Psychology, Art, and Antifascism

Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature

Rose Louis

A vivid portrait of two remarkable twentieth-century thinkers and their landmark collaboration on the use and abuse of caricature and propaganda in the modern world In 1934, Viennese art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris invited his mentee E. H. Gombrich to collaborate on a project that had implications for psychology and neuroscience, and foreshadowed their contributions to the Allied war effort. Their subject: caricature and its use and abuse in propaganda. Their collaboration was a seminal early effort to integrate science, the humanities, and political awareness. In this fascinating biographical and intellectual study, Louis Rose explores the content of Kris and Gombrich's project and its legacy.

About the Author

Louis Rose is professor of history at Otterbein University, executive director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, and editor of the interdisciplinary journal American Imago.

Reviews

"In this book, Louis Rose traces the path of two great Viennese intellectuals, Ernst Kris and E. H. Gombrich – one a psychoanalyst who emigrated to New York and the other an art historian exiled in London – who together elaborated how caricature emerged as an art form since the seventeenth-century, until by the twentieth it could be used as an arm of propaganda in the struggle against fascism. A masterful and erudite study" – Elisabeth Roudinesco, Universite de Paris VII-Diderot

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