Freud Upside Down

This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.

This book reviews and rejects fundamental assumptions made by traditional psychotherapists concerning the nature of law, suffering, agency, truth, the human being, and change. The book then begins to provide alternative foundations, drawn from the gospel of Jesus Chrsit, that will guide explanations of how counseling works.

Science’s conventional understanding of environment as an inert material resource underlies our unwillingness to acknowledge the military-industrial role in ongoing ecological catastrophes. In a crucial challenge to modern science’s exclusive attachment to materialist premises, Bateson reframed culture, psychology, biology, and evolution in terms of feedback and communication, fundamentally altering perception of our relationship with nature. This intellectual biography covers the whole trajectory of Bateson’s career, from his first anthropological work alongside Margaret Mead through the continuing relevance of his late forays into biosemiotics. Harries-Jones shows how the sum of Bateson’s thinking across numerous fields turns our notions of causality upside down, providing a moral divide between sustainable creativity and our current biocide.

P. Adams Sitney, the leading critic of personal and experimental cinema in America, picks up where he left off in his landmark book, Visionary Film. This all new work offers in-depth analysis of eleven central filmmakers of the American avant-garde cinema, drawing on the aesthetic articulated by Emerson and theorized by John Cage, Charles Olson, and Gertrude Stein.

In 1958, the US director John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a scenario for a film about Sigmund Freud. Huston wanted Sartre to concentrate on the conflict-ridden period of Freud’s life when he abandoned hypnosis and invented psychoanalysis. The Freud Scenario, discovered in Sartre’s papers after his death, is the result—a deft portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that would prove a turning point in twentieth-century thought. Sartre did not regard this script as a diversion from his larger intellectual project. Freud’s preoccupations with female hysteria and the father relationship touched on major themes in his own work, and Loser Wins, The Family Idiot and Words, some of Sartre’s most celebrated publications, are all in some way derived from his work for Huston. Written for a Hollywood audience, The Freud Scenario demonstrates that, in addition to a towering intellect, Sartre enjoyed a genuine popular touch. Already widely acclaimed in France, The Freud Scenario stands as a valuable testament to two of the most influential minds in modern history.

Freud Revisited sees Freud as one of the last great exponents of Enlightenment rationalism; yet he also forms part of modernism - which shattered traditional forms in art - and he leads forward to certain postmodern ideas. The book examines some of Freud's themes which remain challenging and relevant today - for example, psychoanalysis as a form of narrative-construction, the creative nature of memory, the revolutionary nature of the knowledge gained through psychotherapy, and the unconscious, which subverts any notion of stable human identity.

In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of "political Freudianism," he shows how twentieth-century radicals, activists, and intellectuals used psychoanalytic ideas to probe consumer capitalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy. He also underscores the continuing influence and critical potential of those ideas in the transformed landscape of the present. Zaretsky's conception of political Freudianism unites the two overarching themes of the last century—totalitarianism and consumerism—in a single framework. He finds that theories of mass psychology and the unconscious were central to the study of fascism and the Holocaust; to African American radical thought, particularly the struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery; to the rebellions of the 1960s; and to the feminism and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Nor did the influence of political Freud end when the era of Freud bashing began. Rather, Zaretsky proves that political Freudianism is alive today in cultural studies, the study of memory, theories of trauma, postcolonial thought, film, media and computer studies, evolutionary theory and even economics.