Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Teaching Officers

John Forrester

John Forrester

Professor
Head of Department

Research interests: History and philosophy of psychoanalysis and human sciences

He is Editor of Psychoanalysis and History.

Freud in Cambridge

John Forrester is completing a study (with Laura Cameron) of the reception of psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the early twentieth century. A number of elements of this study have been published – these are available below in PDF form:

  • (2008) '1919: Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Cambridge and London: Myers, Jones and MacCurdy', Psychoanalysis and History 10(1): 37-94 [660 KB PDF file]
  • (2004) 'Freud in Cambridge', Critical Quarterly 46 No. 2 pp. 1-26 [850 KB PDF file]
  • (2000) (with Laura Cameron) 'Tansley's psychoanalytic network: An episode out of the early history of psychoanalysis in England', Psychoanalysis and History 2(2) (September 2000): 189-256 [570 KB PDF file]
  • (1999) (with Laura Cameron) '"A nice type of the English scientist": Tansley and Freud', History Workshop Journal 48 pp. 65-100 [2.65 MB PDF file]

Other recent work and published books

  • (2007) 'On Kuhn's Case: Psychoanalysis and the Paradigm', Critical Inquiry, 33 No. 4, Summer 2007: 782-819 [185 KB PDF file]
  • (1997b) Truth Games. Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis, Foreword by Adam Phillips, Harvard University Press, paperback edition March 2000
  • (1997a) Dispatches from the Freud Wars. Psychoanalysis and Its Passions, Harvard University Press. Paperback edition, 1998
  • (1996d) 'If p, then what? Thinking in cases' History of the Human Sciences 9 No. 3, pp. 1-25 [2.57 MB PDF file]
  • (1992c) with Lisa Appignanesi, Freud's Women, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1992/New York: Basic Books, 1992; paperback (UK: Virago; US: Basic), October 1993 (UK), February 1994 (US); 2nd edition with Afterword, Penguin, 2000
  • (1990a) The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Freud, Lacan and Derrida, Cambridge: C.U.P; published in paperback November 1991, paperback reprinted May 1992; second reprinting 1994
  • (1980a) Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press; paperback edition, 1982, reprinted 1985