Hinshelwood R. D. - Influential Papers From 1920s

R. D. Hinshelwood is a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He was previously Clinical Director of The Cassel Hospital and currently is Professor, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. He is the author of A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (1989), and Clinical Klein (1995). He has written widely on therapeutic communities, and the psychoanalysis of organizations ( Thinking About Institutions (2001)); and published a book on psychoanalysis and ethics, Therapy or Coercion (1997).

R. D. Hinshelwood

The 1920s, the first decade of the journal, was a time of hope and dismay. The phenomenal violence of the First World War was slowly absorbed in Europe and a new realization of what human beings could do to each other was faced. The optimism was to resolve that it should never happen again, and Freud believed that psychoanalysis had a contribution to make to that resolve. In his paper (1919a) Lines of advance in psychoanalysis he pointed with some enthusiasm towards innovative developments in psychoanalysis itself.

Curiously, one powerful factor that supported optimism over psychoanalysis was the war. The huge haemorrhage of manpower due to war neurosisi.e. post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)led, after the war, in all European (and American) armies, to a search to understand the illness psychologically. At the time it was only psychoanalysis that could offer a credible theory of the condition and, therefore, a method of prevention (see, for instance, Ferenczi et al ., 1921). From this, psychoanalysis gained a lot of credit in some quarters, and was widely applied in the treatment and rehabilitation of soldiers. Over the years of the 1920s, the journal reviewed many papers and books on the topic. The topic of war neurosis was of great interest again at the time of the Second World War (see, for instance, Miller, 1940). Freuds reaction to the enormity of the social violence gave rise to at least one of his major texts Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (Freud, 1921c); and probably Beyond the pleasure principle (Freud, 1920g). Both these works serve as inspiration to much of what was published in the 1920s.

The backdrop of social changes and historical events are rarely addressed explicitly in these papers. The post-war poverty in Germany, and the plight of the working class in mid-decade in Britain, appear to go unmarked. Nor do the events of the developing Soviet regime in Russia warrant mention, despite their devastating effect on Russian psychoanalysts. This seeming neglect of social occurrences is, I presume, on the grounds that they are mere epiphenomena and that psychoanalysis is an investigation of the psychological underpinnings of any social phenomena, a view not necessarily shared by social scientists (see the debate between Malinowski, 1923, and Jones, 1925).

One of the enthusiastic new projects after the First World War was to found an English-language journal. Psychoanalysis had originated in Germany; and though a number of Freuds books had been translated and published in Britain and the United States in English, this new journal was a celebration of the spread of psychoanalysis to international dimensions. As Ernest Jones said in his editorial to the first volume:

It has long been evident that a periodical published mainly in German could not indefinitely subserve the function of an official international organ, and, since interest in Psycho-Analysis has extended from German-speaking countries to English-speaking countries far more than to any other, it was only a question of time when such a Journal as the present one would have to be founded: with the cessation of the war, the resumption of scientific activities, and the reestablishment of contact between different countries, that time may be judged to have now arrived. [Jones, 1920, p. 3]