Cold War Freud

About this book

No one has been able to explain why psychoanalysis was such a powerful emotional and intellectual framework in the Cold War decades - or how it could serve both conservative and subversive ends. In part, the reasons lie in radical revisions to understandings of human nature in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust. Yet the ascendance of psychoanalysis also involved the new challenges brought by the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the new Latin American dictatorships and the emergence of postcolonial cultures. 0In 'Cold War Freud', Dagmar Herzog sheds new light on the impact of these epochal transformations on theories of aggression, desire and trauma, and on the tensions between psychoanalysis' possibilities as a theory of human nature and as a toolbox for cultural criticism. She recovers psychoanalysis at its historic zenith and restores it to its place as an essential part of twentieth-century social and intellectual history.