Psychoanalysis And The Politics Of The Family The Crisis Of Initiation

Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Family aims to raise a sophisticated and highly accessible debate around the family, self-making and the political and cultural implications of liberation. The text proposes a new way to read the Lacanian theory of Oedipus and through this reading resituate a series of important political and theoretical debates that have concerned intellectual life over the last forty years. It is written with an accessible style so that both specialists in Lacanian and Marxist theory and a broader cross-section of readers interested in understanding the implications of debates across populist and Marxist perspectives that have occupied the global left since the 2008 economic crash. The text aims to resituate the way theories of emancipation and liberation are theorized from a distinctive psychoanalytic and Lacanian point of view. In resituating the infamous “Oedipus complex” in a new light, the text re-opens a series of debates with important theoretical interlocutors, including the influential American historian and psychoanalytic thinker Christopher Lasch, whose thought has witnessed a significant renaissance of interest today, to the staunch critic of Freud and Lacan, René Girard, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their widely read Anti-Oedipus series that disputes the Freudian and Lacanian notions of Oedipus.

In this issue, you will find three peer-reviewed articles and two forum essays. Adrien A. P. Chauvet’s “Cosmographical readings of the Qurʾan” is a trained physicist’s probing, multidisciplinary inquiry about a topic of great interest to the recent generations of Muslims about the compatibility of Islam and science, and about the obvious exuberance Muslims feel when some modern discoveries point to the Qurʾanic truth. As a trained physicist, he wonders whether and how we can be sure that the scientific paradigms endorsed today will endure, and therefore, more pertinently, “how can the text stay scientifically relevant across the ages, while science itself is evolving?” It thus advances the scholarship on the scriptures’ relevance to past and present scientific paradigms, reviewing multiple ancient cosmographical paradigms (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebraic, Greek, Christian, Zoroastrian and Manichean) as well as modern ones, while being grounded in Islamic theology and philosophy of science. It manages to advance a novel thesis in the growing field of Islam and science, advocating for a multiplicity of correspondences between both past and modern scientific paradigms, even if these paradigms conflict with one another.

From its roots in the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to its branches in contemporary political and social movements, Islam has always been concerned with the question of social justice. The promise of a just order on earth has motivated both the reflections of the community of scholars and the actions of Muslims who have striven to realize it within their societies. Despite the disappointments that history has often delivered, the hope for justice remains undimmed as does the struggle to achieve it today. This concise volume focuses on some of the ways that the theme of justice is explored in emerging currents of Islamic thought. Chapters discuss new theological and ethical proposals in the light of contemporary philosophical developments; ideas of gender justice that provoke a reformist challenge to the received tradition; and regional contexts, such as Turkey, Iran and Japan, in which the question of Islam’s relationship to justice is sharpened by the particularities of history and locale. The contributions to this collection raise the prospect that if justice can be imagined more perfectly as an Islamic ideal, perhaps it can be brought into reality.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers’ hands is a playful exploration of how people’s desires, fantasies, and emotions shape political events and social phenomena. It highlights the mythical sources of today’s political projects, the power of political imagination, and the function of symbolism in political thought. Eszter Salgó argues that the driving force for the formation of political communities is fantasy – ‘illusions’ in a Winnicottian sense, ‘phantasies’ in a Lacanian sense, ‘phantoms’ as described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and ‘dreams’ as interpreted by Sándor Ferenczi. She introduces the metaphor of the ‘fantastic family’ as a symbolic representation of political communities, both to reflect on people’s deeply felt desire to find in public life the resolution, love, and wholeness of early childhood, and to unveil the political elite’s readiness to don the mask of the ‘ideal parent’. The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book explores the theories of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan: the matrimony on the stage of politics between the ‘good-enough mother’ and the Symbolic Father which inaugurates the story of democracy’s ‘fantastic family’. The second part presents the ‘fantastic families’ of selected countries such as Hungary, Italy, and the world community to explain the proliferation of cosmogony projects, and to document the failure of the political elites to offer a satisfactory performance of their maternal and paternal functions. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers’ hands presents a new way of considering the art of politics, based on the understanding that people perceive reality through imagination and unconscious fantasy. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, and academics from across the disciplines of politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and art.

What is the relationship between internal states of psychological crisis and features of the external world? This book explores that question, bringing psychoanalytic thinking and practice to bear on the more public spheres of culture and politics.

Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family. A psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Laing worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. His books include The Self and Others and The Politics of Experience.

In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.

To what extent are the concepts of fatherhood and family, as proposed by Sigmund Freud, still valid? Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family traces the development of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and discusses his ideas in the context of recent psychoanalytic work, new sociological data, and theoretical explorations on gender and diversity. Contributors include representatives from many academic disciplines, as well as practicing psychoanalysts who reflect on their experience with patients. Their exciting essays break new ground in defining who a father is—and what a father may be.