The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either.1 Freud.

_Mirroring and Attunement_ offers a new approach to psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion. Viewing these activities from a broadly relational perspective, Wright proposes that each provides a medium for creative dialogue: the artist discovers himself within his self-created forms, the religious person through an internal dialogue with ‘God’, and the analysand through the inter-subjective medium of the analysis. Building on the work of Winnicott, Stern and Langer, the author argues that each activity is rooted in the infant’s preverbal relationship (...) with the mother who ‘holds’ the emerging self in an ambience of mirroring forms, thereby providing a ‘place’ for the self to ‘be’. He suggests that the need for subjective reflection persists throughout the life cycle and that psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion can be seen as cultural attempts to provide the self with resonant containment. They thus provide renewed opportunities for holding and emotional growth. _Mirroring and Attunement_ will provide essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and art therapists and be of interest to anyone working at the interface between psychoanalysis, art and religion. _ _. (shrink)

Negrete brings together women writers and artists known for their formal experimentation to show that "the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire."-- taken from back cover.

Introduction : (re) making meaning -- Shaping private demons -- A play of selves : art as play -- Narrating the self -- Mapping : the need for borders -- The fluidity of time and space in art, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience -- Resisting representation -- Conclusion : order and chaos or framing ambiguity.

This book explores the phenomenon of creativity and creation from a psychoanalytic point of view, focusing on understanding the psycho-emotional dynamics underlying the artistic creative activities, such as theatre, literature, and painting. Throughout, Delgado considers these works of art through a Bionian, Kleinian and Freudian lens. He uses three major psychoanalytic models of the creative process, two of them classic: the first, Freudian, based on the theory of conflict between impulse and defense, the result of the effort to manage an (...) excessive drive activity, and in which the concept of sublimation is central; the second, Kleinian, based on the attachment theory, in which creative effort corresponds to an attempt to repair the damage done to the object or to the self; and the third, more recent, affiliated with the more expanded attachment relationship theory, based on W. Bion's theory of thinking, and emphasising the continent's capacity for psyche and the oscillation between schizo-paranoid and depressive positions. With illustrations throughout, this book will be vital reading for anyone interested in the intersection of creativity, the Arts, and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

