Download or read book A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason written by Léon Chertok and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and provocative work begins by examining the shift of scientific paradigms that took place in the late eighteenth century, a shift illustrated by the report of a French Royal Commission appointed in 1784 to investigate Mesmerism. The reactions to Mesmerism among the Commission members--in particular the chemist Lavoisier and the botanist Jussieu--crystallized conflicts about the notion of reason and its role as a scientific ideal, about how science ought to be done. The Commission's denunciation of Mesmerism as the work of the "imagination" then serves as the starting point for the authors' reconsideration of the history of psychoanalysis, notably its suppression and repression of phenomena associated with hypnosis--imagination, suggestion, and empathy--in its search to establish itself as a science in accord with the new ideal of scientific reason. Examining the new and often troubled relationship in psychoanalysis between therapeutic effectiveness and advances in theory, the authors highlight the challenge to Freudian ideals in the 1920's by Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi. The discrediting of Ferenczi--engineered to a large extent by Ernest Jones and Freud himself--was an attempt to "purify" psychoanalysis of the effects of suggestion. The authors discuss Freud's own therapeutic nihilism occasioned by his recognition that suggestion, by means of the transference relationship, played an uncontrollable role in psychoanalytic therapy. In assessing Freud's legacy, the authors examine evolving notions of psychoanalysis, especially the role played by the effects of suggestion in recent theoretical representations of the development of the subject. Asserting that hypnosis and the challenge it poses to our understanding of human motivation, reason, and the mind/body relationship constitutes the fourth narcissistic wound to the human ego (after those introduced by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), the authors analyze Lacan's rejection of hypnosis and explain current resistance to hypnosis through its challenge to the modern scientific notion of reason.
Download or read book Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason written by Dany Nobus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-27 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly arcane "wisdom" produced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is either endlessly regurgitated and recited as holy writ by his numerous acolytes, or radically dismissed as unpalatable nonsense by his equally countless detractors. Contrary to these common, strictly antagonistic yet uniformly uncritical practices, this book offers a meticulous critique of some key theoretical and clinical aspects of Lacan’s expansive oeuvre, testing their consistency, examining their implications, and investigating their significance. In nine interrelated chapters, the book highlights both the flaws and the strengths of Lacan’s ideas, in areas of investigation that are as crucial as they are contentious, within as well as outside psychoanalysis. Drawing on a vast range of source materials, including many unpublished archival documents, it teases out controversial issues such as money, organisational failure, and lighthearted, "gay" thinking, and it relies on the highest standards of scholarly excellence to develop its arguments. At the same time, the book does not presuppose any prior knowledge of Lacanian psychoanalysis on the part of the reader, but allows its readership to indulge in the joys of in-depth critical analysis, trans-disciplinary creative thinking, and persistent questioning. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike in psychoanalytic studies and philosophy, as well as all those interested in French theory and the history of ideas.
Download or read book Critique on the Couch written by Amy Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on the Couch, Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning. Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims of critique.
Download or read book Why Freud was Wrong written by Richard Webster and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first complete and coherent account of Freud's life and work to be written from a consistently sceptical point of view. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, the book is a devastating portrait of the interpreter of dreams.
Download or read book Why Psychoanalysis written by Elisabeth Roudinesco and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-10 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some people still choose psychoanalysis-Freud's so-called talking cure-when numerous medications are available that treat the symptoms of psychic distress so much faster? Elisabeth Roudinesco tackles this difficult question, exploring what she sees as a "depressive society": an epidemic of distress addressed only by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs. Far from contesting the efficacy of new medications like Prozac, Zoloft, and Viagra in alleviating the symptoms of any number of mental or nervous conditions, Roudinesco argues that the use of such drugs fails to solve patients' real problems. In the man who takes Viagra without ever wondering why he is suffering from impotence and the woman who is given antidepressants to deal with the loss of a loved one, Roudinesco sees a society obsessed with efficiency and desperate for the quick fix. She argues that "the talking cure" and pharmacology represent not just different approaches to psychiatry, but different worldviews. The rush to treat symptoms is itself symptomatic of an antiseptic and depressive culture in which thought is reduced to the firing of neurons and desire is just a chemical secretion. In contrast, psychoanalysis testifies to human freedom and the power of language.
