Connecting the Life of Montague David Eder (1865–1936), Socialist, Psychoanalyst, Zionist and Modern Saint1
Medical History, 2011, 55: 61–84 ‘The Solution to his Own Enigma’: Connecting the Life of Montague David Eder (1865–1936), Socialist, Psychoanalyst, Zionist and Modern Saint1 MATHEW THOMSON* Abstract: This article examines the career of pioneer British psycho- analyst David Eder (1865–1936). Credited by Freud as the first practising psychoanalyst in England, active in early British socialism and then a sig- nificant figure in Zionism in post-war Palestine, and in between an adventurer in South America, a pioneer in the field of school medicine, and a writer on shell-shock, Eder is a strangely neglected figure in exist- ing historiography. The connections between his interest in medicine, psychoanalysis, socialism and Zionism are also explored. In doing so, this article contributes to our developing understanding of the psychoana- lytic culture of early twentieth-century Britain, pointing to its shifting relationship to broader ideology and the practical social and political challenges of the period. The article also reflects on the challenges for both Eder’s contemporaries and his biographers in making sense of such a life. Keywords: Psychoanalysis; Medicine; Socialism; Zionism; Palestine; South America; Biography; Kropotkin; Mental Deficiency; New Age; Children; Shell-Shock Introduction When David Eder died in 1936, he received accolades from international luminaries including Sigmund Freud, Alfred Einstein and H.G. Wells, and preparations began for a volume of essays on his life and achievements.2 Memoirs of a Modern Pioneer, pub- lished in 1945, included a foreword from Freud, which described Eder as the first and for some time the only doctor practising psychoanalysis in England, and presented Ó Mathew Thomson, 2011.
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