Rescuing Psychoanalysis From Freud And Other Essays In Re Vision

In his latest groundbreaking book, the author examines the history of psychoanalysis from a resolutely independent perspective. At once spellbinding case histories and meticulously crafted gems of scholarship, Rudnytsky's essays are "re-visions" in that each sheds fresh light on its subject but they are also avowedly "revisionist" in their scepticism towards all forms of psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Beginning with a judicious reappraisal of Freud and ranging in scope from King Lear to contemporary neuroscience, the author treats in depth the lives and work of Ferenczi, Jung, Stekel, Winnicott, Coltart, and Little, each of whom sought to "rescue psychoanalysis" by summoning it to live up to its highest ideals.

Theories and Practices of Psychoanalysis in Central Europe explores the close relationship between psychoanalysis, psycho-medical discourses, literature, and the visual arts of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Central Europe. Agnieszka Sobolewska addresses the issue of theories and practices of psychoanalysis in Central Europe and the need to undertake interdisciplinary reflection on the specificity of psychoanalytic literary genres and fin-de-siècle psycho-medical discourses. With a focus on the circulation of Freudianism in the territories of present-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany, the book considers the creative transformations that psychoanalytic thought underwent in these countries and reflects on the specificity of psychoanalytic literary genres and the pivotal role of lifewriting genres in the psychoanalytic movement. Sobolewska’s work both fills a visible gap in research on the history of psychoanalysis in Central Europe before the outbreak of World War II and offers the first insightful analysis of the role of life writing in the development of psychoanalytic thought. Theories and Practices of Psychoanalysis in Central Europe will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training as well as scholars of the history of psychoanalysis, the history of psychology, literature, cultural anthropology, and modernism.

Cesare Romano revisits Dora's clinical case in light of Freud's own seduction theory. His central thesis is that Freud failed to follow through with his initial proposition of confirming his theories on the traumatic aetiology of hysteria. He also suggests a new dating for the duration of Dora's therapy, placing the beginning of the analysis within the context of Freud's concurrent and recent life events. A detailed analysis of Dora's first dream shows that Freud did not go back to Dora's first infantile traumas, but stopped instead at the period of her infantile masturbation. In analysing this dream, Romano's theory begins to take shape around the idea that Dora suffered an early trauma: possibly, a sexual abuse inflicted by her father. Drawing on Ferenczi, the author uses the notion of the 'traumatolytic function of the dream' to show that Dora, through her two dreams, was elaborating her early sexual trauma. Dora's analysis is investigated alongside what was happening in Freud's life at the time of the therapy.

A multidisciplinary analysis of the Freud-Jung wars that still rage on the discursive territory of religion.

In 1921, a young female doctor started analysis with Sigmund Freud. In a diary, she recorded what moved her. The present volume not only contains a full translation of these records, but also collects four essays by two psychoanalysts and two analytical historians who take their cue from the young doctor's notes to think about Freud and his methods. The discovery of the diary marks a small sensation for the history of social science. Three factors make the document unique: first, it records not a training analysis, but the analysis of an actual patient, second, the analysis took place before Freud fell ill with cancer, and third, the analysand obviously noted down what was said in the practice word by word.

A moody Freud posed against a background of holiday pictures pinned to a wall; or lurking at the very edge of a large family group; or lost in a crowd of nineteenth-century scientists. These snapshots or posed portraits not only tell stories, they also carry a specific emotional charge. The earlier essays in this book follow traces of Freud's early years through the evidence of such album photographs; the later essays use them to reconstruct the stories of various family members. An unknown photo of his half-brother Emanuel initiates an investigation into the Manchester Freuds. An identity photo of his daughter Anna, and the document to which it is attached, throw light on the critical final days of her trip to England in 1914. A faded idyllic print of children playing evolves into a discussion of Ernst Freud's luck and childhood. The suicide of Anna's artist cousin, Tom Seidmann Freud, emerges from a snap of her infant daughter Angela.

An influential New York salon host and perpetual seeker of meaning, Mabel Dodge entered psychoanalysis in 1916 with A.A. Brill, the first American psychoanalyst, continuing until she moved to New Mexico in December 1917. In Taos, she met Antonio Luhan, the Pueblo Indian who became her fourth husband in 1923, a radical union that forever altered her turbulent life. From the beginning of her analysis until 1944, Mabel wrote to Brill and he replied, yielding 122 letters. No other such extensive, elaborate written conversations exist between patient and analyst. This book presents a narrative organized around these letters, featuring the turmoil in Mabel's relationships with others, most notably D. H. Lawrence, as well as her extraordinarily candid memoirs, both published and unpublished, inspired by Brill's fierce insistence upon constructive outlets. In her correspondence, as in life, Mabel was despairing, insightful, insecure, and talented, reporting to Brill her emotional states, seeking his advice. With warmth and frankness, he offered opinions, affection, and interpretations.

This book provides the reader with rich evidence of the very contemporaneity of Karl Abraham, reminding the reader of his unique clinical contributions to such diverse areas of concentration as the psychoses, depression, and the pre-oedipal.