From Anti-Freudianism to a Bastion of Psychoanalysis: A History of Psychoanalysis at the University Psychiatric Clinic of Strasbourg in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

By contrast with a dominant part of the historiography of psychoanalysis in France, which tends to be dedicated to the history of the centres and the biography of the great theorists, this article focuses on the less well known history of psychoanalysis in a peripheral region, namely Alsace, and its capital, Strasbourg. It zooms in on the main central university hospital service in the mental health care system of northeastern France, the University Psychiatric Clinic of Strasbourg. On the basis of abundant and varied sources, it relates the passions, attractions and aversions that Freudian methods aroused among the major protagonists of Strasbourg psychiatry, especially Théophile Kammerer (1916–2005), the director of the Clinic from 1953 to 1982, and the various actors (physician or non-physician) that have circled the establishment throughout the twentieth century.