Psychology After Psychoanalysis

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Psychoanalysis, the fourth volume in the series, is about the impact of psychoanalysis on critical debates in psychology. It addresses three central questions: Why is psychoanalysis re-emerging within psychology? How can psychoanalytic ideas inform psychosocial research? How does psychoanalysis explain the relation between the individual and society? International in scope, the book includes a clear account of psychoanalysis, and the different varieties of the approach that are at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. It explores the status of psychoanalysis as a series of concepts and as a methodology, and shows how its clinical practice is crucial to the way that it operates now in an academic context. In doing so, the book sheds light on the arguments currently occurring inside psychoanalysis, with discussion of its relation to critical psychology, psychosocial research, the health professions, culture and social theory. Parker shows how psychoanalysis rests on a notion of ‘method’ that is very different from mainstream psychology, and unravels the implications of this difference. Early chapters examine the lines of debate between various psychoanalytical traditions, and show how critical psychology challenges the assumptions about human nature and subjectivity made in conventional psychoanalysis. Later chapters introduce the methodological device of ‘transference’ and explore how psychoanalysis may be utilized as a resource to review key questions of human culture. Psychology After Psychoanalysis is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psychosocial studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research.

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Lacan is the sixth volume in the series and addresses three central questions: Why is Lacanian psychoanalysis re-emerging in mainstream contemporary psychology? What is original in this account of the human subject? What implications does Lacanian psychoanalysis have for psychology? This book introduces Lacan’s influential ideas about clinical psychoanalysis and contemporary global culture to a new generation of psychologists. The chapters cover a number of key themes including conceptions of the human subject within psychology, the uses of psychoanalysis in qualitative research, different conceptions of ethics within psychology, and the impact of cyberspace on human subjectivity. The book also explores key debates currently occurring in Lacanian psychoanalysis, with discussion of culture, discourse, identification, sexuality and the challenge to mainstream notions of normality and abnormality. Psychology After Lacan is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psycho-social studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

2020 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) book award winner! In a radically powerful interpretation of the human condition, this book redefines the discipline of psychoanalysis by examining its fundamental assumptions about the unconscious mind, the nature of personal history, our sexualities, and the significance of the "Oedipus Complex". With striking originality, Barratt explains the psychoanalytic way of exploring our inner realities, and criticizes many of the schools of "psychoanalytic psychotherapy" that emerged and prospered during the 20th century. In 1912, Sigmund Freud formed a "Secret Committee", charged with the task of protecting and advancing his discoveries. In this book, Barratt argues both that this was a major mistake, making the discipline more like a religious organization than a science, and that this continues to infuse psychoanalytic institutes today. What is Psychoanalysis? takes each of the four "fundamental concepts" that Freud himself said were the cornerstones of his science of healing, and offers a fresh and detailed re-examination of their contemporary importance. Barratt's analysis demonstrates how the profound work, as well as the playfulness, of psychoanalysis, provides us with a critique of the ideologies that support oppression and exploitation on the social level. It will be of interest to advanced students of clinical psychology or philosophy, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Addressing the art and science of psychodynamic treatment, Nancy McWilliams distills the essential principles of clinical practice, including effective listening and talking; transference and countertransference; emotional safety; and an empathic, attuned attitude toward the patient. The book describes the values, assumptions, and clinical and research findings that guide the psychoanalytic enterprise, and shows how to integrate elements of other theoretical perspectives. It discusses the phases of treatment and covers such neglected topics as educating the client about the therapeutic process, handling complex challenges to boundaries, and attending to self-care. Presenting complex information in personal, nontechnical language enriched by in-depth clinical vignettes, this is an essential psychoanalytic work and training text for therapists.

This book draws on a number of Freud's lesser-known works to explore psychoanalytic perspectives on memory, mourning and repetition. It is remarkable that Freud in his speculations on the human psyche often took his point of departure in an insignificant detail. It might be a lapse of memory or a detail in a piece of art. From here he uncovered the many layers of the psyche, its complex structure and the processing of meaning right to the limit of understanding. At this point Freud ́s exploration encountered the unknown, an internal outland as difficult to acknowledge as the external reality. Freud did not invent the unconscious but he demonstrated how it works. The unconscious according to Freud does not exist, but insists on making itself visible. The eleven essays in this book draw a picture of the critical humanistic thinking so characteristic of Freud. His concepts and suppositions were the result of many years’ speculations, based on observation, experience and ideas, and although they are marked by the time and culture from which they emerged, they demonstrate a revolutionary knowledge of the psyche transcending the knowledge of his time. In her reading of the chosen texts the author has chosen the position of a contemporary interpretation. Examining how psychoanalytic work on the topics of memory, mourning and repetition has changed since Freud and how these themes remain of crucial importance in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, this book intersperses theory with clinical practice. It will be of great interest to training and practicing psychoanalysts, as well as scholars of art, literature and sociology.

The conflict and dissociation between the Body and the Mind have determinant implications in the context of our current clinical practice, and are an important source of internal and relational disturbances. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis proposes the concept as a new hypothesis, different from traumatic dissociation or states of splitting. This approach opens the door to a clinical confrontation with extreme forms of mental disturbance, such as psychosis or borderline disorders, and strengthens the relational power of the analytic encounter, through a focus on the internal sensory/emotional axis in both analyst and analysand. The book details this importance of the analyst’s intrasubjective relationship with the analysand in constructing new developmental horizons, starting from the body-mind exchange of the two participants. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis will be of use to students, beginners in psychotherapy, mental health practitioners and seasoned psychoanalysts.

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker, and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Deconstruction is the second volume in the series and addresses three important questions: What is ‘deconstruction’ and how does it apply to psychology? How does deconstruction radicalize social constructionist approaches in psychology? What is the future for radical conceptual and empirical research? The book provides a clear account of deconstruction, and the different varieties of this approach at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. In the opening chapters Parker describes the challenge to underlying assumptions of ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’ within psychology that deconstruction poses, and its implications for three key concepts: humanism, interpretation and reflexivity. Subsequent chapters introduce several lines of debate, and discuss their relation to mainstream axioms such as ‘psychopathology’, ‘diagnosis’ and ‘psychotherapy’, and alternative approaches like qualitative research, humanistic psychology and discourse analysis. Together, the chapters in this book show how, via a process of ‘erasure’, deconstructive approaches question fundamental assumptions made about language and reality, the self and the social world. By demonstrating the application of deconstruction to different areas of psychology, it also seeks to provide a ‘social reconstruction’ of psychological research. Psychology After Deconstruction is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and for discourse analysts of different traditions. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within deconstruction to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

This collection of essays at the juncture between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural studies questions the future of a discipline which has emerged from the intimate experience of therapy to exert a powerful hold over contemporary culture.