupt the snooty notion of the ‘purity’ and ‘exclusivity’ of psychoanalysis, its transmission and who has historical claim to its institutions and practices. Psychoanalysis has always been a hybrid entity, whose identity has been in permanent contestation since its inception. Its centres are many, and the sites that it operates in and from are multiple and diverse, so there can be no monopoly on the ‘right’ or ‘true’ version of psychoanalysis, although this insurgent counter-history has always had to struggle hard against the prevailing forces of ‘official’ psychoanalysis, that seek to erect a cordon sanitaire around it.
At long last, it is finally possible for the serious student of psychoanalytic history to zoom out and see psychoanalysis as being far from an exclusively (if mainly) London-centric phenomenon, tied to the activities of a few intrepid patrician types associated with the founding of the BPaS, waging a lonely campaign against a prevailing tide of intellectual cant, moral hypocrisy and social conservativism. In fact, psychoanalysis met with a huge amount of enthusiasm and was widely debated and discussed amongst broad groups of people, indicating that its ascent had as much to do with real material, social, economic and cultural changes at the start of the twentieth century, as with the fleeting tastes of modernist intellectuals and the self-appointed stewards and custodians of high-culture. Perhaps this also helps to explain why, despite so much persistent hostility, psychoanalysis has managed to survive in both popular and ‘radical’ intellectual forms: within it, psychoanalysis contains something that resists the bourgeois milieu in which it was founded and to which its ‘official’ gatekeepers are continually seeking to (re)confine it.