The Politics of Psychoanalysis

The Politics of Psychoanalysis

Author: Stephen Frosh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1999-07-21

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 134927643X

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Psychoanalysis has had a profound influence on twentieth-century thought in a wide variety of areas, from psychology and psychiatry to sociology, literature, feminism and politics. Most importantly, it offers insights into the relationship between individual subjectivity and social relations, making it a key discipline for understanding the links between social phenomena and personal experience. Since its first publication in 1987, The Politics of Psychoanalysis has been widely recognised as one of the best introductions to psychoanalytic theory from the point of view of its relevance for social relations. As well as describing Freud's work, it examines the basic assumptions and social implications of a broad spectrum of post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought, especially object relations, Kleinian and Lacanian theory. Feminist and critical psychoanalytic approaches are explored, along with questions of psychoanalytic practice andd its implications for social and personal change. For this second edition, the book has been thoroughly revised, with updated accounts of the theories covered in the first edition, plus new material on contemporary feminist psychoanalytic work and on the engagement of psychoanalysis with postmodernism. The result is a book that combines a lucid introduction to theory with a radical examination of the value of psychoanalysis for therapeutic and social practice.


Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics

Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics

Author: Lynne Layton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-09-27

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1134181612

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Do political concerns belong in psychodynamic treatment? How do class and politics shape the unconscious? The effects of an increasingly polarized, insecure and threatening world mean that the ideologically enforced split between the political order and personal life is becoming difficult to sustain. This book explores the impact of the social and political domains at the individual level. The contributions included in this volume describe how issues of class and politics, and the intense emotions they engender, emerge in the clinical setting and how psychotherapists can respectfully address them rather than deny their significance. They demonstrate how clinicians need to take into account the complex convergences between psychic and social reality in the clinical setting in order to help their patients understand the anxiety, fear, insecurity and anger caused by the complex relations of class and power. This examination of the psychodynamics of terror and aggression and the unconscious defences employed to deny reality offers powerful insights into the microscopic unconscious ways that ideology is enacted and lived. Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics will be of interest to all mental health professionals interested in improving their understanding of the ideological factors that impede or facilitate critical and engaged citizenship. It has a valuable contribution to make to the psychoanalytic enterprise, as well as to related scholarly and professional disciplines.


Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation

Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation

Author: Daniel Tutt

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-02-12

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 3030940705

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Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Family aims to raise a sophisticated and highly accessible debate around the family, self-making and the political and cultural implications of liberation. The text proposes a new way to read the Lacanian theory of Oedipus and through this reading resituate a series of important political and theoretical debates that have concerned intellectual life over the last forty years. It is written with an accessible style so that both specialists in Lacanian and Marxist theory and a broader cross-section of readers interested in understanding the implications of debates across populist and Marxist perspectives that have occupied the global left since the 2008 economic crash. The text aims to resituate the way theories of emancipation and liberation are theorized from a distinctive psychoanalytic and Lacanian point of view. In resituating the infamous “Oedipus complex” in a new light, the text re-opens a series of debates with important theoretical interlocutors, including the influential American historian and psychoanalytic thinker Christopher Lasch, whose thought has witnessed a significant renaissance of interest today, to the staunch critic of Freud and Lacan, René Girard, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their widely read Anti-Oedipus series that disputes the Freudian and Lacanian notions of Oedipus.


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.


Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Author: Samo Tomšič

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1317933265

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A charismatic and controversial figure, Lacan is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his work has revolutionized a range of fields. The volume aims to introduce Lacan’s vast opus to the field of international politics in a coherent and approachable manner. The volume is split into three distinct sections: Psychoanalysis and Politics: this section will frame the discussion by providing general background of Lacan’s engagement with politics and the political Lacan and the Political: each chapter will focus on different key ideas and concepts in Lacan’s thought including ethics, justice, discourse, object a, symptom, jouissance Political Encounters: seeks to represent different ways of engaging with Lacanian thought and ways of adopting it to explain and comment on global political phenomena Bringing together internationally recognised scholars in the field, this volume will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars in areas including critical theory, international relations, political theory and political philosophy.


