One Hundred Years of Psychoanalysis, A Timeline: 1900-2000
This communication by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Christine Dunbar somewhat stumped me as I was preparing for this review. It is not a book, but a visually accessible chronology of people (from Freud to Fonagy), psychoanalytic schools (Budapest, Adler, French, British, and Jung as well as "Freud and Freudians"), and both educational and clinical institutions (from the Wednesday Psychological Society to the Berlin Clinics to the founding of the Menninger Clinic), all displayed by chronological times, geographical locations, and theoretical peculiarities.
The timelines are augmented with brief (2- to 3-paragraph) descriptions of the major events and ideas of various decades. Perspectives on trauma, child abuse, and sociocultural phenomena (Marx meeting Freud) and even an intimation of a current neurobiological/neuropsychoanalytic relationship are introduced. All of this is condensed into a 10-page foldout collage of the timelines and the decades with about 8 pages of narrative comments, plus a 2-page introduction to the piece to help the reader use it more successfully.
This work would be quite interesting to a relatively small number of people, mostly psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic historians. It would be an easy and accessible introduction to the history of psychoanalysis for candidates at psychoanalytic institutes and might play a role in a History of Psychiatry seminar for psychiatry residents. It will be interesting to see if the efforts to integrate psychoanalytic and neurobiological concepts by investigators like Fonagy and Gabbard lead to a resurrection of this somewhat neglected dimension of our field and our history in the majority of academic medical centers and their associated educational programs.
Author affiliation: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. Potential conflicts of interest: None reported.
doi:10.4088/JCP.10bk06739
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