John Forrester: A Cambridge Historian of Psychoanalysis

John Forrester was born on August 25, 1949 in London, England to working class parents transformed by education into the professional classes. He received a B.A. with honors in the Natural Sciences Tripos, specializing in the history and philosophy of science, from the University of Cambridge (1970). While on a Fulbright Scholarship he studied for eighteen months in the Program in the History of Science at Princeton University and he was elected a Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge on the basis of his Fellowship Dissertation “Language and Symbol in Freud’s Psychoanalysis” (1975). Forrester received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1979. He was Senior Research Fellow at King’s College from 1980-84, when he was appointed to a position at the University of Cambridge as Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science. Since 2000 he has been Professor of History and Philosophy of the Sciences at the University of Cambridge.

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Professor Forrester is the author of five books, Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis (1997), Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (1997), Freud’s Women with Lisa Appignanesi (1992), The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (1990), and Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1980). Translations of his books have appeared in eight languages including Turkish, Korean, Polish and Portuguese. In addition, he has published over fifty papers on the history and philosophy of psychoanalysis and related fields.

John Forrester’s teaching at the University of Cambridge has included courses such as Darwin and Darwinism; History of Thermodynamics; Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Twentieth Century; Cultures of Science; and the Social and Institutional Aspects of the History of Psychiatry. Professor Forrester has successively supervised sixteen PhD candidates and has been active in the administration of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in a number of roles. Among his honors are a 1999 Gradiva Award for the Best General Book in the field of psychoanalysis, Honorary Life Membership, Library of the British Psycho-Analytic Society, and a variety of fellowships and scholarships. Prof. Forrester has held numerous visiting professorships in France, Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere, including being Schaffner Visiting Professor, Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago and Visiting Directeur d’Etudes, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

He is the co-founder of the Cambridge Group for the History of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Allied Sciences, as well as the Psychoanalytic Forum. He has served on the editorial board of several publications including History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalytic Studies. Since 2004, he has been the editor of Psychoanalysis and History. Professor Forrester was interviewed online in May 2006. He may be contacted at <jpf11@cam.ac.uk>. Our thanks to Drs. Ralph Colp (Columbia University-retired) and Kenneth Fuchsman (University of Connecticut) for several questions included in this interview.

PHE: What brought you to psychoanalysis?

JPF: Reading Freud.

PHE: What is the climate regarding psychoanalysis in British intellectual and educational circles? Was there much openness to psychoanalysis at Cambridge University where you wrote your doctoral dissertation on it?

JPF: I’m writing a book about the reception of psychoanalysis in Cambridge, principally in the 1920s, so I will leave this question to one side, rather than give a book-length answer. When I was a student, my first contact with psychoanalysis was attending a series of lectures by Robert M. Young, in 1968-9, on “Dualism and Continuity from Descartes to Freud.” Freud and psychoanalysis has been an intermittently vigorous but always unorthodox interest of Cambridge academics for most of the twentieth century, with, of course, different phases and types of interest. But always somewhat unorthodox, with a substantial body of extremely skeptical opinion being dominant.

PHE: Tell me about the publication you edit and its editorial policies.

JPF: Psychoanalysis and History is concerned with the relations between psychoanalysis and history; most of the papers accepted are on the history of psychoanalysis, which is also my principal interest. All papers are peer-reviewed.

PHE: Do you consider Psychoanalysis and History to be at all psychohistorical and what are your thoughts and feelings about psychohistory?

JPF: Relatively few papers on psychohistory are submitted to the journal; the general level of the few papers we’ve received is rather poor.

PHE: How many of the members of your editorial board are like Peter Loewenberg and Nellie Thompson in having a background in history and psychoanalysis? How many are like Larry Friedman, in having a background in history alone?

JPF: The range of backgrounds is considerable, but principally academic. I’m not sure what constitutes “having a background” in psychoanalysis. I suspect you mean having trained as a psychoanalyst. A small but significant proportion have trained as psychoanalysts; others have extensive experience of psychoanalysis of other sorts.

PHE: Do you see political psychology, psychobiog-

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raphy, and psychohistory as the natural extension of applied psychoanalysis, or as other genres altogether?