Many forays have been made by psychoanalysts into the aesthetic realm, particularly in the form of interpretations of works of art and discussions of the particular or general pathology that may predispose individuals toward artistic creativity. Likewise, occasional philosophers have commented on the usefulness of psychoanalysis as a way of approaching areas of mutual interest. This study aims to contribute to this ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue, primarily through a focus on pathography, the term and method originated by Freud in his (...) 1910 monograph on Leonardo da Vinci. ;The thesis begins with an attempt to establish grounds for a dialogue between aesthetics and psychoanalysis by offering a selective review of the literature, identifying three fundamental problems in aesthetics and three basic approaches within psychoanalytic theory, and presenting a discussion of the application of these three modes of psychoanalytic thought to problems of form and content in modern art. ;Next, it is established that pathography, which attempts to probe associations between works of art and the minds that created them, derives from the nineteenth century critical tradition to which Freud was heir. Pathography is subjected to a critique in terms of the ongoing debate in aesthetics concerning problems of intention and expression; finally, its special contributions and limitations are explored. Three models of pathography are presented in detail. Each model with its differing context, motive for interpretation and methodology is scrutinized from an interdisciplinary perspective. ;Beyond pathography, we consider finally the contribution of several post-Freudian theorists who have emphasized the importance of preoedipal development and illuminated certain more general problems of aesthetic interest, i.e., issues centering on response to works of art, creativity and the importance of the external object. The possibility of a developmental line for aesthetic experience is considered, and relevant contemporary infant research is summarized. ;The Appendix offers, beyond pathography, yet another approach of psychoanalysis to art in which the work of art is considered sui generis, not, as in pathography, tied inextricably to the mind of its creator. A statement concerning the vicissitudes of interdisciplinary scholarship concludes the study. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis has, in the very nature of its object, an interest in and difficulty with the concept of place as well as an interest in and difficulty with the logic of place, topology. The Unconscious can thus seem to give rise to a certain prospect of mathesis or formalization; and such formalization, achieved, would offer a ground for the psychoanalytic claim to scientific knowledge relatively independent of empirical questions and approaching the condition of mathematics. This might then seem to (...) have been Lacan’s wager in organizing the researches of his école around works of theoretical elaboration rather than clinical study; certainly some such notion must underlie Miller’s claim to be “axiomatic.”1In this paper I want to explore some of Lacan’s formalizations as they are unfolded in the seminar Encore. 2 I will in effect be looking at the place of place or places in psychoanalysis—in particular, I will be looking at the place of jouissance in Lacan’s psychoanalysis and at the places of what Lacan punningly calls jouis-sens. The joint problematic here might be called one of “enjoymeant,” combining the logic of pleasure with the pleasure of logic. For Lacan, questions of jouissance, however punned, are questions of unity and selfhood, so in examining the reciprocal play of pleasure and sense I will be examining how Lacanian psychoanalysis secures itself in place. This last topic touches implicitly in Encore on questions of legacy and inheritance, so in the end I will also have something to say about the limits Lacan’s formalizations would impose on our enjoyment of Freud. I should note in advance that Encore, Lacan’s seminar of 1972-73, is an extraordinarily compact and involuted text, even by his standards, and of a corresponding richness, weaving sustained meditations on such figures as Georges Bataille, Roman Jakobson, Kierkegaard, and Aquinas with “mathemystical” digressions on sexuality, discourse, Borromean knots, and the like. The reading offered here is perforce schematic. 1. By and large the evidences of the Lacanian clinic are closed to us in consequence of Lacan’s insistence on theoretical elaboration. But it should not go unremarked that much of the work of Lacan’s school seems to have focused on areas traditionally recalcitrant to psychoanalytic treatment—alcoholism, retardation, and psychosis—and that such an emphasis is responsive to traditional empirically minded critiques of the limits of psychoanalysis.2. It should perhaps be noted in this context that the project of a genuinely public presentation of Lacan’s seminars seems to have been abandoned in favor of the more circumscribed circulation of texts through the Lacanian journal Ornicar? Stephen Melville is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism and is currently completing a series of essays on postmodern art and criticism. (shrink)

Both books published in 1996 explore the role that gender plays in the psychology of art (dealing with both making and viewing), complicating current philosophical distinctions between the aesthetic and the cognitive, and providing new insights into basic topics in the history and psychology of perception, representation, and disinterestedness.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), French phenomenological philosopher and Talmudic commentator, is regarded as perhaps the greatest ethical philosopher of our time. While Levinas enjoys prominence in the philosophical and scholarly community, especially in Europe, there are few if any books or articles written that take Levinas's extremely difficult to understand, if not obtuse, philosophy and apply it to the everyday lives of real people struggling to give greater meaning and purpose, especially ethical meaning, to their personal lives. This book attempts to (...) fill in the large gap in the Levinas literature, mainly through using a Levinasian-inspired, ethically-infused psychoanalytic approach. All of the essays included in this book are animated by the Levinasian assumption that it is the ethical relation to the other person (and, in one case, dog!) that is primary. That is, there is a human tendency in us, an often inhibited, muted or repressed tendency, as psychoanalysts have taught us, to see the needs of others as more important (or at least as important) than our own and therefore be willing to sacrifice for others. Moreover, once this human tendency to be for the Other is consciously embraced and made part of one's way of being in the world the possibility for a greater degree of personal fulfillment and happiness is often enhanced. Thus, the art of living the "good life" involves embracing "goodness" as one's guiding metaphor, an existential orientation in which, says Levinas, "the Other counts more than myself." As social psychologists have repeatedly shown, in social life, paradoxically, it is often the case that "the more you give, the more you get." Being for the Other, in other words, is often self-affirming!. --- Product Description. (shrink)

