Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The War Inside
  • Cited by 78
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139547314
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139547314
Series:
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare (38)
Subjects:
Twentieth Century British History, Twentieth Century European History, History, History of Psychology, Psychology
Information

Book description

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.

Awards

Shortlisted for the 2014 Gradiva Book Award, National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

Shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize

Reviews

'This scholarly and well-researched book is the first to investigate how psychoanalysis influenced social policies relating to children in mid-twentieth-century Britain and demonstrates the far-reaching role of psychoanalytic ideas within social policy. Michal Shapira has been particularly effective in demonstrating the way in which psychoanalytic experts, in dealing with the disruptions and mass separation of families in wartime, introduced psychoanalytic ideas to discussions of citizenship and democracy.'

Michael Roper - University of Essex

'A substantial and well-researched contribution to the history of British psychoanalysis; Michal Shapira’s illuminating book, The War Inside, deserves a wide readership.'

Daniel Pick - Birkbeck, University of London

'Shapira does a superb job of narrating the shift in both clinical thinking and public attitudes effected by the suffering of the shell-shocked in the previous war, demonstrating how, by the 1940s, fear and anxiety were recognised as legitimate responses to war but ones that needed careful management by the state.'

Helen McCarthy Source: Reviews in History (history.ac.uk/reviews)

'Shapira’s work is one that I am likely to go back to more often … Reading this work, one can see the profound ways in which psychoanalytic thinking informed the society in which we now live; and because there are so many wonderfully researched details in the book, it is one that I will keep on my shelf and can imagine dipping back into again and again.'

Source: Psychoanalysis and History

'In this important and original contribution, Michal Shapira presents an interdisciplinary, social and cultural history that examines the impact of psychoanalysis on the self, child development, and the family in post World War II Britain. Drawing on published and archival materials as well as clinical case histories this book will interest a wide range of academics as well as clinicians and psychoanalysts.'

Lewis Aron - Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.