A Review by Sonu Shamdasani – Geoffrey Cocks, Treating mind and body…
A Review by Sonu Shamdasani – Geoffrey Cocks, Treating mind and body: essays in the history of science, professions, and society under extreme conditions.
In this volume, Geoffrey Cocks has collected together a series of his essays dealing with psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and medicine in twentieth-century Germany and under the Third Reich in particular.
He introduces them with an account of his intellectual trajectory and the specific occasions that gave rise to them.
Slightly disconcertingly, Cocks commences his introduction by discussing his enthusiasm for psychobiography and his essays exploring the psychobiography of A A Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, which are not reprinted in this volume.
After this, however, Cocks presents the themes of his major 1985 work, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: the Goering Institute, recently reprinted in a considerably expanded and improved form (New Brunswick, Transaction, 1997).
A number of the essays in this volume can be read as adjuncts and addendas to this book.
According to the legend, the Nazis had banned psychoanalysis as a Jewish science and there was no organized psychotherapy in a situation dominated by racial biology.
In Psychotherapy in the Third Reich, Cocks recovered the history of the German institute for psychological research and psychotherapy, generally known as the Goering Institute after its chief, the psychotherapist Mathias Goering, a cousin of the infamous Hermann Goering.
He dismantled these legends, and indicated how they arose in a postwar era of institutional reconstruction for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, when practitioners were keen to claim a moral high ground and portray themselves as intrinsically allied to liberal and democratic tendencies and deny any evidence to the contrary.
At the same time, he presented what remains the best documented and most judicious account of C G Jung’s relations with German psychotherapy at this time.
What Cocks accomplished was the relocation of the history of psychoanalysis within the institutional development of psychotherapy as a whole, and of the latter in its connections with medicine and psychology and within the wider social and political context of mid-twentieth-century Germany.
Thus the history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis become critical sites for addressing wider questions concerning how professions develop in relation to varying social and political conditions-critical, in Cocks’ view, as by the nature of its subject matter, the psychological enterprise is the most permeable of all disciplines to social and political factors.
Thus the cultural and historical study of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy may ultimately have more generality than the disciplines themselves.
Finally, in a study of the émigré psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, Cocks demonstrates that in the essay ‘Two analyses of Mr. Z.’ that launched Kohut’s popular brand of self-sychology, Mr. Z. was a fiction, and the analyses in question were Kohut’s of Ruth Eissler, and his own subsequent self-analysis.
In the foreword to this volume Peter Loewenberg argues that this revelation of the subjective source of Kohut’s discoveries gives them a “greater validity and conviction” (p. xii).
For this reviewer, it indicates rather that dissimulation and invented narratives are no less present in contemporary psychoanalysis than at its inception. ~Sonu Shamdasani, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300066862, Page 417-419
Sonu Shamdasani biography
Sonu Shamdasni
Sonu Shamdasani (born 1962) is a London-based author, editor, and professor at the UCL Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. His works are on the history of psychiatry and psychology from the mid-nineteenth century to current times.
In 2003, he founded Philemon Foundation, along with Stephen Martin, where he is the general editor. In 2009, he edited the much awaited Red Book written by Carl Jung between approximately 1914 and 1930.
He gained his BA from Bristol University in 1984, followed by an MSc in the History of Science and Medicine at University College London/Imperial College London and a Ph.D. in the History of Medicine from WIHM/UCL (1996).
In an interview with the Times of India, dated 12 December 2009, he gives this brief personal biographical note:
“I am a Sindhi, I was born in Singapore and grew up in England.
I first encountered Jung when I was travelling in India in my teens, looking for a guru.
The first work of his that I came across was his commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower, which was my first introduction to psychology.
I then saw the text as promising the possibility of a mediation between Eastern mysticism and Western rationality.
After further study, I thought that contemporary psychology and psychotherapy was in a mess, and I wanted to figure out how it had got into this state. This led me to the studying the history of psychology” ~Wikipedia
Happily as a founder and editor of the Philemon Foundation we may look forward to the following forthcoming publications:
JUNG ON DE NERVAL
JUNG NEUMANN CORRESPONDENCE
JUNG ADOLF KELLER CORRESPONDENCE
JUNG AND THE INDOLOGISTS
THE BLACK BOOKS 1913-1932
BERLIN SEMINAR 1933
GERMAN SEMINAR 1931
ETH LECTURES
DREAM INTERPRETATION AND ITS HISTORY
DREAM SYMBOLS
Select Publications
Books:
C. G. Jung: A Biography in Books, (New York, W. W. Norton, 2012).
(With Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen) The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Jung Stripped Bare by his Biographers, Even (London: Karnac Books, 2004).
Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology (London: Routledge, 1998).
Edited Volumes
Editor, C. G. Jung, Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes on the Seminar in Analytical Psychology Given by Jung in 1925 (Princeton, New Jersey, Philemon Series, 2011).
Editor, C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani, (New York: W. W. Norton, Philemon Series, 2009).
Editor, C. G. Jung, Seminar series, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Bollingen Series, (Princeton New Jersey/London: Princeton University Press/Routledge, 1996).
Editor, Michael Fordham, Analyst-Patient Interaction: Collected Papers on Technique (London: Routledge, 1996).
Editor, Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages by (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Editor (with Michael Münchow), Speculations after Freud, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). ~UCL DIVISION OF PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE SCIENCES
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