Daniel Pick

Daniel Pick is a British historian, psychoanalyst, university teacher, writer and occasional broadcaster. He is leading a research group at Birkbeck exploring the history of the human sciences and 'psy' professions during the Cold War. He currently holds a Senior Investigator grant from the Wellcome Trust for this project, entitled 'Hidden Persuaders': Brainwashing, Culture, Clinical Knowledge and the Cold War Human Sciences, c. 1950-1990'.

He read English at the University of Cambridge, before taking a PhD in History. He is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, a fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and author of numerous articles and several books on modern cultural history, psychoanalysis, and the history of the human sciences. These include Faces of Degeneration (CUP, 1989) and The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (OUP, 2012). He has written, and taught at London University for many years, on aspects of the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, modernism, the relationship of Freudian thought to historiography, Victorian evolutionary theory, eugenics and social Darwinism, ideas of war and peace, fin-de-siècle literature, and the history of cultural attitudes to crime and madness. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Pick has presented a number of radio programmes, most recently: ‘The Unconscious Life of Bombs’, BBC Radio 4 (December 2017); ‘Dictators on the Couch’, BBC Radio 4 (June 2017); and ‘Freud for our Times’, BBC Radio 4 (December 2016).

Selected works

• Co-editor (with Matt ffytche), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (Routledge, 2016)
• Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015)
• The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts (Oxford University Press, 2012); paperback (2014)
• Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (Jonathan Cape, 2005; Pimlico 2006)
• Co-editor (with Lyndal Roper), Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2004)
• Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture, Yale University Press, 2000
• Edited and introduced George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (Penguin Classics, 1994)
• War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 1993)
• Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c.1918, Cambridge University Press, 1989

External links

• ‘The Psychiatrist and the Deputy Fuhrer’, BBC Radio 4
• ‘Nazism and Psychoanalysis in the 1940s and Beyond’, Freud Museum
• ‘On Psychoanalysis and Fascism’
• 'The Roots of Extremism’, BBC Radio 4 (March 2014)'
• Hidden Persuaders project website