JPF: I’m not clear what “applied psychoanalysis” is – this is a disputed category. After all, Freud regarded therapeutic psychoanalysis as “applied,” and Lacan took this one step further by asserting that the training analysis is the only “pure” form. By temperament and by conviction I’m skeptical, for example, of rigid divisions between disciplines or subdisciplines – so I take little notice, as far as is possible, of distinctions between economic, social or cultural history, and that would include being skeptical of the importance of the prefix “psycho-.” Psychoanalysis has generated concepts and approaches which can be useful in many areas of history; but I would be skeptical of an attempt to distinguished “biography” from “psychobiography.” Fine examples of the deployment of psychoanalytic categories in biography – e.g. in Frank Manuel’s study of Newton – do not, in my view, mean that his biography enters another genre. It would be best to drop the prefix “psycho-,” especially since there are so many different varieties of psychology that can be used in such studies. The best biographies amongst those I have read recently – e.g. Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, Skidelsky on Keynes – of necessity present a portrait of the inner life of their subject; that’s as “psycho-” as one could wish for!

PHE: Are there those on your editorial board who share my personal commitment to write psychobiography/psychohistory based upon adaptability, childhood, coping mechanisms, creativity, empathy, innovation, and overcoming trauma while avoiding most technical psychological terms and all jargon?

JPF: I haven’t asked them that question; I somehow doubt it.

PHE: Some of the members of the Psychohistory Forum, the twenty-three year old group I head, know and respect your journal, but I suspect most do not know it. Why should they read your publication? What will they find to be of most interest?

JPF: If they are at all interested in the history of psychoanalysis, they will find much to interest them.

PHE: Of which of your psychoanalytic works are you most proud?

JPF: Probably Freud’s Women. At other times, I’m very taken with The Seductions of Psychoanalysis for its breadth.

PHE: Since you’ve written extensively on Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, please give us your overall assessment of them and their importance.

JPF: Lacan is the only psychoanalyst since Freud to have deployed to the same extent his contemporary cultural resources – from mathematics to art, from ethology to linguistics, from literature to physics. For all his infuriatingly rebarbative prose, which deeply offends me at times, his radical reconception of psychoanalysis is of fundamental importance. I spent several year (with Sylvana Tomaselli) translating two of his more accessible works, Seminars I & II, as a tribute to the importance of his work. Every time I return to his work, as it is progressively published (there is much more still to come), I’m deeply impressed. But with time, he appears as a more and more eccentric cultural figure as well. Slavoj Zizek is the most successful transformer of his ideas and, above all, his style into forms suitable for the age of the internet.

Michel Foucault was without doubt the most original historian/philosopher of the sciences and of the socio-political field of the second half of the twentieth century. His influence is still very great and will continue to be so. The fact that he accorded such attention to psychoanalysis is a marker of the importance of psychoanalysis for the scientific and cultural life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his at times hostile critique is something anyone concerned with psychoanalysis should read and consider. His articulation of a vision of history (of modernity), a new theory of power and a genealogy of the modern subject is unique.

Jacques Derrida was simply an inspired reader of Freud, whatever else he was; his sympathy for Freud underpins much of his philosophical work. There is a (Derridean) chiasmus in the relations between his work and that of Freud: it is tempting to identify “psychoanalysis” and “deconstruction” as being the same process. The generosity of thought which was deeply entwined with his capacity for “being inside” the thought of the other was exemplary—as a moral and personal lesson.

PHE: Do you think there is merit in one of my colleague’s description of you as an enlightened advocate of psychoanalysis and defender of Freud?

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JPF: I hope I’m enlightened! I defend Freud against criticisms that are based on poor evidence and misplaced arguments. There is no question in my mind that Freud was and remains a major cultural and scientific figure. The hostility to Freud from many different quarters is based on many different kinds of criticism, scientific, personal, and historical. In these debates, it is historical accuracy and honesty of argument that concerns me most.

PHE: Though I thoroughly agree with your “wager that the more one knows about Freud…the more interesting and surprising and thought-provoking he becomes,” I would appreciate your elucidating this comment.

JPF: It is a quasi-autobiographical remark; the wager is that many others feel the same way. It’s not for nothing that Freud was the most widely read nonfiction writer of the twentieth century – “our Sophocles,” as Philip Roth called him. But it also points to the fact that having read Freud’s published works one has one view of Freud; having then read all the subsequently published letters of the private and political Freud one has a new and more interesting view; and then if one places him in an historical and scientific context, he becomes even more interesting. One can then undertake another kind of approach to Freud: for instance, one can isolate his four-page paper on “Negation” from his oeuvre and place it within a long tradition of reflection on negation in both linguistics and philosophy, alongside Plato and Russell; one can compare his project for a neuronal account of thinking alongside those of his contemporaries, such as Sherrington, or ours, such as Damasio or Edelman. Freud always becomes more interesting, rather than less, when one engages in these projects. Then there’s the promise of the revolution in human consciousness that the psychoanalytic enthusiasts have often proclaimed and to which he, anti-prophet that he was, had a complicated relationship. All this makes Freud more and more interesting and thought-provoking. I often remember a young student I taught some fifteen years ago, a biological scientist, who confessed to me that reading Freud made her so angry that she threw the book against the wall… and then picked it up and went on reading in utter absorption. I find both bits of her story equally important! Both the passion and the sustained interest.

