Psychoanalysis and the Future of Global Politics
Psychoanalysis and the Future of Global Politics

Author: Robert Samuels

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13: 3031411668

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This book offers a unique approach by using psychoanalytic theory to explain how we can resolve the most important issues facing the world today and in the future. One of my main arguments is that we need to move beyond national politics in order to provide global solutions to global problems. However, there is a misplaced fear concerning global governance, and much of this phobia is derived from a misunderstanding of history and human psychology. Not only do we have to learn to give up our idealized investment in nations and nationalism, but we also have to move beyond seeing the world from the perspective of a victim fantasy. Since we often repress real signs of global progress, we experience the global present and the future in negative ways. To reverse this perspective, we need to first understand the incredible progress humans have made in the last two hundred years, but we also should not ignore the real threats we face.

Psychoanalysis and the Global
Psychoanalysis and the Global

Author: Ilan Kapoor

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1496208595

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Psychoanalysis and the GlObal is about the hole at the heart of the "glObal," meaning the instability and indecipherability that lies at the hub of globalization. The contributors use psychoanalysis to expose the unconscious desires, excesses, and antagonisms that accompany the world of economic flows, cultural circulation, and sociopolitical change. Unlike the mainstream discourse of globalization, which most often assumes unencumbered movement across borders, these contributors uncover what Lacan calls "the Real" of the glObal--its rifts, gaps, exceptions, and contradictions. Psychoanalysis and the GlObal adopts a psychoanalytic lens to highlight the unconscious circuits of enjoyment, racism, and anxiety that trouble, if not undermine, globalization's economic, cultural, and environmental goals or gains. The contributors interrogate how unconscious desires and drives are externalized in our increasingly globalizing world: the ways in which traumas and emotional conflicts are integral to the disjunctures, homogeneities, and contingencies of global interactions; how social passions are manifested and materialized in political economy as much as in climate change, urban architecture, refugee and gender politics, or the growth of neo-populism; and how the unconscious serves as a basis for the rise and breakdown of popular movements against authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization. Psychoanalysis and the GlObal represents a major step forward in understanding globalization and also in extending the range and power of psychoanalytic critiques in, and of, geography.

Progress in Psychoanalysis
Progress in Psychoanalysis

Author: Steven D. Axelrod

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-11

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1351103970

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Is psychoanalysis in decline? Has its understanding of the human condition been marginalized? Have its clinical methods been eclipsed by more short-term, problem-oriented approaches? Is psychoanalysis unable (or unwilling) to address key contemporary issues and concerns? With contributors internationally recognized for their scholarship, Progress in Psychoanalysis: Envisioning the Future of the Profession offers both an analysis of how the culture of psychoanalysis has contributed to the profession’s current dilemmas and a description of the progressive trends taking form within the contemporary scene. Through a broad and rigorous examination of the psychoanalytic landscape, this book highlights the profession’s very real progress and describes a vision for its increased relevance. It shows how psychoanalysis can offer unparalleled value to the public. Economic, political, and cultural factors have contributed to the marginalization of psychoanalysis over the past 30 years. But the profession’s internal rigidity, divisiveness, and strong adherence to tradition have left it unable to adapt to change and to innovate in the ways needed to remain relevant. The contributors to this book are prominent practitioners, theoreticians, researchers, and educators who offer cogent analysis of the culture of psychoanalysis and show how the profession’s foundation can be strengthened by building on the three pillars of openness, integration, and accountability. This book is designed to help readers develop a clearer vision of a vital, engaged, contemporary psychoanalysis. The varied contributions to Progress in Psychoanalysis exemplify how the profession can change to better promote and build on the very real progress that is occurring in theory, research, training, and the many applications of psychoanalysis. They offer a roadmap for how the profession can begin to reclaim its leadership in wide-ranging efforts to explore the dynamics of mental life. Readers will come away with more confidence in psychoanalysis as an innovative enterprise and more excitement about how they can contribute to its growth.

Illusions of a Future
Illusions of a Future

Author: Kate Schechter

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-08-20

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0822376423

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A pioneering ethnography of psychoanalysis, Illusions of a Future explores the political economy of private therapeutic labor within industrialized medicine. Focusing on psychoanalysis in Chicago, a historically important location in the development and institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the United States, Kate Schechter examines the nexus of theory, practice, and institutional form in the original instituting of psychoanalysis, its normalization, and now its "crisis." She describes how contemporary analysts struggle to maintain conceptions of themselves as capable of deciding what psychoanalysis is and how to regulate it in order to prevail over market demands for the efficiency and standardization of mental health treatments. In the process, Schechter shows how deeply imbricated the analyst-patient relationship is in this effort. Since the mid-twentieth century, the "real" relationship between analyst and patient is no longer the unremarked background of analysis but its very site. Psychoanalysts seek to validate the centrality of this relationship with theory and, through codified "standards," to claim it as a privileged technique. It has become the means by which psychoanalysts, in seeking to protect their disciplinary autonomy, have unwittingly bound themselves to a neoliberal discourse of regulation.

