All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance

Hannah Zeavin
History
UC Berkeley

The history of psychoanalysis is rife with parents borrowing from the dreams and symptoms of their children to make a theory that might save the rest of us. The manuscript for my third book, “All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance,” aims to recenter this critical importance of the children of psychoanalysis to the intellectual history of the theory and resulting practice. The manuscript argues that many of the central theories from Freud onwards found their origin not from clinical material surfaced on the couch, nor in friendship between analysts, but from intimate relations between parent-child. From Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and theory of the death drive to Klein’s understanding of repair and Lacan’s mirror stage, All Freud’s Children restores the centrality of domestic and familial relations to our understanding of the history of psychoanalysis. “All Freud’s Children” considers six sets of analytic children. Far from being discrete historical cases, many of these children knew each other, knew each other’s parents across time, and figured in one another’s stories. There is a genealogy, not of blood but of the practice itself, that can be traced backwards and forwards through this book. Here, I offer a new portrait of the analytic family.