Reason and Unreason

Reason and Unreason

Author: Michael Rustin

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780819564795

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Explores issues concerning the justification and legitimacy of psychoanalytic knowledge, and its relevance to political and social questions.


Marx and Freud in Latin America

Marx and Freud in Latin America

Author: Bruno Bosteels

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1844678474

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This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.


The Politics of Desire

The Politics of Desire

Author: Agustín Colombo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-03-28

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1538144255

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In his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault notes that in the late sixties, there is a turn away from Freud anda movement toward what he calls an “experience and technology of desire that is no longer Freudian”. Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari were interested in, and engaged with this shift and their collective work in these areas spawned a larger post-Freudian literature. This book gathers contributions from international scholars with the aim of exploring the social, political, and philosophical dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Foucault’s critical encounters with psychoanalytic thought: Their possible connections, their divergences, the fields of reflection that these encounters open, and the problems and debates that led Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari to engage with psychoanalysis in the ways that they did. In doing so, the main goal of the book is not to engage in a critique of the discipline of Psychoanalysis as such, but to investigate how Foucault’s and Deleuze’s critique of Psychoanalysis gives rise to a political reflection that draws on some of Psychoanalysis key notions. Among these, the concept of Desire is central as it allows us to grasp the different ways in which Foucault and Deleuze politically engage with Psychoanalysis: for Deleuze, Desire is the element through which Revolution becomes possible, whereas for Foucault Desire is a cornerstone of the modern mechanisms of subjection. Drawing both on new material like Confessions of the Flesh, the 4th volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and on Foucault and Deleuze main work, the book covers a variety of topics including the contrast between Foucault’s and Deleuze political understanding of desire and pleasure; the genealogy of desire as a way to investigate the historical shaping of psychoanalysis; the relationship between psychoanalysis and the normalizing mechanisms of power (e.g. biopolitics and disciplinary regimes); the ways in which psychoanalysis and neoliberalism come together in particular moments, the status and role of desire in revolt, resistance, and transformation; Foucault and Deleuze’s different approaches to the unconscious; the role of desire in the formation of identity; etc.,. In the 50th anniversary of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, one of the major references that inspires the many chapters in this book, we aim to pay homage to these two important figures of contemporary thought by enriching and opening new lines of thought and problematization of the political reflection on Desire that Foucault and Deleuze developed.


Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and the Politics of Human Relationships

Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and the Politics of Human Relationships

Author: Laurence Simon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2003-05-30

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0313016208

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This volume offers a psychology of human personality and behavior created as a function of the politics practiced by the social structure in which they are based. The interaction of individuals with authoritarian/totalitarian, democratic/humanistic and anarchistic forms of politics is examined. The focus is on the particular type of politics practiced by psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, with the conclusion that these enterprises operate more along authoritarian/totalitarian than democratic/humanistic lines. Simon argues that the mental health field, as currently dominated by psychiatric thinking entrenched in the myths of mental illness, is acting as a social control agency and a force in the development of a totalitarian state. This volume aso offers a view of how psychotherapy can be used as a means to fuel democratic states for individuals. Other works that focus on the politics of psychiatric services have also emerged since Thomas Szasz' work, The Myth of Mental Illness, but this is the first to demonstrate the dangers of the psychiatry and therapy industries from this variety of political, religious, and scientific perspectives.


The Revision of Psychoanalysis

The Revision of Psychoanalysis

Author: Erich Fromm

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2013-02-26

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1480401978

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DIVDIVBestselling author Erich Fromm revisits Sigmund Freud’s work, ushering psychoanalysis into the modern age/divDIV In The Revision of Psychoanalysis, renowned psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm applies his innovative, humanist approach to Freud’s often contradictory ideas. Fromm pays special attention to the fact that human beings’ main problem has been the way they are related to the outer world, to others, and to themselves. Human passions and their effects have to be explained differently than Freud did, and psychoanalysis must be revised to accommodate this—a fact Fromm explains in his typically brilliant way. The result is a comprehensive, updated look at psychoanalysis and humanistic thinking that is as relevant today as when it was first written./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate./div/div