In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908–88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto’s rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto’s continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if French people had a parenting problem or dilemma there was one person they consulted above all: Françoise Dolto (1908-88). But who was Dolto? How did she achieve a position of such influence? What ideas did she communicate to the French public? This book connects the story of Dolto's rise to two broader histories: the dramatic growth of psychoanalysis in postwar France and the long-running debate over the family and the proper role of women in society. It shows that Dolto's continued reputation in France as a liberal and enlightened educational thinker is at best only partially deserved and that conservative and anti-feminist ideas often underpinned her prominent public interventions. While Dolto retains the status of a national treasure, her career has had far-reaching and sometimes harmful repercussions for French society, particularly in the treatment of autism.

In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.

Until the mid-20th century, France saw itself as a great power with universalist aspirations and global ambitions. But the Second World War and decolonisation irrevocably changed France's place in the world. Despite attempts to restore the country's 'grandeur' in the 1960s, the French have been forced to reconcile themselves to their modest place at the heart of a changing Europe. What impact has this had on political life? How have the French reimagined the revolutionary, republican and reactionary ideologies that have been so crucial to their history? How has the arrival of hundreds of thousands of postcolonial migrants transformed politics? These are just some of the questions at the heart of France since the 1970s. With contributions from leading specialists on topics as varied as the legacy of empire and neo-liberalism, it explores how the French have dealt with the pervasive sense of uncertainty that has become a defining feature of contemporary European politics.

In Native to the Republic, Minayo Nasiali traces the process through which expectations about living standards and decent housing came to be understood as social rights in late twentieth-century France. These ideas evolved through everyday negotiations between ordinary people, municipal authorities, central state bureaucrats, elected officials, and social scientists in postwar Marseille. Nasiali shows how these local-level interactions fundamentally informed evolving ideas about French citizenship and the built environment, namely that the institutionalization of social citizenship also created new spaces for exclusion. Although everyone deserved social rights, some were supposedly more deserving than others.From the 1940s through the early 1990s, metropolitan discussions about the potential for town planning to transform everyday life were shaped by colonial and, later, postcolonial migration within the changing empire. As a port and the historical gateway to and from the colonies, Marseille's interrelated projects to develop welfare institutions and manage urban space make it a particularly significant site for exploring this uneven process. Neighborhood debates about the meaning and goals of modernization contributed to normative understandings about which residents deserved access to expanding social rights. Nasiali argues that assumptions about racial, social, and spatial differences profoundly structured a differential system of housing in postwar France. Native to the Republic highlights the value of new approaches to studying empire, membership in the nation, and the welfare state by showing how social citizenship was not simply constituted within "imagined communities" but also through practices involving the contestation of spaces and the enjoyment of rights.

From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought. In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

I had to do something to escape Hitler's clutches, writes Esti Freud. Yet she waits with her then-16-year-old daughter, Sophie in Paris until German canons can be heard in the distance before deciding to escape by bicycle across France, as Sophie keeps looking back to see whether German tanks will overtake them. Both women survive and, in their own ways, come to feel a need to keep a personal record of those tumultuous times. Thus, in a memoir written at age 79, Esti Fraud, daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud and wife of his oldest son, Martin, looks back on her life starting before the 20th century, lived on three continents, and stretched through two world wars and the Holocaust. Twenty years after her mothers' death, daughter Sophie turned to Esti's memoir as the scaffold for this book, expanding it through family letters, archival material, and her own diary penned as a teenager. Out of these documents, Sophie Freud has created a many-voiced mosaic, including letters and insights from a wide cast of characters who tell the story of a famous family—and of a century. This work gives an insider's, in-law view of the family Freud, its foundations, and flaws. The relationship between Esti, daughter of a wealthy Vienna attorney and her husband Martin Freud is foreshadowed by the young lovers' fathers. At first meeting Esti, Sigmund told his son the glamorous woman was too beautiful for the clan, meaning her splendor belied a lifestyle not conducive to the frugal Freud ways. And Esti's father, on hearing of her love for Martin, expressed regret she was involved with a man who was not a financially favorable linkage, and that his family was not respectable since patriarch Sigmund was just another psychiatrist, and one who writes pornography books at that. Thus begins the ill-fated relationship that would rock two families and a generation of children to come. Sophie weaves into the text letters she inherited, including letters from Martin while he was a prisoner of war, and excerpts from her own diary, kept as an adolescent. The resulting mosaic will fascinate—and perhaps disturb—readers interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as those intrigued by relationships and family.

For most of the twentieth century, Jewish and/or politically leftist European psychoanalysts rarely linked their personal trauma history to their professional lives, for they hoped their theory—their Truth—would transcend subjectivity and achieve a universality not unlike the advances in the "hard" sciences. Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich confronts the ways in which previously avoided persecution, expulsion, loss and displacement before, during and after the Holocaust shaped what was, and remains a dominant movement in western culture. Emily Kuriloff uses unpublished original source material, as well as personal interviews conducted with émigré /survivor analysts, and scholars who have studied the period, revealing how the quality of relatedness between people determines what is possible for them to know and do, both personally and professionally. Kuriloff’s research spans the globe, including the analytic communities of the United States, England, Germany, France, and Israel amidst the extraordinary events of the twentieth century. Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich addresses the future of psychoanalysis in the voices of the second generation—thinkers and clinicians whose legacies and work remains informed by the pain and triumph of their parents' and mentors' Holocaust stories. These unprecedented revelations influence not only our understanding of mental health work, but of history, art, politics and education. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, cultural historians, Jewish and specifically Holocaust scholars will find this volume compelling.

In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of "political Freudianism," he shows how twentieth-century radicals, activists, and intellectuals used psychoanalytic ideas to probe consumer capitalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy. He also underscores the continuing influence and critical potential of those ideas in the transformed landscape of the present. Zaretsky's conception of political Freudianism unites the two overarching themes of the last century—totalitarianism and consumerism—in a single framework. He finds that theories of mass psychology and the unconscious were central to the study of fascism and the Holocaust; to African American radical thought, particularly the struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery; to the rebellions of the 1960s; and to the feminism and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Nor did the influence of political Freud end when the era of Freud bashing began. Rather, Zaretsky proves that political Freudianism is alive today in cultural studies, the study of memory, theories of trauma, postcolonial thought, film, media and computer studies, evolutionary theory and even economics.

The War Inside is a groundbreaking history of the contribution of British psychoanalysis to the making of social democracy, childhood, and the family during World War II and the postwar reconstruction. Psychoanalysts informed understandings not only of individuals, but also of broader political questions. By asserting a link between a real 'war outside' and an emotional 'war inside', psychoanalysts contributed to an increased state responsibility for citizens' mental health. They made understanding children and the mother-child relationship key to the successful creation of a democratic citizenry. Using rich archival sources, the book revises the common view of psychoanalysis as an elite discipline by taking it out of the clinic and into the war nursery, the juvenile court, the state welfare committee, and the children's hospital. It traces the work of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud in response to total war and explores its broad postwar effects on British society.