At the end of his attack on my use of the psychoanalytic model for the interpretation of literature, Heller raises the question concerning what the task of the literary critic is or ought to be. His own "sketch of the Kleistean theme's historical ancestry and its later development," he says, seeks to deepen and enrich the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents, the conclusiveness of his examples." By implication he suggests (...) that my method does not have this end—that is, appreciation—for its goal. In this he is partially right. "Appreciation" in Heller's sense is not as directly a goal for me. But does Heller's method of intellectual history and literary relation meet his own criteria of deepening and enriching the reader's appreciation of Kleist? In his capsule treatment of Great Thinkers of the Western World from Plato to Marx, we learn that many writers besides Kleist treated Kleist's theme of man's fall from unconscious grace. What exactly does this tell us about Kleist's treatment of it? How does it deepen the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents? It doesn't. It isn't even about Kleist. Although Heller tells us that it is the "thought" and "imagery" which "make for the great distinction of the essay" , his evidence for this consists, in the case of the former, in his tracing the history of the essay's thought and, in the case of the latter, in his statements that Kleist's use of the puppet as the exemplar of the unselfconscious graceful being is "unusual" and "novel" and that his bear story, though it may lack "in immediate plausibility," "gains in making Kleist's point" and is "a memorable exemplar" of the "art of grotesque inventions that are capable of floating for quite a while above and between the comic and the serious before landing with scintillating effect in one domain or the other" . Margret Schaefer is a lecturer in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. She responds here to Erich Heller's "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" , in which he discussed her article, "Kleist's 'About the Puppet Theater,". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter Lamarque TRUTH AND ART IN IRIS MURDOCH'S THE BLACK PRINCE "Art," writes Bradley Pearson, protagonist and narrator in The Black Prince, "is concerned not just primarily but absolutely with truth." Bradley Pearson is also concerned with truth. And understandably so, as he has just taken the rap, and been imprisoned, for a murder he claims he never committed. There are two rather different concerns here with truth: there (...) is the high-minded concern of the artist and there is the more pragmatic concern of the despised and falsely convicted man writing his "apologia." The careful juxtaposition of these two appeals to truth is a central theme in The Black Prince. The bulk of the novel purports to be a first-person narration of events in the later life of Bradley Pearson. Bradley is a writer who has been waiting patiently and silently for the inspiration, "the dark blaze," to produce a great work of art. This "dark blaze" eventually shows itself as the "black Eros," in a passionate but short-lived love affair with the youngJulian Baffin. Bradley is reflecting on these events from his prison cell, guided by his mentor and fellow prisoner, the "editor" P. Loxias (a witty reference to Apollo, god of truth). He sees his art and his love as stemming "from the same source" (p. 172) and, although sensitive to his shortcomings as an artist, he believes that through a divine inspiration he has attained a kind of Platonic tranquillity in the presence of truth and self-knowledge. However, through the device of "postscripts," purportedly written by other characters, we are presented with another picture of him rather different from his own. His former friends, more down to earth, though variously self-interested, depict him as a pitiful, even contemptible, charlatan lost in fantasy and delusion and a suitable case for psychoanalysis. What, then, is the real Bradley Pearson? Is he the pathetic, fantasy-ridden creature of the "postscripts"? Or is he, as he thinks, the great artist inspired by the gods and by Eros who has seen the revelation of truth? 209 2 1 0 Philosophy and Literature By forcing us to raise these questions about the novel, Iris Murdoch, I suggest, is inviting us to reflect on, and relate, two concerns we might have with truth in works of fiction. The first is with truth internal to the novel, truth-within-fiction, which informs us about the fictional characters and events. In The Black Prince, our attention is focused on unravelling and assessing the "truth" of Bradley's account. The second is with truth proper, as it might be revealed through fiction. This is truth not about the fictional world but about the non-fictional real world. It is often maintained that novels can instruct us in acquiring knowledge of the world. This, I suggest, is the type of truth that Bradley, so grandly and solemnly, and frequently, identifies with art. The nature of such truth is the main topic of this article. II What sense can we make of Bradley's repeated claims to the effect that "good art speaks truth" (p. xi)? One answer, reflecting an obvious feature of literary works, is that propositions about the world are often expressed, explicitly, within a fictional context; they might be uttered by one of the characters or directly by the author. The Black Prince offers many such propositions, some of which, on the nature of art, I shall be considering in detail. Examples are plentiful. Thus, Bradley remarks on marriage: "People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity..." (p. 64). He meditates on love: "The foreverness of real love is one of the reasons why even unrequited love is a source of joy" (pp. 173-74) and discusses jealousy (p. 207). He also reflects on human consciousness and responsibility (p. 155) and on selfishness and goodness: "The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives" (p. 149). Such explicit propositions carry us beyond the... (shrink)