PHE: In the light of your having co-authored Freud’s Women (1992), how open would you say Freud was to women and their varied experiences?

JPF: The premise – and the finding – of Freud’s Women was that Freud’s relationship with women was fundamental to the creation of psychoanalysis. Without the possibility of absolute honesty, which was to some extent an extension of Freud’s characteristic belligerence in relation to the world, there would have been no fundamental rule and no psychoanalysis. But it was the fact that patients, at least half of whom were women, trusted Freud that made the fundamental rule conceivable in the first place. In certain respects, Freud’s relationships with women were more straightforward than his relationships with men: more amicable, more intimate in certain respects and with less suspicion mixed with the mutual respect characteristic of all his relationships. But the basic fact is that Freud took seriously whatever women said to him – including when they confessed erotic feelings for him which he (probably) did not reciprocate. To carve the concept of transference out of such propositions was Freud’s unique achievement. I suppose one could interpret Freud’s concept of transference as a catastrophic refusal of woman on his part, but it would be a rather perverse interpretation, in my view!

The hostility of some women to Freud’s theories is in my view misplaced; there are many different sources for the vigorous opposition to Freud’s theories, but the idea that Freud was not capable of having sustained and mutually understanding relationships with women and that this led to his “blindness” about their experience is historically implausible. Where did psychoanalysis come from? In one essay, I have argued that critics are often confused when confronted by the concept “penis envy”: their objections seem as much to the foundational character of envy as to the idea that feminine sexuality is not autonomous and is constituted in relation to the masculine (the penis). After all, Freud’s theory insists that masculine sexuality is constituted in relation to the feminine (conceived of as “the castrated”); otherwise the male subject would be marooned in phallic solipsism. If envy is the concept that incites this feminist rage, then Klein’s theories of the infant’s relation to the breast should be doubly objectionable. Also, in this respect, the arguments in Freud’s Women were intended to remind readers that much of what all psychoanalysts once agreed was clinical reality – the fact of “penis envy,” attested to by all in the early debates, especially Horney – may

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no longer be clinical reality. Which would leave us with interesting consequences: either the basic constitution of masculinity and femininity have changed fundamentally since the beginning of the twentieth century, or the basic “data” of psychoanalysis are indefinitely pliable through subsequent revision and re-interpretation. I’m not sure which way present day theorists jump when confronted with that choice.

PHE: What are your thoughts on Einstein’s critique of psychoanalysis as lacking scientific validity?

JPF: Einstein did not have a well-thought out view of psychoanalysis lacking scientific validity. On Tuesdays he might be very enthusiastic about psychoanalytic ideas, on Fridays he might be skeptical. His views wavered markedly from the 1910s to the 1950s. Einstein’s views on lots of things were decidedly eccentric, although they always had a certain charm and freshness which stemmed from his basically childlike character (a description he would probably not have denied!). The key fact about the scientific validity of psychoanalysis is how the criteria for “scientificity” have changed radically across the decades since the early twentieth century. Einstein’s style of grandiose – and rigorous – mathematical exploration based on a few key facts tied to some fundamental physical intuitions is only one style of valid scientific reasoning; there are many others and new forms of scientific validity will continue to be developed. Nothing stays the same in science! That is the source of its continued efficacy and creativity.

PHE: As an historian and philosopher of science, what unique insights do you have to bring to Freud?

JPF: Freud’s science was a very peculiar one, distinctive to his time and perhaps to his temper. Assessing that character makes him a very interesting and educative topic in the field of the history of psychoanalytic science. Does he belong alongside Copernicus and Darwin, as he argued, as a disturber of the ideological sleep of humanity? Well, quite obviously, if one puts it like that. Does he belong besides Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Lavoisier as a scientific revolutionary? Or is he part of a pedigree that runs Kircher, Mesmer, Lodge (the physicist psychical researcher), Kammerer (the possibly fraudulent biologist), Dawson and Woodward (the discoverers of Piltdown Man) and Einstein (the diehard refuser of quantum mechanics)? These are interesting questions for an historian of science!

