In this provocative work, Joel Faflak argues that Romanticism, particularly British Romantic poetry, invents psychoanalysis in advance of Freud. The Romantic period has long been treated as a time of incipient psychological exploration anticipating more sophisticated discoveries in the science of the mind. Romantic Psychoanalysis challenges this assumption by treating psychoanalysis in the Romantic period as a discovery unto itself, a way of taking Freud back to his future. Reading Romantic literature against eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, Faflak contends that Romantic poetry and prose—including works by Coleridge, De Quincey, Keats, and Wordsworth—remind a later psychoanalysis of its fundamental matrix in phantasy and thus of its profoundly literary nature.
“One of the most interesting scholars working at the intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis.” —Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation—in life and in death. Elizabeth Rottenberg examines what emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Part I, “Freuderrida,” announces a non-traditional Freud: a Freud associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and symbolization, but with accidents and chance. Looking at accidents both in and of Freud’s writing, Rottenberg elaborates the unexpected insights that both produce and disrupt our received ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured as a foreign body, as traumatic temporality, as spatial unlocatability, or as the death drive, it points to something neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither psychically nor materially determined. Whereas the close reading of Freud leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing, Part II, “Freuderrida,” addresses itself to what transports us back and limits the openness of our horizon. Here the example par excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating decision. If “Freuderrida” insists on the death penalty, if it returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of Freud’s death drive. “Brilliant, pathbreaking, witty, and lucidly argued” (Elissa Marder, Emory University), this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Freud, Derrida, and the many critical debates to which their thought gives rise.
In this book, Suzanne Kirschner traces the origins of contemporary psychoanalysis back to the foundations of Judaeo-Christian culture, and challenges the prevailing view that modern theories of the self mark a radical break with religious and cultural tradition. Instead, she argues, they offer an account of human development which has its beginnings in biblical theology and neoplatonic mysticism. Drawing on a wide range of religious, literary, philosophical and anthropological sources, Dr Kirschner demonstrates that current Anglo-American psychoanalytic theories are but the latest version of a narrative that has been progressively secularized over the course of nearly two millennia. She displays a deep understanding of psychoanalytic theories, while at the same time raising provocative questions about their status as knowledge and as science.
These selections from Theodor Reik's work concern the love life and sexual activity of men and women. Reik establishes the theme of this work in the following way: "The sex urge hunts for lustful pleasure; love is in search of joy and happiness." Over a third of this volume had never been published in book form before it originally appeared half a century ago. Its appearance in paperback, for the first time, is a welcome addition to current debates, liberated from ideological and political constraints.The first part of the book is so far ahead of its time that it is still current. It reveals Reik's departure from Freud's theories and from those of most of his contemporaries in psychology and psychoanalysis. Part Two is a greatly abbreviated version of Masochism in Modern Man, retaining those parts with a direct bearing on the subject of this volume. Part Three offers two essays on why people remain single. In the author's usual direct style, they deal with the marriage shyness of the male and the psychological fears and resistance of both men and women to acceptance of the marriage bond. Part Four is Reik at his wisest. "The first lady whom I asked to read the manuscript said smilingly: 'Many of your impressions about us (women) are correct. No man should read the book!' A few seconds later, she said: 'Or rather, every man should read the book!'"As Paul Roazen noted, "in contrast to some of Freud's other followers, Reik was prescient early on in distinguishing self-love from narcissism. Reik believed that genuine self-regard was the ultimate basis for developing the capacity to love."At times Reik seems to defend women, at times to critique them. Yet he writes with sympathy and understanding. He challenges other authorities who have written on the subject, but he also agrees with many of them. Love and Lust is civilized writing at its most provocative. Reik is authoritative, and his book reflects the glow of a rich personali
Sacrifice Your Love develops the idea that sacrifice is a mode of enjoyment--that our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea for various problems important in medieval studies today and beyond.
Explores how the Romantic period gave birth to a seductive cognitive cultural program that retains far reaching implications for contemporary views on individuality and relationships between the individual and larger groups of identification. Established
