Self Analysis

First Published in 1999. Psychoanalysis first developed as a method of therapy in the strict medical sense. Freud had discovered that certain circumscribed disorders that have no discernible organic basis-such as hysterical convulsions, phobias, depressions, drug addictions, functional stomach upsets --can be cured by uncovering the unconscious factors that underlie them. In the course of time disturbances of this kind were summarily called neurotic. Therefore humility as well as hope is required in any discussion of the possibility of psychoanalytic self-examination. It is the object of this book to raise this question seriously, with all due consideration for the difficulties involved.

Self-Analysis is a fascinating reprise on the mode of disciplined self-inquiry that gave rise to psychoanalysis. From Freud's pioneering self-analytic efforts onward, self-analysis has been central to psychoanalytic training and psychoanalytic practice. Yet, only in recent years have analysts turned their attention to this wellspring of Freud's creation. The contributors to Self-Analysis represent diverse theoretical perspectives, but they share a common appreciation of the importance of self-analysis to the analytic endeavor. Their papers encompass systematic inquiries into the capacity for self-analysis, examples of self-analysis as an aspect of clinical work, and personal reflections on the role of self-analysis in professional growth. Among the questions explored: What do we mean by self-analysis? To what extent and under what conditions is self-analysis possible? How does it differ from ordinary introspection? What are the developmental antecedents of the capacity for self-analysis? What is the role of the "other" in self-analysis? What are the relationships among self-analysis, writing, and creativity? As Barron observes, the contributors to the book "grapple with the formidable ambiguities of self-analysis without either idealizing or devaluing its potential." What emerges from their effort is not only an illuminating window into the psychoanalyst's subjectivity as a fact of clinical life, but a far-reaching exemplification of the ways in which self-understanding is always a constitutive part of our understanding of others.

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Levi-Strauss - a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu's lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu's theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time - including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir - as well as Bourdieu's own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria.

What makes one reader look for issues of social conformity in Kafka's Metamorphosis while another concentrates on the relationship between Gregor Samsa and his father? Self-Analysis in Literary Study investigates how the psychoanalytic self-analysis enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of literature as well as themselves. In the past scholars have largely ignored self-analysis as an aid to approaching literature. The contributors in Self-Analysis in Literary Study boldly explore how the psyche affects intellectual intellectual discovery in the realm of applied psychoanalysis. Jeffrey Berman confronts a close friend's suicide through Camus and his student's diaries, kept for an English class. Language, family history, and an attachment to Kafka are addressed in David Bleich's essay. Barbara Ann Schapiro writes of her attraction to Virginia Woolf during her emotional senior year of college. Other essayists include Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Norman N. Holland, Bernard J. Paris, Steven Rosen, and Michael Steig. Written for both scholars in the fields of psychology and literature and for a general audience intrigued by self- analysis as a tool for gaining insight, Self-Analysis in Literary Study answers traditional questions about literature and raises challenging new ones.

The purification program, based on teachings by the founder of the Church of Scientology and author of the best seller Dianetics, describes a detoxification regimen of running, saunas, natural oils, and specific vitamins and minerals.