by Boomert - Freud in the Antipodes by Joy Damousi 12 Jan 2010

Freud in the Antipodes (Joy Damousi, UNSW Press, $49.95 pb, ISBN 0868408883, April) ***

We have all read of the changing role of university presses and of the pressure on those within the academy to speak to a perceived wider audience. This latest book by Melbourne University historian Joy Damousi is a good example of both the potential and the pitfalls of this approach. In the opening chapters, Damousi’s tone is clear and her narrative strong as she makes the interesting and convincing argument that the spread of the language (and, but to a lesser extent, the practice) of psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in Australia in the early 20th century was part and parcel of the social shifts of modernity. In addition to the popular conception of psychoanalysis as the ‘talking cure,’ she argues, it is equally important to see it as a ‘listening cure’ and to understand this ‘listening’ to an emergent ‘modern’ self alongside technological developments such as radio, the telephone and the talking picture. The chapters on the uses of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the two World Wars are also fascinating. The latter third of the book, however, with its detailing of the struggles of psychiatry within medicine and of psychoanalysis within various faculties of the academy, falls away somewhat in its interest to a ‘lay’ reader, seeming much more like a first-year university textbook.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2005, Thorpe-Bowker