Download or read book Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives in Psychoanalysis written by Jon Mills and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 2005-05-20 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first concentrated effort to offer a philosophical critique of relational and intersubjective perspectives in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The distinguished group of scholars and clinicians assembled here trace the theoretical underpinnings of relational psychoanalysis, its divergence from traditional psychoanalytic paradigms, and the broader implications for clinical reform and therapeutic practice.
Download or read book The Psychoanalytic Movement written by Ernest Gellner and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is the understanding of how psychoanalysis came to be so generally accepted by the public at large. The author, a sociologist, focuses on reconstructing the system of ideas upon which the theory and practice of psychoanalysis rests.
Download or read book The Foundations of Psychoanalysis written by Adolf Grunbaum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1985-12-16 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect.
Download or read book For the Love of Psychoanalysis written by Elizabeth Rottenberg and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most interesting scholars working at the intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis.” —Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation—in life and in death. Elizabeth Rottenberg examines what emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Part I, “Freuderrida,” announces a non-traditional Freud: a Freud associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and symbolization, but with accidents and chance. Looking at accidents both in and of Freud’s writing, Rottenberg elaborates the unexpected insights that both produce and disrupt our received ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured as a foreign body, as traumatic temporality, as spatial unlocatability, or as the death drive, it points to something neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither psychically nor materially determined. Whereas the close reading of Freud leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing, Part II, “Freuderrida,” addresses itself to what transports us back and limits the openness of our horizon. Here the example par excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating decision. If “Freuderrida” insists on the death penalty, if it returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of Freud’s death drive. “Brilliant, pathbreaking, witty, and lucidly argued” (Elissa Marder, Emory University), this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Freud, Derrida, and the many critical debates to which their thought gives rise.
Download or read book Conundrums written by Jon Mills and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2013 Goethe Award Winner! This is the first book of its kind to offer a sustained critique of contemporary psychoanalytic thought favoring relational, postmodern, and intersubjective perspectives, which largely define American psychoanalysis today. Conundrums turns an eye toward the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary theory; its theoretical relation to traditional psychoanalytic thought; clinical implications for therapeutic practice; political and ethical ramifications of contemporary praxis; and its intersection with points of consilience that emerge from these traditions. Central arguments and criticisms advanced throughout the book focus on operationally defining the key tenets of contemporary perspectives; the seduction and ambiguity of postmodernism; the question of selfhood and agency; illegitimate attacks on classical psychoanalysis; the role of therapeutic excess; contemporary psychoanalytic politics; and the question of consilience between psychoanalysis as a science versus psychoanalysis as part of the humanities. The historical criticisms against psychoanalysis are further explored in the context of the current philosophical-scientific binary that preoccupies the field.
Download or read book Against Understanding Volume 1 written by Bruce Fink and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2014 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize winner for Best Anthology Against Understanding, Volume 1, explores how the process of understanding (which can be seen to be part and parcel of the Lacanian dimension of the imaginary) reduces the unfamiliar to the familiar, transforms the radically other into the same, and renders practitioners deaf to what is actually being said in the analytic setting. Running counter to the received view in virtually all of contemporary psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Bruce Fink argues that the current obsession with understanding – on the patient’s part as well as on the clinician’s – is excessive insofar as the most essential aim of psychoanalytic treatment is change. Using numerous case studies and clinical vignettes, Fink illustrates that the ability of clinicians to detect the unconscious through slips of the tongue, slurred speech, mixed metaphors, and other instances of "misspeaking" is compromised by an emphasis on understanding the why and wherefore of patients’ symptoms and behavior patterns. He shows that the dogged search for conscious knowledge about those symptoms and patterns, by patients and practitioners alike, often thwart rather than foster change, which requires ongoing access to the unconscious and extensive work with it. In this first part of a two-volume collection of papers, many of which have never before appeared in print, Bruce Fink provides ample evidence of the curative powers of speech that operate without the need for any sort of explicit, articulated knowledge. Against Understanding, Volume 1 brings Lacanian theory alive in a way that is unique, demonstrating the therapeutic force of a technique that relies far more on the virtues of speech in the analytic setting than on a conscious realization about anything whatsoever on patients’ parts. This volume will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors.
