Freud in Cambridge: An institutional romance?

Abstract

Freud in Cambridge is an astonishing venture: in the design of its individual and group portraits; in the visions, sympathies, accidents, and events that loosely link them; in detailing a lesser-known ‘local’ chapter in the early development of psychoanalysis in England; in scrutinizing that 20-year period (1910–30) in which Freud crashed the gates of Cambridge and trespassed the grounds of its classical ‘High Science’. But if Freud in Cambridge is a monumental intellectual history, it is also a selfconscious ruse. ‘Freud the physical individual never came to Cambridge’ (p. 2). The book, Forrester and Cameron make clear, ‘is the story of his non-arrival’ (ibid.). Or rather, given his short-lived and often chilly reception, this is a study of Freud’s entrance but of his never settling in or staying on. Why, the authors ask, did the unmatched enthusiasm for psychoanalytic theory in the Cambridge of the 1910s and 1920s never attain institutional legitimacy or endow a disciplinary legacy? Why did this episode break off so abruptly – a flurry of impassioned attachments and affiliations that begat little ‘progeny or issue of any kind’ (p. 6), bestowed few pedagogical innovations, and left behind ‘not even a consulting room to be visited by town or gown’? (p. 613). The question of Freud’s appearance, and the more peculiar query of his disappearance, in Cambridge is what I would like to focus on here. For even if the book turns on a bluff, it also reveals Cambridge at its most Freudian: absenting never invalidates but inheres as the real content of our histories, riders are not mere discretionary additions, and