Description: In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches.
Brief description: Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and has published extensively on the histories of religion, gender and sexuality, and the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. She is the author of four previous books, including Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), and the editor or co-editor of six anthologies spanning issues of war, sexuality, religion and historical theory.
Review Quotes: 'In this brilliant book, Herzog explores the relationship between politics and psychoanalysis in the aftermath of World War Two. As she convincingly shows, psychoanalysts were deeply engaged with their contexts and they revised their theories to better understand how desire, violence, and power interacted. This will change the way we think not only about psychoanalysis but also about the Cold War.' Camille Robcis, author of The Law of Kinship