European Yearbook of the History of Psychology

Through the analysis of Ludwig Binswanger's conference on Daseinsanalyse "in psychiatry" and of the short report on Daseinsanalyse "as science" by the Italian psychiatrist Silvio Brambilla, this paper aims to highlight the salient features of the first "Symposium" on Clinical Psychology held in Milan in 1952, the main theme of which was the role of psychology in psychiatric practice. On this basis, it will be possible to shed light on the relevance of phenomenological psychiatry in the Italian context of the mid-20^th century, on the role that Binswanger's Daseinsanalyse could have in psychiatry as such and on the preference accorded by Gemelli to non-psychoanalytic psychotherapies, such as that of Binswanger.

In this paper, I intend to explore the roots of Jung's psychological elaboration of the ancient notion of active imagination. The revalorisation of a creative and healing function of imagination was central throughout Jung's life and work. In the first place, it was crucial in Jung's visionary experiment known as Liber Novus [New Book]. Later, it played a primary role in the progressive adaptation of active imagination as a therapeutic tool in analytical psychology. At the same time, an increasing interest in the creative faculties of imagination was in the early decades of the twentieth century the object of a cultural, cross-disciplinary discussion which affected the intersection between psychology and terrains such as art and literature. In this paper, I aim to offer a brief survey of the way in which Jung's reflection on the nature of imagination was underpinned by the experimental lines of such cultural moment.

This paper explores the life and work of Richard Wilhelm. It argues that Wilhelm's oeuvre can be seen as both a unique bridge between European and Chinese intellectual traditions and as a collision of multiple disciplinary streams within western academia from the early 20^th century. The paper will first give some detailed background on his translations of the I Ching and significant relationship with Carl Jung. It will then explore the mysteries of one of Wilhelm's more forgotten texts, Chinese Economic Psychology. The paper will conclude that Wilhelm's broad and diverse interests merit the further attention of historically minded scholars interested in unpacking major developmental moments as western academics in the early 20^th century sought to explore traditions and ideas from the east.

In the mid-Twentieth Century the psychoanalyst James Strachey attempted an intervention during a crisis within British psychoanalysis which demonstrated that he had some acquaintance with philosophy and the philosophy and history of science. In effect, he sought to address some difficulties that were emerging from psychoanalysis's firm identification with the natural sciences by resorting to these other disciplines. Strachey's sources will be examined including his contact with the University of Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Frank Ramsey. The case will be made that Strachey had been prescient in comparing the difficulties occurring in the 1940s in the regular Scientific Meetings of his analytical Society to the incidents of superseded theories that were predicted by some philosophers and recorded by historians of science.

This discussion paper will assess the intellectual trajectory of Kenneth Waltz in the period 1959–79. The paper will argue that Waltz's oeuvre is best understood via connection to how the human mind was being conceptualised and explored in the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of these 20 years Waltz published three of his most significant single-author books. The third of these was Theory of International Politics (1979), a text still definitive for the field of academic International Relations in the present day. However, Waltz's IR magnum opus was built up over the course of twenty years via a gradual fine-tuning of his scholarly approach. Where Waltz began in 1959 with wide-ranging criticism of how international politics had been assessed by his peers and intellectual forebears, by 1979 Waltz had formulated a strident and detailed proposal for how the field should direct its investigations into the dynamics of the international world. The paper will unpack three of Waltz's key texts – Man, the State, and War (1959), Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics (1967), and Theory of International Politics (1979) – in this regard. It will conclude with two main concluding ideas, one specific to Waltz and one more general: 1) Waltz's intellectual trajectory was contingent upon core psychological ideas and trends that shaped the social sciences in the post-WWII world, and 2) unpicking the psychological underpinnings of different International Relations theories helps to better understand them, both historically and for the purposes of comparative debate.

The essay investigates how the Danish-American psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson first operationalised psychoanalytic thought in historiography, which in turn contributed to the birth of the interdiscipline "psychohistory". I will attempt to show that Erikson's use of psychoanalytic theory rested heavily on his clinical work, and more specifically on his theory of "identity" and "identity crisis". As such, it is an example of one author welding together two academic discourses – psychoanalysis and academic historiography – to suit his particular theoretical needs at a specific point in time, which in turn sparked the creation of an interdiscipline, "psychohistory".