Why do human beings feel shame? What is the cultural dimension of shame and sexuality? Can theory understand the power of affect? How is psychoanalysis integral to cultural theory? The experience of shame is a profound, painful and universal emotion with lasting effects on many aspects of public life and human culture. Rooted in childhood experience, linked to sexuality and the cultural norms which regulate the body and its pleasures, shame is uniquely human. _Shame and Sexuality _explores elements of (...) shame in human psychology and the cultures of art, film, photography and textiles. This volume is divided into two distinct sections allowing the reader to compare and contrast the psychoanalytic and the cultural writings. Part I, _Psychoanalysis_, provides a psychoanalytic approach to shame, using clinical examples to explore the function of unconscious fantasies, the shame shield in child sexual abuse, and the puzzling manner in which shame attaches itself to sexuality. Part II, _Visual Culture_, is illustrated throughout with textual analysis; contributors explore shame and sexuality in art history, politics and contemporary visual culture, including the gendering of shame, shame and abjection, and the relationship between shame and shamelessness as a strategy of resistance. Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward bring together debates within and between the discourses of psychoanalysis and visual culture, generating new avenues of enquiry for scholars of culture, theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

_On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature_ explores the lyrical dimension of the psychic space. It is not presented as an artistic disposition, but rather as a universal psychic quality which enables the recovery and recuperation of the self. The specific nature of human lyricism is defined as the interaction as well as the integration of two psychic modes of experience originally defined by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: The emergent and the continuous principles of the self. Dana (...) Amir elaborates Bion's general notion of an interaction between the emergent and the continuous principles of the self, offering a discussion of the specific function of each principle and of the significance of the various types of interaction between them as the basis for mental health or pathology. The author applies these theoretical notions in her analytic work by means of literary illustrations showing how the lyrical dimension may be used to teach psychoanalytic readings of literature and explore the connection between psychoanalytic and literary languages._ _ On the Lyricism of the Mind presents a new psychoanalytic understanding of the capacity to heal, to grieve, to love and to know, using literary illustrations but also literary language in order to extract a new formulation out of the classic psychoanalytic language of Winnicott and Bion. This book will appear to a wide audience to include psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists. It is also extremely relevant to literary scholars, including students of literary criticism, philosophers of language and philosophers of mind, novelists, poets, and to the wide educated readership in general._ _. (shrink)

