Introduction

The aim of the introduction is to present psychoanalysis as a crucial element of the modernist turn in Central Europe. The following purpose is to outline the book’s methodological scope and introduce a cultural perspective for analyzing the history of psychoanalysis in Central Europe. As I demonstrate, the recognition of psychoanalysis as a cultural practice raises questions not only about the social and political context of its origins but also about its languages and the specific genres they represented, in which the personal, the subjective, and the autobiographical merged with the objective and impersonal. In the following chapters, psychoanalysis is seen as a polyphonic narrative assemblage – a set of cultural practices involving specific writing forms, narrative strategies, and analytical techniques rather than a purely theoretical system. This “narrative assemblage” is defined as a set of narrative strategies that were specific to the psycho-medical and literary discourses of the late 1800s and early 1900s that bred early psychoanalytic discourse.