The historian and philosopher John Forrester, who has died aged 66 after suffering from cancer, advanced the study of psychoanalysis, its history, key figures, clinical practice and social significance, both in Britain and farther afield. Based in the department of history and philosophy of science (HPS) at Cambridge University, this brilliant, deft and warm-hearted man brought boundless curiosity, unsurpassed stores of information and tough questioning to bear on Sigmund Freud’s talking cure and its place in the modern world.
From his PhD thesis,published as Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1980) and immediatley translated into French, to his magnum opus, Freud in Cambridge, completed but yet to be published, John was passionately engaged with his subject, though, being at heart a follower of the French Enlightenment, never a zealot. He continually enjoyed the conundrum that psychoanalysis – which he recognised had aspects of a faith or even a cult – presented to a sceptic of his rationalist temper. His life’s ambition, he explained to his daughter, Katrina, was to reconcile Freud, the doctor of the soul, with Michel Foucault, the critic of medical regimes of all kinds.
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