There is an additional curious feature: the history of psychoanalysis and the history and philosophy of science have intriguingly linked histories. It is not for nothing that Karl Popper’s views on the criteria of scientificity were developed in Vienna in the 1920s with half an eye on psychoanalysis, all the rage then; the Vienna Circle, so influential for the development of philosophy of science, had links, sometimes covert, with their contemporaries developing psychoanalysis. In Paris, the fledgling historians of science and the fledgling analysts even shared a building! One might say that both psychoanalysis and history and philosophy of science are symptoms of a reflexive turn within the sciences. Whatever else Freud was thought to offer, his encomium to self-analysis was taken as essential to his message and made him peculiarly attractive to those developing overarching visions of the nature of science.

But perhaps the principal insights I can help bring concern the hybrid character of Freud’s work: part medical discourse, part science, part cultural critique, part subtle analysis of human motivation and destiny (Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist). This hybridity is one of the key elements leading to the confused arguments about whether psychoanalysis is or is not a science. As a student of the history of psychoanalytic science I’m familiar both with the historical conditions under which such arguments are mounted and the changing criteria of what counts as a science (or as high-status or low-status science) in different historical and cultural circumstances; as a student of psychoanalytic science I’m also aware of the disputed character of all the philosophical criteria mobilized for such distinction-drawing – if one has the right answer to a question, then it wasn’t a philosophical question in the first place! Also, there is certainly no agreed answer amongst philosophers as to what distinguishes science from non-science. So a useful response to the question “Is psychoanalysis a science?” is: “Well, it certainly used to be. What might have happened to both psychoanalysis and the cartography of the sciences to put into question its status?”

PHE: What responses have you gotten to your interest in psychoanalysis?

JPF: Too many and too various to recount. One that always amused me was: “Oh, I’d better be careful what I say.”

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PHE: How do you relate to Nobel Prize-winning Eric Kandel and others like him who argue that psychoanalysis has a firm foundation in neuroscience?

JPF: Not being an expert in neuroscience, this claim interests me and I am interested in reading such accounts. I think the neurosciences have a very long way to go before they can begin to approach the questions that psychoanalysis has been struggling with for a long time. The neurosciences remind me of eighteenth century chemistry: lots of progress, important connections with industrial developments, but no one is sure if a Lavoisier just round the corner is not going to overturn the whole enterprise. Perhaps that is what they are hoping for!

PHE: In reference to an article listed on your CV on the influence of psychoanalysis on Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, what is this influence? What did you learn from Kuhn when you were a student of his at Princeton from 1970 to 1972?

JPF: I learned from Kuhn how to be a particular kind of historian of science, a close reader of scientific texts. Kuhn’s ideal of graduate school training was to confront students with very difficult texts and tease us into making sense of them; for example, one week in the context of the history of nineteenth century heat theory we read Poisson’s “Sur la vitesse de son” of 1823 – a highly mathematical paper, using early nineteenth century versions of calculus (nothing like ours!), in French. Kuhn thought you had to get inside the head of past scientists so that you could yourself do their work, indeed have a sense of where the work was going so that you could almost predict the next step in the development of theory. Given how contextual and cultural the history of science has become in the intervening decades, this nowadays looks like a very odd practice – almost not history at all. Kuhn’s ideal historian of science was wholly identified with past practitioners of the sciences. I learnt that from him and it became a constitutive part of my professional personality. I have other parts as well, learned from others; but the experience with Kuhn was the most rigorously transformative precisely because I admired him so much. Reading his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the most powerful stimulus – not the only stimulus, but the most powerful – for me changing tack from the sciences towards history and philosophy of science. (I’d had a love affair with physical chemistry from the age of fifteen on: I loved the mathematical de-scriptions of messy dynamic processes.) And I now have developed my own speculative reconstruction of Kuhn’s own development of the ideas in that book and of his conception of the practice of the history of science, which sees that development as fundamentally influenced by his own analysis when a graduate student. From analysis, he learned about getting inside someone else’s head – namely his own! – from the odd point of view that the experience of analysis provides.

PHE: What are you working on now? When do you expect to have it published?

