“A ferociously intelligent investigation of psychoanalysis as a story of inheritance. Artful and astute, All Freud’s Children reveals how axiomatic theories are created from subjective experience and illuminates the humanity of the people who developed them. Hannah Zeavin’s field of play is the fraught and unexplored site of the analyst’s family as both subject and object of theories of psychoanalysis; the family romance, in other words, is even more central than we think. All Freud’s Children will prove a brilliant examination of what’s at stake when the particular is made to stand for the universal.”
-The Whiting Award, Judges’ Citation
ALL FREUD’S CHILDREN tells an alternate history of psychoanalysis by centering those closest to the practice: the children. People associate psychoanalysis with the couch and the lecture hall, but the origin of psychoanalysis is the nursery, the family home. The story I surface is one of how the children of analysts came to play a major but forgotten role in the most decisive theory of self in the 20th century. The most famous psychoanalysts studied, treated, traded on, and theorized their own children; those same children, in turn, found themselves raised by a theory and as evidence for it, becoming bound to an intellectual discipline—a fate—they never quite had the freedom to choose. Psychoanalysis proceeded, across the next century, to redescribe the family from within its families both biological and of the practice, patients and children mixing to form a braided genealogy. I’ve set out to recover the history of that experimentation, exploitation, inheritance, and destiny by following the children of psychoanalysts from their ghostly presence in the pages of texts, from the margins and the footnotes, back into their early homes and subsequent, often troubled, lives.
ALL FREUD’S CHILDREN is under contract with Penguin Press (USA) and Fern Press [Viking] in the UK.
