Psychoanalysis And Culture At The Millennium

This outstanding collection of essays explores the pervasive influence of psychoanalysis on culture and thought in the late twentieth century. Eminent contributors representing the fields of philosophy, history, anthropology, literature, art history, and psychoanalysis examine the scope and variety of Sigmund Freud's impact on the modern intellectual climate. They show how Freud and others who followed him have profoundly expanded our understanding of human nature. The contributors discuss the psychoanalytic value of picture books for the young child; the historical and social meanings of perversion; the gendered cultural geography of Freud's mind; current issues of nationalism; and a variety of other topics that reveal both the diversity and the unity of psychoanalysis at the approach of a new millennium.

Since its founding one hundred years ago psychoanalysis has been the focus of contention, controversy, and debate. What has been clear despite all controversies is that the psychoanalytic tradition has created and inspired special modes of critical thinking which have been used to examine both human behavior and corresponding social ideologies. Psychoanalysis, Identity, and Ideology presents papers from a historic two day conference of leading Israeli, Palestinian, and European psychologists held in June of 1999. Sensitive professional and historical dilemmas are discussed with refreshing openness. This collection embodies the tradition of critical thinking applied to ideologies and identities, Zionism in particular, through a non-exclusive prism of psychoanalytic traditions.

Uses psychoanalysis to reconsider cultural studies with a focus on wholeness and integration.

Why do we continue to desire psychoanalysis? What can this desire contribute to a vital cultural criticism? In Desire of the Analysts, these and other questions are addressed by leading contributors from a variety of fields, including Sharon Nell, Deneen Senasi, Kaja Silverman, Henry Sussman, Domietta Torlasco, Pierre Zoberman, and Slavoj Zðizûek. They argue for the urgency of a psychoanalytic criticism that is at once intellectually vibrant, politically engaged, and uniquely able to illuminate the psychic motivations and gratifications underlying a range of contemporary cultural phenomena. These phenomena include nationalistic violence, the formation of normative masculinity, the psychic appeal of domination and submission, and the place of the "queer" desire in counterhegemonic practices. The contributors explore the role of psychoanalysis in shaping the future of cultural criticism; elaborate on innovative ways to approach group dynamics from a psychoanalytic perspective; rethink psychoanalytic understandings of authorship; and offer original interpretations of the intersections between gender, sexuality, and domination. Desire of the Analysts demonstrates that psychoanalysis remains an indispensable resource for critiquing our contemporary condition.

This book offers a new account of Freud’s work by reading him as the social theorist and philosopher he always aspired to be, and not as the medical scientist he publicly claimed to be. In doing so, the author demonstrates that’s Freud’s social, moral, and cultural thought constitutes the core of his life’s work as a theorist, and is the thread that binds his voluminous writings together: from his earliest essays on the neuroses, to his foundational writings on dreams and sexuality, and to his far-ranging reflections on art, religion, and the dynamics of culture. Returning to the fundamental questions and concerns that animate Freud’s work - the nature of evil; the origins of religion, morality, and tradition; and the looming threat of resurgent barbarism - Freud as a Social and Cultural Theorist provides the first systematic re-examination of Freud’s social and cultural thought in more than a generation. As such, it will be of interest to social and cultural theorists, social philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and those with interests in psychoanalysis and its origins.

From August 29 to September 21, 1909, Sigmund Freud visited the United States, where he gave five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This volume brings together a stunning gallery of leading historians of psychoanalysis and of American culture to consider the broad history of psychoanalysis in America and to reflect on what has happened to Freud’s legacy in the United States in the century since his visit. There has been a flood of recent scholarship on Freud’s life and on the European and world history of psychoanalysis, but historians have produced relatively little on the proliferation of psychoanalytic thinking in the United States, where Freud’s work had monumental intellectual and social impact. The essays in After Freud Left provide readers with insights and perspectives to help them understand the uniqueness of Americans’ psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the forms in which the legacy of Freud remains active in the United States in the twenty-first century. After Freud Left will be essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American history, general intellectual and cultural history, and psychology and psychiatry.

This comprehensive book provides an indispensable introduction to the most significant figures in contemporary social theory. Grounded strongly in the European tradition, the profiles include Michel Foucault, J[um]urgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Martin Heidegger, Frederic Jameson, Richard Rorty, Nancy Chodorow, Anthony Giddens, Stuart Hall, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway. In guiding students through the key figures in an accessible and authoritative fashion, the book provides detailed accounts of the development of the work of major social theorists and charts the relationship between different traditions of social, cultural and political thought.