Fort/Da/Freud

Abstract

I first met Sigmund Freud in Lexington, Kentucky early on in the spring semester of 1999. Virginia Blum introduced him to me in a graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, which counted towards the Social Theory Graduate Certificate, at the University of Kentucky. Not the 5-foot 6-inch Austrian male, of course, but what John Forrester and Laura Cameron call the ‘Absent Great Man’ (p. 2), who is activated by various ‘loose networks’ (ibid.) and ‘paths of transmission’ (p. 614).While my encounter with this latter type of Freud took place seven decades or so after the historical setting of the late John Forrester and Laura Cameron’s monumental yet painstakingly rigorous 700-page and 1971-footnote study, there is a great similarity in terms of the transformative effects that the absent Freud had on the many figures at Cambridge University and on students, including myself during that transformative seminar in Lexington. As Forrester and Cameron deftly show us, an absent though wellknown and connected figure who never quite made it to Cambridge can have real, profound, and lasting effects. As a concrete void or ‘vanishing mediator’ (Jameson, 1973), Freud prompted Cambridge undergraduate John Desmond Bernal to write in 1920, ‘I find myself more of a Freudian than any of the others, though I never read a word he wrote’ (quoted on p. 161). Similarly, we learn about Ernest Jones, who in 1922, ‘was clearly ... fretting over the prospect of Freud’s arrival in Cambridge’ (p. 196). Forrester and Cameron’s book also explores the effects Freud had on Cambridge as the result of a surprising number of Cambridge scholars who travelled to Vienna for analysis with Freud himself. On this point, the book provides rich and nuanced insights into what it was like to be analyzed by Freud. Exemplary here is James Strachey’s description: