Review of Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia by Joy Damousi

Review of Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia by Joy Damousi

Joy Damousi, a historian currently lecturing at the University of Melbourne, has shown a vested interest in psychoanalysis since her third and fourth books, The Labour of Loss: Mourning Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia and Living With the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia. This inclination for Freudianism was spelled out in the subsequent book she co-edited with Australian historian Robert Reynolds History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis. In 2005 she brought her ongoing project to fruition by publishing Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, which had mixed reviews in Australia.