JPF: I have three major projects on the go. The first, which will be published next year, is an account of the surprising reception of psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the early twentieth century; the second is a cultural global history of Freudianism in the twentieth century. This will take me another couple of years. And the third concerns the genre of the case: its epistemic status, its historical development (case histories, case conferences, casework) and its importance in a range of disciplines that deal with human beings: the human sciences (which, in my view, include medicine, law and other social sciences).

PHE: What special training was most helpful in your doing psychoanalytic work? How has it affected yours scholarship?

JPF: I’m not sure if I do psychoanalytic work. Training by Kuhn and others in how to read scientific texts was crucial. Trying to understand Lacan over many years was also an education, that’s for sure!

PHE: Please describe and analyze the recent growth of psychoanalysis and applied psychoanalysis in England? Has psychohistory also made inroads?

JPF: Psychoanalysis in Britain, as elsewhere, is in difficulties. Leaving aside the questions of daily bread and the overall interest of people in undergoing analysis, it’s a field in some difficulties about its future. One symptom of that is the fact that it is determinedly fixated on its past glories and past achievements: it’s not a sign of intellectual vitality when a field refers to Winnicott’s work, Klein’s work or any other of the important figures of that period as the standards or achievements by which present theoretical discourse is assayed and calibrated. They have both been dead for over 35 years! There is some work of astounding clinical virtuosity and some rather wonderful writing about such work being

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done, but that is an odd place for psychoanalysis to end up. But I’m not very well informed about contemporary psychoanalysis; I’m an historian!

Psychohistory has made little impact, I sense. But there is significant work with a psychohistorical dimension: Daniel Pick has written a very interesting study of Garibaldi recently which utilizes psychoanalysis – he is both analyst and academic historian.

PHE: Have American scholars such as Robert Young and Brett Kahr had any impact on the growth of psychoanalysis in the UK?

JPF: Bob and Brett have both been very active in working with psychoanalysis. Bob was one of my teachers at Cambridge and had a considerable influence on my own development. Bob has had a broad cultural influence, in part because of the many parts he has played: a charismatic teacher at Cambridge, a political radical in science studies and in psychoanalysis, a founder and editor of journals and a publishing house specializing in psychoanalysis, which probably had as many readers as the somewhat flagging older psychoanalytic publishing ventures of the 1970s and 1980s. And then he has played a significant part in the development of psychoanalytic studies within the universities. Yes, Bob has had a great impact. But does he count as an American? He’s lived in Britain for over forty five years! I think of him as a post-American.

PHE: How does the acceptance of psychoanalysis in Britain and France differ?

JPF: In France they think of Freud as essentially French, so strong is his influence on French culture since 1960. Freud in Britain is both a hugely respected and a widely dismissed figure. The numbers of person calling themselves psychoanalysts in the two countries also means a very different presence of “psychoanalysis”: there are probably twenty times as many “psychoanalysts” in France as in Britain, perhaps fifty times! France, the United States and Argentina have had what I call “psychoanalytic cultures,” whereas Britain hasn’t. In France, in 1981 I rented a room from a cherry and truffle farmer in Provence who knew that when I told him I worked on “le langage et la psychanalyse” I was working in an area where Lacan was important and wanted to talk about it; in Buenos Aires you have to negotiate with your taxi-driver in case your destination will upset his schedule for making his appointment with his analyst. Such comparable indices of the spread of psychoanalysis in everyday culture are entirely absent in Britain. On the other hand, the middle-brow English newspapers of the 1920s could declaim, “we are all psychoanalysts now,” so these characterizations have to be nuanced. In France now, there is a debate over whether Freud was a charlatan and some of the responses are as if these critics are saying Marianne wasn’t a virgin. In Britain, the responses to similar debates over the last few years are more along the lines: “Told you so.”

PHE: In the light of your extensive experiences in and travels to Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, what are your thoughts about the varying adaptations of psychoanalysis in these countries?

JPF: Too vast a topic to broach here and now. Wait for my big book The Freudian Century!

PHE: How do you see psychoanalysis developing in the next decade and beyond?

JPF: At a recent conference on “Therapeutic Training after Freud” I heard Elisabeth Roudinesco remind her audience that Freud had feared that psychoanalysis as a therapy would take over psychoanalysis as a science. This is roughly what happened, beginning in the 1920s, with the growing hegemony of the training institutes. Without its connection to “science” or “theory,” psychoanalysis will be just another therapy, another treatment modality. I think it is almost there…! Whether there is another future, beyond being “just another treatment,” admittedly of a peculiar and challenging sort (for both parties), is a question the next decade will answer. No predictions!

