Prof. Joy Damousi

Title

Psychoanalysis in Australia: A History

Abstract

This paper explores key events and concepts in the history of psychoanalysis in Australia. It examines the impact of Freudian ideas on cultural, social and political life across the twentieth century. In doing so it argues that understanding emotional and interior lives has a complex history and challenges Australian stereotypes of an indifference to our emotional worlds. By focusing on Freudian ideas, it demonstrates how many permeated intellectual circles and everyday life and was key to the development of modernity in Australia.

Bio

Professor Joy Damousi is Dean of Arts and Director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. Her recent publications include: The Humanitarians: Child War Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational World, 1919-1975 (Cambridge, 2022); Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s…