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 and The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind. 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 ; ‘Dictators on the Couch’, BBC Radio 4 ; and ‘Freud for our Times’, BBC Radio 4.Selected works
