John Forrester (historian)

Life

Born and raised in London, Forrester attended Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School from 1960–66 and read Natural Sciences at King's College, Cambridge (1967–70), graduating with a First in Part II History and Philosophy of Science. In Cambridge he was taught by Gerd Buchdahl, Mary Hesse and Robert M. Young. In 1970-72, as a graduate student in the History of Science Program at Princeton University, he took courses with Thomas Kuhn, Gerald Geison, Theodore M. Brown and Charles Coulston Gillispie. In 1972 he spent six months teaching science in London secondary schools and in 1973-74 worked for the Science Policy Foundation. From 1973-76 he was a graduate student at King's College, Cambridge, a Junior Research Fellow in the College (1976–80) and a Senior Research Fellow (1980–84); during this time he researched in Vienna (1975) and while in Paris (1977-78), attached to the École Normale Supérieure, was much influenced by the lectures of Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. In 1984, he was appointed to a University Lectureship in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, was promoted to Reader in 1996 and to Professor in 2000. He was Head of Department from 2007-13.

He was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Logic and the Epistemology of the Human Sciences, University of Campinas, Brazil (1988); Visiting Professor at the Institut für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung, University of Bielefeld in Germany (1997); Research Scholar, Getty Research Institute in the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, California (1998); Whitney J. Oates Fellow of the Council of the Humanities and the Program in the History of Science, Princeton University (2001); Schaffner Visiting Professor, Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago (2003); Professor, Ittingen Summer School, Kartaus Ittingen, Switzerland (2004); Visiting Directeur d’Études, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2006). He taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at Dartmouth College (1995).

Work

Much of his research was devoted to the history of psychoanalysis and the life and work of Sigmund Freud; he also studied the work of Jacques Lacan for many years, including co-translating two of Lacan's Seminars. His PhD thesis became his first published book, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1980), which argued for the considerable influence of the sciences of language, from neurology (aphasia) to philology, on the development of Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud's Women (1992), co-written with Lisa Appignanesi, explored the part that women played in Freud's work and the history of psychoanalysis, from patients to practitioners, including the extensive debates over the nature of femininity that took place in Freud's work, during his lifetime and in second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. He has also published three collections of papers: The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. Freud, Lacan and Derrida (1990); Dispatches from the Freud Wars. Psychoanalysis and its Passions (1997); and Truth Games. Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis (1997). He has extensive interests in cases as a genre and as a style of reasoning, linked to the prominence of the case history in psychoanalytic work and writing, and has published a series of papers on cases, including the influential 'If p then what? Thinking in cases'. In recent years he has published (in part with Laura J. Cameron) papers documenting the reception of psychoanalysis in early twentieth century Cambridge.

He was Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History 2005-14.

His final book, Freud in Cambridge (co-authored with Laura J. Cameron), was finished before his death, but is yet to be published.

Personal life

He was married to Lisa Appignanesi; their daughter is Katrina Forrester, a Lecturer in History at Queen Mary's University of London; his step-son is the filmmaker Josh Appignanesi. He died on 24 November 2015 of cancer.