ABSTRACT
A great wave of enthusiasm for psychoanalysis had struck the University of Cambridge. Arthur George Tansley, having resigned from the Cambridge Botany School in 1923 to study with Freud in Vienna, was one of the chief fomenters. This was a productive moment for psychoanalytic applications in numerous fields and key insights in economics, psychology, English, and anthropology can be traced to Freudian inspiration (Forrester and Cameron forthcoming). Can we say the same for the discipline of geography in its Cambridge context? On the face of it, the answer seems a pretty safe “no.” After “generally lamentable beginnings” with the first lecturer Henry Guillemard resigning when pressed to actually lecture (Stoddart 1989: 25), the early teaching focus was physical geography. Founding figures of Cambridge geography like Antarctic scientist Frank Debenham and historical geographer H.C. Darby (the first PhD in 1931) exhibited little interest in psychoanalysis.
