Reconstructing ‘Bioanalysis’: Freud, Ferenczi and the Discomfort with Heredity

Workshop discussion on this unrealized project as a critical intervention into the scientific language of the long nineteenth century. Bioanalysis, I suggest, constitutes a covert counter-discourse, half in jest, half in earnest: both a playful and a desperate attempt to wrest the language of biology away from theories of degeneration that persisted in eugenicist thought long into the twentieth century. Precisely where it appears most biologically naïve, psychoanalysis intervenes in the entanglements of science, politics, and the cultural imaginary.