Download or read book Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan written by Ann Casement and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book was seeded by the first-ever joint Jung–Lacan conference on the notion of the sublime held at Cambridge, England, against the backdrop of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. It provides a fascinating range of in-depth psychological perspectives on aspects of creativity and destruction inherent in the monstrous, awe-inspiring sublime. The chapters include some of the outcrop of academic and clinical papers given at this conference, with the addition of new contributions that explore similarities and differences between Jungian and Lacanian thinking on key topics such as language and linguistics, literature, religion, self and subject, science, mathematics and philosophy. The overall objective of this vitalizing volume is the development and dissemination of new ideas that will be of interest to practising psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and academics in the field, as well as to all those who are captivated by the still-revolutionary thinking of Jung and Lacan.
Download or read book Knowing Nothing Staying Stupid written by Dany Nobus and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative discussion of the dialectics of knowing and not knowing, and how they inform Freudian and Lacanian theory, will be welcomed by practicing psychoanalysts and students of the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959 1960 written by Jacques Lacan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.
Download or read book The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann written by Ingeborg Bachmann and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These two fragments of novels, Ingeborg Bachmann's only untranslated works of fiction, were intended to follow the widely acclaimed Malina in a cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Although Bachmann died before completing them, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann stand on their own, continuing Bachmann's tradition of using language to confront the disease plaguing human relationships. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted upon the living from outside and from within, through history, politics, religion, family, gender relations, and the self.Bachmann's allegiance to the twin muses of memory and history, as well as her perception of fascism as not being limited to the context of the war but also existing within the intimate relations of everyday life between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, psychiatrists and patients' are supremely evident in The Book of Franza. Here, Bachmann follows a woman who escapes from a sanitorium and, after years of silence, sends her brother a cryptic telegram. Rightly suspecting that she has fled her sadistic husband -- a renowned Austrian psychiatrist whose intimate relations have merged with his studies of concentration camps -- her brother finds her in their childhood home. Together they travel to Egypt, where Franza slowly begins to regain her bearings. But Franza's desire to cleanse herself by journeying into the heart of the desert's void ends in tragedy, as she becomes the victim of a horrible act of violence.Unlike Franza, who attempts to flee her past but fails, the heroine of Requiem for Fanny Goldmann makes no attempt to escape her history. Thisnovel tells of the demise of a Viennese actress who is manipulated by a younger, ambitious playwright to advance his career. Deception follows disloyalty; the final treachery comes when the playwright portrays her in a novel, which secures his fame and, in Fanny's eyes, robs her of her future. Caught in a perpetual stasis, Fanny suffers in total obscurity, as her present is stolen from her as well.Whether analyzing the place where the self begins and the power of history ends or the ways in which women are forced to be complicit in their mistreatment at the hands of men, Bachmann's critical approach to the human psyche is unparalleled. Mesmerizing and profound, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann constitute the final evidence that Ingeborg Bachmann is the most important female German-language writer of the postwar period.
Download or read book Law and the Unconscious written by Anne C. Dailey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we bring the law into line with people's psychological experience? How can psychoanalysis help us understand irrational actions and bad choices? Our legal system relies on the idea that people act reasonably and of their own free will, yet some still commit crimes with a high likelihood of being caught, sign obviously one-sided contracts, or violate their own moral codes--behavior many would call fundamentally irrational. Anne Dailey shows that a psychoanalytic perspective grounded in solid clinical work can bring the law into line with the reality of psychological experience. Approaching contemporary legal debates with fresh insights, this original and powerful critique sheds new light on issues of overriding social importance, including false confessions, sexual consent, threats of violence, and criminal responsibility. By challenging basic legal assumptions with a nuanced and humane perspective, Dailey shows how psychoanalysis can further our legal system's highest ideals of individual fairness and systemic justice.
Download or read book Becoming Freud written by Adam Phillips and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-time editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud offers a fresh look at the father of psychoanalysis.
