A triumph of identity politics.

Until not so long ago, the received liberal view of the history of biology and the social sciences was that social Darwinist and racist theories had been given the kiss of death by their association with the eugenic policies of the Nazis. A revulsion from biological determinism and any analogies between the biological and social came to dominate the post Second World War liberal consensus; psychoanalysis was a vital part of this antiracist synthesis, since it offered a universal psychology that could bridge the gap between social theory and the somatic substrate of its indeterminate (and non-biological) instinct theory. In the 1970s, and more strongly in the 1980s, a number of seemingly unrelated movements put the anti-racist and antibiologizing presuppositions into question. With sociobiology, speculative applications of biological models to social institutions once again became permissible and "scientific". With the rise of identity politics, racial, religious and gender affiliations once again became the primary categories for social and historical analysis, this time by those whom the shibboleths of liberal universalism had attempted to protect from the damaging effects of racial prejudice masquerading as knowledge. Gilman's books represent the triumph of identity politics over these liberal shibboleths in the history of medicine and psychoanalysis. His working assumption is: no scientist can ever forget, repress or do away with "his" racial identity. When this is coupled with the disease model of cultural infection (so akin to the fashionable culturalist-historicist premises), according to which all inhabitants of a medical culture inhabit the same cultural universe, and are infected by the same assumptions, its application to Freud yields the following: "one of the definitions of the Jew that [Freud] would have internalized was a racial one, and it was a definition that, whether he consciously sought it or not, shaped the argument of psychoanalysis" (FRG3). To secure this argument, Gilman asserts that "the debate about race taints all other views of the social reality of the period" (Case 175).