Book review

In a celebrated article, first published in 1973, the intellectual historian Carl Schorske had castigated the project of psychoanalysis as a retreat from political engagement and an escape into a realm of psychological interiority where Freud could claim a superiority over politics. However, it cannot be said of this valuable and sometimes arresting collec-tion of essays, several of which originated as presentations at the ‘Psychoanalysis and His-tory ’ seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, that either psychoanalysis or the psyche is in any sense immured in a realm of psychological inter-iority. Ironically, the keynote to much of the discussion here is set by a remark of the magisterial historian of Freud, and long-standing advocate of a psychoanalytic approach to history, Peter Gay, that his approach, while it paid attention to unconscious factors, was ‘heavily invested in reality’, ironic because the ‘reality ’ in which Gay is invested is heavily contested by several contributors and, arguably, by the overall tenor of this volume. In an essay on ‘Postwar Art and the Psychoanalytic Imaginary ’ Alex Potts explores how psychoanalytic art critics of a Kleinian persuasion such as Adrian Stokes and Anton Ehrenzweig, who had come to maturity before the Second World War, were alternatel