UC Berkeley History Professor Hannah Zeavin recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her book “All Freud’s Children.” It explores how the children of psychoanalysts helped shape some of the 20th century’s most influential ideas about the human mind, tracing how family life became intertwined with research material and theory.
The prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship provides funding for scholars, artists and writers pursuing ambitious independent work. With this support, Zeavin will draw on multilingual archives, oral histories and newly opened family records to complete the book and rethink the foundations of psychoanalysis.
What is your reaction to winning the Guggenheim Fellowship?Hannah Zeavin: Disbelief, to be honest, then immense gratitude. The Guggenheim offers time and money, the two resources that are vanishingly scarce in higher education. I am already so lucky to work in a place where I have access to both, but this will radically transform my next set of years as a scholar and a writer.
Why do you think you were selected for this fellowship?
Hannah Zeavin: There's a political economic answer to this, having to do with the prize economy. Northeastern University Creative Writing Professor Stephanie Young, Northeastern University English Professor Juliana Spahr, and Occidental College English Professor Claire Grossman write a lot about this in Crowd Control: The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward, a book forthcoming from Columbia University Press later this year.
And then I think that my project has a certain kind of charisma. The book in progress, "All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance" is about the children of psychoanalysts and their import to the theory as it is made, written by a historian of psychoanalysis, who is also the child of analysts.
Can you tell us more about your book and your goals for it?Hannah Zeavin: "All Freud’s Children" considers how the lives of the children of analysts were turned into data, mined and generalized by their parents to make the universal theories of human mind that defined the 20th century. It traces the effects on those children of being raised by and for a theory and, in turn, the effects on the theory itself.
I turn to eight sets of analytic children, including the children of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon. While each sibling set receives its own section in the book, these are far from discrete historical cases. Many of these children knew each other, knew each other’s parents across time, and they appeared in one another’s stories.
Psychoanalysts have two families, one of kin and one of training, and trace back their own lineages by describing who analyzed and studied with whom. By this understanding, it is but one family that the book assembles for its group portrait.
This family has existed for more than a hundred years and has dispersed across the globe. The book has required the most demanding and diverse research I’ve conducted to date: it is conducted in three major languages and in repositories that are both traditional and those that have rarely, if ever, been used and are often unorganized.
Despite these challenges, I’ve had extraordinary luck in gathering materials. The families it studies have opened restricted files for me, and I have been conducting oral histories with the living children and grandchildren my book discusses. A central contention of the book is that the children of psychoanalysts are all over the scene of the resulting theory, if only we know to look.
What do you hope to do as a Guggenheim Fellow?
Hannah Zeavin: "All Freud’s Children" was, for about a decade, both the book of my life and also one I would never publish, at least not while my parents are alive. They are psychoanalysts.
In summer 2021, the demand for parental privacy changed radically when my stepfather was doxxed by the alt-right for a clinical paper he wrote about whiteness. Suddenly, my parents were thrust out of the underfeatured non-public they had long crafted and onto Fox News (a saga I chronicled for the publication “n+1”).
I turned to "All Freud’s Children" concertedly the next year and have been extremely fortunate in the support the project has garnered. In 2022, I received a Robert B. Silvers work-in-progress award for the book, and then in 2024 I received a Whiting Foundation Non-Fiction Grant, both of which helped provide key funding for the research.
During the Guggenheim Fellowship and with its support, I will finish the book, which is set to be published by Penguin Press and to the highest possible standard.