This essay brings psychoanalytic theory on trauma together with film and television criticism on rape narrative in an analysis of Michael Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You. Beyond the limited carceral framework of the police procedural, which dislocates the act of violence from the survivor’s history and context, Coel’s polyvalent, looping narrative metabolizes rape television’s forms and genres in order to stage and restage both trauma and genre again and anew. Contesting common conceptions of vulnerability and susceptibility that prefigure (...) a violent breach of autonomy, Coel’s series and her interviews about it invite an ethics of looking that embraces a curiosity in the unknowable and untreatable kernel of subjective experience and defies and resists a policing of the survivor’s thoughts and emotions. By emphasizing and exploring what psychoanalysis calls the “afterwardness” of trauma, Coel foregrounds her main character’s subjectivity prior to her victimization, widens the sphere of consequence beyond the victim and criminal justice system to the survivor’s larger community, and entreats that community to preserve a space for her to look and look again at everything, without judgment. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo constituye un aporte al conocimiento del arte en su vinculación con la filosofía y el psicoanálisis, en tanto aborda la tensión entre la representación y la construcción simbólica de la imagen artística en el contexto cultural/estético contemporáneo, mediante la relación entre lo Real lacaniano y la estática negativa de Adorno. Dicha relación encuentra su punto de articulación en el fenómeno estético de lo Bello, entendido como lo que encara al sujeto con el vacío de su deseo (...) radical, sin engañarlo y que permite integrar la negatividad propia de lo Real con los elementos formales que componen la obra artística, así como con los conceptos de radicalidad y autenticidad de la propuesta adorniana. La articulación entre la estética negativa de Adorno y el efecto estético de lo Bello de Lacan, se ejemplifica con una interpretación en clave psicoanalítica de la obra de la artista colombiana Doris Salcedo. Abstract: This article constitutes a contribution to the knowledge of art in its connection with philosophy and psychoanalysis, as it approaches to the tension between the representation and the symbolic construction of the artistic image in the contemporary cultural / aesthetic context, through the relationship between the Lacanian Real and Adorno's negative aesthetic. This relationship finds its articulation point in the aesthetic phenomenon of the Beautiful, understood as what confronts the subject with the emptiness of its radical desire, without deceiving it and that allows to integrate the Real´s negativity with the formal elements that make up the artistic work, as well as the Adornian proposal concepts of radicality and authenticity. At the end, a psychoanalytic interpretation of colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s work is made, in which the negative aesthetics and the aesthetic effect of the Beautiful are integrated. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo constituye un aporte al conocimiento del arte en su vinculación con la filosofía y el psicoanálisis, en tanto aborda la tensión entre la representación y la construcción simbólica de la imagen artística en el contexto cultural/estético contemporáneo, mediante la relación entre lo Real lacaniano y la estática negativa de Adorno. Dicha relación encuentra su punto de articulación en el fenómeno estético de lo Bello, entendido como lo que encara al sujeto con el vacío de su deseo (...) radical, sin engañarlo y que permite integrar la negatividad propia de lo Real con los elementos formales que componen la obra artística, así como con los conceptos de radicalidad y autenticidad de la propuesta adorniana. La articulación entre la estética negativa de Adorno y el efecto estético de lo Bello de Lacan, se ejemplifica con una interpretación en clave psicoanalítica de la obra de la artista colombiana Doris Salcedo. Abstract: This article constitutes a contribution to the knowledge of art in its connection with philosophy and psychoanalysis, as it approaches to the tension between the representation and the symbolic construction of the artistic image in the contemporary cultural / aesthetic context, through the relationship between the Lacanian Real and Adorno's negative aesthetic. This relationship finds its articulation point in the aesthetic phenomenon of the Beautiful, understood as what confronts the subject with the emptiness of its radical desire, without deceiving it and that allows to integrate the Real´s negativity with the formal elements that make up the artistic work, as well as the Adornian proposal concepts of radicality and authenticity. At the end, a psychoanalytic interpretation of colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s work is made, in which the negative aesthetics and the aesthetic effect of the Beautiful are integrated. (shrink)

BACON AND THE MIND: ART, NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY. HarrisonMartin. Thames & Hudson. 2019. pp 160. £28.00.

Introduction: Losing our heads -- Kristeva and Benjamin: melancholy and the allegorical imagination -- Kenotic art: negativity, iconoclasm, inscription -- To be and remain foreign: tarrying with l'inquietante etrangete alongside Arendt -- And Kafka -- Sublimating maman: experience, time, and the re-erotization of existence in -- Kristeva's reading of Marcel Proust -- The "Orestes Complex": thinking hatred, forgiveness, Greek tragedy, and the -- Cinema of the "thought specular" with Hegel, Freud, and Klein -- Conclusion: forging a/head.

