Freud in Cambridge Review Symposium

Abstract

‘ There was a wide road to the unconscious which was neither altogether medical nor psy-chological, neither philosophical nor literary ’ (p. 614). This sentence appears towards the end of Freud in Cambridge , as John Forrester and Laura Cameron re fl ect upon the book ’ s sustained focus on a number of illustrious scientists and other intellectuals in and around Cambridge in the 1920s. Their documentation and analysis of these individuals ’ and groups ’ enthusiasm for Freud in the 1920s challenges not only received histories of the incursion of psychoanalysis into British cultural life, but also how the very history of 20th-century science is told. Our review symposium on Freud in Cambridge provides a further exempli fi cation of the wideness of the road to and out from the unconscious: we bring together an hetero-geneous and interdisciplinary group of scholars who all are in some way tied to the dis-cipline of geography, as well as enthusiastic about the epistemological and analytical challenges posed by psychoanalysis. Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile are each central to the emergence and consolidation of a geographical sub-discipline named psychoanalytic geography (see Kingsbury and Pile, 2014; Pile, 1997). Jessica Dubow fi gures Freud as a nodal point in a network of Jewish intellectuals for whom conceptions of attachment, history, identity, and territory are radically reworked (see Dubow, 2021). Clive Barnett