PHE: What do we as psychohistorians need to do to strengthen our work in the eyes of psychoanalysts?

JPF: Not being very familiar with the field of psychohistory, I hesitate to offer advice. The same as I would offer to analysts: write without jargon, with intelligence and with critical rigor.

PHE: What are your thoughts on the psychodynamics of violence in our world?

JPF: Nothing very original, I’m afraid. Old men send young men to war. Young men think they are immortal. Women think they are no different from men. A lot follows from these facts.

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PHE: Why did you chose to write about lying in Truth Games?

JPF: Because lying and fantasy are very closely linked and fantasy is a key concept in psychoanalysis. I was also preoccupied with attempting to understand some of Lacan’s thinking about the relationship between truth and fiction. Then I discovered that lying is a universally condemned activity, whereas it is obvious that, as Benjamin Jowett, once said, “There is a great deal of hard lying in the world, especially among people whose characters are above suspicion.” So I tried to think hard about the pros and cons of lying, its significance and its relation to psychoanalysis. It took me nearly twenty years to work the various lines of thinking into a presentable form, and I’m still not satisfied with the book!

PHE: How can psychoanalysis and psychohistory have more impact in academia and on society in general?

JPF: I think the path here is through the universities, from which – certainly in Britain – psychoanalysis cut itself off, particularly when it established exclusive Societies dominated by training Institutes. There are changes in this respect in the last two decades or so. The universities have become increasingly dominant in determining what counts as “useful knowledge” in our societies. So psychoanalysis – and psychohistory – must pay attention to what is going on the universities across the board, from neuroscience to medical faculties, to literature departments, to anthropology. The funding now available within universities for research and development of ideas and projects is enormous, especially when compared with the funds available outside. Even the large Foundations, which, after the First World War, played such a key role in the development of disciplines and new sciences, channel most of their money through universities. Basically if a discipline is not integrated with the universities and its knowledge power base, its future is unclear.

PHE: Has psychohistory had any impact on your area of expertise?

JPF: No.

PHE: In England and Europe, are universities and research institutions hiring psychoanalysts and psychohistorians for these credentials, or for other purposes?

JPF: In England, there are relatively few psychoanalysts and their training is almost exclusively directed towards a future career in private practice. In the few centers running courses in psychoanalytic studies, a qualification as a psychoanalyst would be of considerable significance, perhaps of overriding significance, although other qualifications might have equal weight. Psychohistorians I presume have primary qualifications in history, and therefore, I presume, would normally have a research qualification from a university. I imagine if they also have a qualification as a psychoanalyst this would make them of more interest to an appointments board. But such doubly qualified researchers are few and far between. I’m not in a position to talk about other European countries with any authority.

PHE: How can we recruit new people into the fields of psychoanalysis and psychohistory?

JPF: Teach lively and intelligent courses on these topics in universities. Write interesting books that sell to a broad mass of people, especially young people.

PHE: What books were important to your development?

JPF: So many! Just from when I was very young: Kuhn, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Foucault’s The Order of Things, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, E.A. Moelwyn-Hughes, The Kinetics of Reactions in Solutions, Darwin, The Origin of Species…. I’ll leave it there, in my early 20s…!

PHE: Who was important to your development as a student of psychosocial phenomena? Did Erik Erikson have any impact on you?

JPF: None. Bion’s Experience in Groups was a revelation.

PHE: Are there any mentors who come to mind?

JPF: Bob Young and T.S. Kuhn were the most important personal influences on me in my development as an historian and philosopher of science. As an intellectual mentor, at a distance as it were, Michel Foucault, whose courses I attended but with whom I only had one lengthy conversation. Two teachers at my secondary school had a great influence on me, Johnny Carlton (chemistry) and Simon Stuart (English).

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PHE: What is your psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic experience and what is its influence on you as an editor? How has it changed your vision of the world?

JPF: I had an analysis which lasted some years and considered training as an analyst, but life got in the way. It was extremely educational working in a psychiatric hospital and day-center. Its influence is difficult to assess.

PHE: What is the state of the “Freud Wars” today compared to 1997 when you published Dispatches from the Freud Wars?

JPF: Not much change, I reckon. I think the “new lines” of attack and defense were drawn up in the early to mid-1980s and things have not shifted much since then. Trench warfare. But there are shifts in France: the trenches are being dug there as well.

PHE: Thanks for an interesting interview.

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