Enjoying What We Don't Have
Enjoying What We Don't Have

Author: Todd McGowan

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-03-01

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1496210522

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Although there have been many attempts to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to political thought, this book is the first to identify the political project inherent in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. And this political project, Todd McGowan contends, provides an avenue for emancipatory politics after the failure of Marxism in the twentieth century. Where others seeking the political import of psychoanalysis have looked to Freud's early work on sexuality, McGowan focuses on Freud's discovery of the death drive and Jacques Lacan's elaboration of this concept. He argues that the self-destruction occurring as a result of the death drive is the foundational act of emancipation around which we should construct our political philosophy. Psychoanalysis offers the possibility for thinking about emancipation not as an act of overcoming loss but as the embrace of loss. It is only through the embrace of loss, McGowan suggests, that we find the path to enjoyment, and enjoyment is the determinative factor in all political struggles--and only in a political project that embraces the centrality of loss will we find a viable alternative to global capitalism.

Political Freud
Political Freud

Author: Eli Zaretsky

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0231540140

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In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of "political Freudianism," he shows how twentieth-century radicals, activists, and intellectuals used psychoanalytic ideas to probe consumer capitalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy. He also underscores the continuing influence and critical potential of those ideas in the transformed landscape of the present. Zaretsky's conception of political Freudianism unites the two overarching themes of the last century—totalitarianism and consumerism—in a single framework. He finds that theories of mass psychology and the unconscious were central to the study of fascism and the Holocaust; to African American radical thought, particularly the struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery; to the rebellions of the 1960s; and to the feminism and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Nor did the influence of political Freud end when the era of Freud bashing began. Rather, Zaretsky proves that political Freudianism is alive today in cultural studies, the study of memory, theories of trauma, postcolonial thought, film, media and computer studies, evolutionary theory and even economics.

Nationalism and the Body Politic
Nationalism and the Body Politic

Author: Lene Auestad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0429902298

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This volume aims to question the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies in the light of what unconscious fantasies are involved in these developments. It examines both recent movements of right-wing extremism and the way in which rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas have been adopted by mainstream politicians and in mainstream public discourse. Politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties have tended to resist specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation. Governments across Europe have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies. Xenophobia and hostility towards 'others' is on the rise, along with appeals to "Tradition and Security". 'Cultures of fear' are linked with fantasies of fusion or 'imagined sameness'. Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body, echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) characterization of 'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics.

Fear of Breakdown
Fear of Breakdown

Author: Noëlle McAfee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0231549911

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What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the subterranean anxieties behind current crises and the ways in which democratic practices can help work through seemingly intractable political conflicts. Working at the intersection of psyche and society, McAfee draws on psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the fear of breakdown to show how hypernationalism stems from unconscious anxieties over the origins of personal and social identities, giving rise to temptations to reify exclusionary phantasies of national origins. Fear of Breakdown contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss in order to create a more democratic politics. Coupling robust psychoanalytic theory with concrete democratic practice, Fear of Breakdown shows how a politics of working through can help counter a politics of splitting, paranoia, and demonization. McAfee argues for a new approach to deliberative democratic theory, not the usual philosopher-sanctioned process of reason-giving but an affective process of making difficult choices, encountering others, and mourning what cannot be had.

Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy
Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy

Author: Fernando Castrillón

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 100037033X

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Originally published in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis (EJP), the essays in this volume are a set of responses to the coronavirus crisis by distinguished philosophers and psychoanalysts from around the globe. The coronavirus irrupted making swift and deep cuts in the fabric of our existence: the risks of contagion and indefinite periods of isolation have radically altered the functioning of society. Pandemics do not wait for comprehension in order to proliferate. Confusion, sickness, and death punctuate the failure of governments worldwide to respond. This collection of writings examines the effects of the pandemic and the conditions that make possible such a global crisis. The writers provoke us to consider how capitalism, governmental power, and biopolitics mold the contours of life and death. The contributors in this collection ignite urgent political dialogue, address emergent transformations in the social field and offer perspectives on shifts in subjectivity and psychoanalytic practice. Beyond providing reflections on the impact of the coronavirus, the authors point to determinants of how the crisis will unfold and what may be on the horizon. This book will be invaluable to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, and to all those interested in the implications of the virus for psychoanalytic practice and theory, and the social, cultural and political spheres of our world.

Critique on the Couch
Critique on the Couch

Author: Amy Allen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0231552718

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Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on the Couch, Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning. Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims of critique.