Last Seminar of the year: Tuesday 18th June, 5.30pm

Our final research seminar of this academic year takes place this Tuesday (18th). We hope you can join us there and for drinks afterwards!

Where: Arts II 3.16
When: Refreshments from 5pm, papers start at 5.30pm


Dr Alison Moore, University of Western Sydney and Visiting Scholar, QMUL
A Chapter in the History of Biologism: Evolution in Interwar Medical and
Psychoanalytic Views of Sex

The interwar period saw the development of a substantial uptake of genetic dimensions of
Freudian thought in French and Spanish medical and psychoanalytic views of sex. In this
new series of reflections about psyche and sexuality, notions of the primitive past
appeared, contradictorily, both as an ideal about appropriate sexual pleasure, and as the
‘other’ of evolved civilisation. In her writings throughout the 1920s-1940s, Marie
Bonaparte, the French Freudian writer and royal heiress, followed the erudite Spanish
endocrinologist Gregorio Marañon in mapping problems of gender differentiation, female
masochism and frigidity, onto a vision of evolution from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised societies’.
Both Bonaparte and Marañon shared similar views about evolution and sex in common
with Freud. But their ideas were a significant development of Freud’s view of the sexual
past since both were acutely aware of the emerging women’s rights currents in European
societies. Both also grappled with the powerful pronatalist ideologies of the interwar
period. This paper considers briefly, how a teleological view of the sexual past was
adapted from both Darwinian evolutionary thought and fin-de-siècle psychiatric thought
in Freud’s account of the psyche; before showing how it differed from the approach of
Marañon and Bonaparte, who each produced their own peculiar understandings of
feminine sexual pleasures as signs of progress or its failure.


Sarah Crook, QMUL
Madness and Motherhood in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain: Making Distress Visible

In 1967, a general practitioner reflected that due to the National Health Service, 'the
planning of medical education, of general practice, of psychiatry, and particularly of
community services, demands a clearer picture of the size and nature of the problem of
psychiatric illness than is now available' (Ryle 1967). This paper reflects on how the
institutional framework of the NHS made milder forms of psychiatric distress visible in the
postwar era. It argues that the general practitioner assumed a central role in researching
and treating emotional distress even before deinstitutionalisation took full effect in the
1970s. This role was a product of professional rivalries between medical specialisms, and
the proliferation of epidemiological studies a consequence of the struggle to enhance
professional prestige. This, combined with social and political anxiety over the state of the
family, made maternal distress a significant object of analysis in postwar British medicine.
This paper argues that the studies conducted from within the general practice rendered
milder forms of distress visible and, through this, created new communities of the
mentally disordered.