Learning from linked lives: narrativising the individual and group biographies of the guests at the 25th Jubilee dinner of the British Psychoanalytical Society at The Savoy, London, on 8th March 1939: a prosopographical analysis of the character and influence of the formative and significant figures present at the dinner

Abstract

This thesis is a prosopography drawn from the original seating plan for the dinner. Aided by rich supporting data, including photographs, archive materials, correspondence and reminiscences, this research presents a collective of biographical information on the guests and seeks out the connections between them: one story from many. This work offers new information and ideas on how the links between the lives of the guests were key to assimilating Freud’s theories into the mainstay of our cultural reference and in enabling psychoanalysis, the ‘talking cure’, to be recognised as a science and a legitimate alternative to the mind-works that had gone before.

Drawing on a feminist paradigm and using explanations of social, cultural and symbolic capital to interpret the data, this thesis presents many findings that are new to the public domain and a scope for research that extends beyond these pages.

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