THE STORY: FREUD'S LAST SESSION centers on legendary psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud who invites the young, rising Oxford Don C.S. Lewis to his home in London. On the day England enters World War Two, Freud and Lewis clash about love, sex, the exis
Compares and contrasts the beliefs of two famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, on topics ranging from the existence of God and morality to pain and suffering.
Imagine growing up smart, ambitious, and queer in a home where your father Sigmund Freud thinks that women should aspire to be wives and calls lesbianism a gateway to mental illness. He also says that lesbianism is always caused by the father, and is usually curable by psychoanalysis. Then he analyzes you. Ultimately Anna Freud loved Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (heir to the Tiffany fortune) for 54 years. They raised a family together and became psychoanalysts in their own right, specializing in work with children. But first Anna had to navigate childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in a famous family where her kind of romantic longings were considered dangerous. What was it like to grow up the lesbian daughter of “the great Sigmund Freud”? Aside from Anna’s sexuality and from her father’s intrusive psychoanalysis of her, what were the Freud family's most closely closeted skeletons? What is it about the birth of psychoanalysis that even today's psychoanalysts would prefer to keep secret? How did Anna defy her father so thoroughly while continuing to love him and learn from him? Weaving a grand tale out of a pile of crazy facts, Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story lets the pioneering child psychologist freely examine the forces that shaped her life.
The Imprinted Brain sets out a radical new theory of the mind and mental illness based on the recent discovery of genomic imprinting. Imprinted genes are those from one parent that, in that parent's interest, are expressed in an offspring rather than the diametrically opposed genes from the other parent. For example, a higher birth weight may represent the dominance of the father's genes in leading to a healthy child, whereas a lower birth weight is beneficial to the mother's immediate wellbeing, and the imprint of the mother's genes will result in a smaller baby. According to this view, a win for the father's genes may result in autism, whereas one for the mother's may result in psychosis. A state of equilibrium - normality - is the most likely outcome, with a no-win situation of balanced expression. Imprinted genes typically produce symptoms that are opposites of each other, and the author uses psychiatric case material to show how many of the symptoms of psychosis can be shown to be the mental mirror-images of those of autism. Combining psychiatry with insights from modern genetics and cognitive science, Christopher Badcock explains the fascinating imprinted brain theory to the reader in a thorough but accessible way. This new theory casts some intriguing new light on other topics as diverse as the nature of genius, the appeal of detective fiction, and the successes - and failures - of psychoanalysis. This thought-provoking book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in autism, psychiatry, cognitive science or psychology in general.
Over the last few decades, vibrant debates regarding post-secularism have found inspiration and provocation in the works of Sigmund Freud. A new interest in the interconnection of psychoanalysis, religion and political theory has emerged, allowing Freud’s illuminating examination of the religious and mystical practices in “Obsessive Neurosis and Religious Practices,” and the exegesis of the origins of ethics in religion in Totem and Taboo, to gain currency in recent debates on modernity. In that context, the pivotal role of Freud’s masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism, is widely recognized. Freud and Monotheism brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research at the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, the contributors hail from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, Jewish studies and psychoanalysis. Jan Assmann and Richard Bernstein, whose books pioneered the earlier debate that initiated the Freud and Moses discourse, seize the opportunity to revisit and revise their groundbreaking work. Gabriele Schwab, Gilad Sharvit, Karen Feldman, and Yael Segalovitz engage with the idiosyncratic, eccentric and fertile nature of the book as a Spӓtstil, and explore radical interpretations of Freud’s literary practice, theory of religion and therapeutic practice. Ronald Hendel offers an alternative history for the Mosaic discourse within the biblical text, Catherine Malabou reconnects Freud’s theory of psychic phylogenesis in Moses and Monotheism to new findings in modern biology and Willi Goetschel relocates Freud in the tradition of works on history that begins with Heine, while Joel Whitebook offers important criticisms of Freud’s main argument about the advance in intellectuality that Freud attributes to Judaism.
Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father's wishes and pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers in the burgeoning field of psychiatry. But when a female patient at the doctors' Austrian sanatorium becomes dangerously ill, the two men's conflicting diagnosis threatens to divide them--and to undermine all their professional achievements. From the bestselling author of Birdsong comes this masterful novel that ventures to answer challenging questions of consciousness and science, and what it means to be human.
THE STORY: It is the night of their high-school graduation and Myst and Grouper, two bright, well-to-do teenagers, have driven to the local lovers leap for a private celebration. Myst is seventeen, and the daughter of a fading rock star of dubious
An appealing and intelligent eighteen-year-old girl to whom Freud gives the pseudonym "Dora" is the subject of a case history that has all the intrigue and unexpected twists of a first-rate detective novel. Freud pursues the secrets of Dora's psyche by using as clues her nervous mannerisms, her own reports on the peculiarities of her family, and the content of her dreams. The personalities involved in Dora's disturbed emotional life were, in their own ways, as complex as she: an obsessive mother, an adulterous father, her father's mistress, Frau K., and Frau K.'s husband, who had made amorous advances toward Dora. Faced with the odd behavior of her family and friends, and unable to confront her own forbidden sexual desires, Dora falls into the destructive pattern of a powerful hysteria. in this influential and provocative case history, Freud uses all his analytic genius and literary skill to reveal Dora's inner life and explain the motives behind her fixation on her father's mistress. -- from back cover.
In this unusual and much-needed reappraisal of Freud's clinical technique, M. Guy Thompson challenges the conventional notion that psychoanalysis promotes relief from suffering and replaces it with a more radical assertion, that psychoanalysis seeks to mend our relationship with the real that has been fractured by our avoidance of the same. Thompson suggests that, while avoiding reality may help to relieve our experience of suffering, this short-term solution inevitably leads to a split in our existence. M. Guy Thompson forcefully disagrees with the recent trend that dismisses Freud as an historical figure who is out of step with the times. He argues, instead, for a return to the forgotten Freud, a man inherently philosophical and rooted in a Greek preoccupation with the nature of truth, ethics, the purpose of life and our relationship with reality. Thompson's argument is situated in a stunning re-reading of Freud's technical papers, including a new evaluation of his analyses of Dora and the Rat Man in the context of Heidegger's understanding of truth. In this remarkable examination of Freud's technical recommendations, M. Guy Thompson explains how psychoanalysis was originally designed to re-acquaint us with realities we had abandoned by encountering them in the contest of the analytic experience. This provocative examination of Freud's conception of psychoanalysis reveals a more personal Freud than we had previously supposed, one that is more humanistic and real.