In 1958 William L. Langer, in a well-known presidential address to the American Historical Association, declared the informed use of psychoanalytic depth psychology as "the next assignment" for professional historians. _Psychoanalysis and History_, volume 31 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_, examines the degree to which Langer's directive has been realized in the intervening 45 years. Section I makes the case for psychobiography in the lives of historical figures and exemplifies this perspective with analytically informed studies of the art of Wassily (...) Kandinsky; the films of Stanley Kubrick; and the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler. Section II reviews Freud's own psychohistorical contributions and then considers the relevance to historical inquiry of the more recent perspectives of Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut. Section III explores an intriguing tributary of psychobiographical inquiry: the impact of the biographer's own subjectivity on his or her work. Section IV turns to a topic of perennial interest: the psychobiographical study of American presidents. Section V turns to the special challenges of applying psychoanalysis to topics of religious history and includes topical studies of religious figures as disparate as the 15th century Asian Drukpa Kunley and Osama bin Laden. Section VI focuses on the recent extension of psychohistorical inquiry to groups of people and to cultural phenomena more generally: an investigation of the youth movement in pre-Nazi Germany; consideration of how societies, no less than individuals, reenact and work through traumas over time; and an outline of the role of analysis in constructing a depth-psychological "social psychology" of use to historians. These papers, no less than those that precede them, are compelling testimony to the claim with which editors James William Anderson and Jerome A. Winer begin the volume, to wit, that "Psychoanalysis would seem to be a resource indispensable to the study of history.". (shrink)

Philosophy After Lacan: Politics, Science and Art brings together reflections on contemporary philosophy inspired by and in dialogue with Lacanian theory. Rather than focus on the thinkers who came before Lacan, the editors maintain attention on innovations in contemporary philosophy that owe their emergence to complimentary, critical, direct, or tangential engagement with Lacan. This collection makes one of the first concerted efforts to expand discussions between psychoanalysis and more recent philosophical thinkers while gathering chapters by some of the leading (...) philosophical voices of the present moment. With contributors from around the world, this book has international appeal and is unique in its emphasis on contemporary philosophies inspired or influenced by Lacan. Philosophy After Lacan will not only appeal to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, but also to students and professors of philosophy, critical theory, psychology, politics, history, and literature. (shrink)

_The Business of Being Made_ is the first book to critically analyze assisted reproductive technologies from a transdisciplinary perspective integrating psychoanalytic and cultural theories. It is a ground-breaking collection exploring ARTs through diverse methods including interview research, clinical case studies, psychoanalytic based ethnography, and memoir. Gathering clinicians and researchers who specialize in this area, this book engages current research in psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and debates in feminist, queer and cultural theory about affect, temporality, and bodies. With psychoanalysis (...) as its fulcrum, _The Business of Being Made_ explores the social constructions and personal experiences of ARTs. Katie Gentile frames the cultural context, exploring the ways ARTs have become a complex form of playing with time, attempting to manufacture a hopeful future in the midst of growing global uncertainty. The contributors then present a range of varied experiences related to ARTs, including: Interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs; A psychoanalytic memoir of male infertility; Clinical research and work with transgender, gay and lesbian patients creating new Oedipal constellations, the experiences of LBGTQ people within the medical system and the variety of families that emerge; Research on the experiences of egg donors and a corresponding clinical case study of successful egg donation; The experiences of ongoing failure which is the often unacknowledged for ART procedures; How and when people choose to stop using ARTs; A psychoanalytic ethnography of a neonatal intensive care unit populated in part with the babies created through these technologies and their parents, haggard and in shock after years of failed attempts. Full of original material, _The Business of Being Made_ conveys the ambivalence of these technologies without simplifying their complicated consequences for the bodies of individuals, the family, cultures, and our planet. This book will be relevant to clinicians, medical and psychological personnel working in assisted reproductive technologies and infertility, as well as academics working in the fields of sociology, literature, queer and feminist theories and at the intersections of cultural, critical and psychoanalytic theories. (shrink)

Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techné and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical Platonism which dominates contemporary understandings of art, this book instead reinvigorates Aristotelian causation. Beginning with the Greek topos and turning to insights from philosophy, pure mathematics, psychoanalysis and biology, Jason Tuckwell re-problematises techné in functional terms. This book examines the deviations at play within logical forms, the subject, and (...) upon phusis to better situate the role of the function in poiesis (art). In so doing, Tuckwell argues that art concerns a genuinely creative labour that cannot be resolved via an ontological or epistemological problem, but which instead constitutes an encounter with the problematic. As such, techné is shown to be a property of the living, of intelligence coupled to action, that not only enacts poiesis or art, but indicates a broader role for creative deviation in nature. (shrink)

Excerpt from Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy: A Symposium The Relevance of Psychoanalysis to Philosophy by morris lazerowitz, Smith College Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection (...) in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public (...) good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)