Rethinking the Relation between Women and Psychoanalysis interrogates core psychoanalytical theoretical concepts concerning loss and femininity. Contributors apply different psychoanalytic perspectives to loss and femininity, focusing on the intersection of psychoanalysis, culture, and clinical work.

2020 Gradiva Award Nominee, Best Edited Book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership considers how these factors can be understood, nurtured, or thwarted and the subsequent impact on women's identity, authority and satisfaction. Psychoanalysis has long struggled with its ideas about women, about who they are, how to work with them, and how to respect and encourage what women want. This book argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice must evolve (...) to maintain its relevance in a volatile landscape. Each section of the book begins with a chapter that reviews contemporary ideas regarding women, as well as psychoanalytic history, gender bias, and societal norms and deficits. Three composite clinical stories allow our distinguished contributors to discuss the contexts within which individual experience can be affected, and the role that clinical work may have to mobilize and advance passion and vitality. In their discussions, the interplay of clinical psychoanalysis, sociopolitical context, and understanding of gender, combine to offer a unique perspective, built on decades of scholarship, personal experience, and clinical expertise. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership will serve as a reference for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars interested in the progress of psychoanalytic theory regarding women in the 21st century. Contributors to this book include: Rosemary Balsam, Brenda Bauer, Andrea Celenza, Diane Elise, Adrienne Harris, Dorothy Holmes, Nancy Kulish, Vivian Pendar, Dionne Powell, and Arlene Richards. (shrink)

In this landmark collection of original essays, outstanding feminist critics in Britain, France, and the United States present new perspectives on feminism and psychoanalysis, opening out deadlocked debates. The discussion ranges widely, with contributions from feminists identified with different, often opposed views on psychoanalytic criticism. The contributors reassess the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism, and explore the significance of its institutional context. They write against the received views on 'French feminism' and essentialism. A remarkable restatement of current (...) positions within psychoanalysis and feminism, the volume as a whole will change the terms of existing debates, and make its arguments and concerns more generally accessible. (shrink)

In this landmark collection of original essays, outstanding feminist critics in Britain, France, and the United States present new perspectives on feminism and ...

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl illuminates the psychological and intellectual demands writing biography makes on the biographer and explores the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis. She considers what remains valuable in Sigmund Freud's work, and what areas - theory of character, for instance - must be rethought to be useful for current psychoanalytic work, for feminist studies, and for social theory. Psychoanalytic theory used for biography, she argues, can yield insights for psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the understanding (...) of creativity. (shrink)

Within the psychoanalytic framework, there is a growing body of research and thinking about female development. In addition, there is ongoing research within other areas of psychology, such as developmental psychology and social psychology, which has important implications for an understanding of women's adult development. Often these research findings are not readily available to the analytic community, nor has much of the research been incorporated into a psychoanalytic framework. _Psychoanalysis and Women_ broadens analytic thinking by integrating contemporary literature from (...) psychoanalysis with that of other areas, both within and outside psychology, which has implications for the undertanding of women's development. This literature is conceptualized within a psychoanalytic framework. A basic premise underlying this book is that psychoanalysis needs continuing review and revision in terms of what women and men are about and a continuing focus on whether and how unfounded biases prevent analysts from understanding patients. The present volume considers how sexism and feminism are affecting psychoanalysis and exemplifies how the emerging field of psychoanalysis of women and the issues its existence raises should be conceptualized. It also exemplifies some of the positive contributions that a feminist outlook gives to the study of human behavior and should esxpand the range of hypotheses that we have about people. (shrink)

This book is a brilliant and timely analysis of the complex issues raised by the relation between women and philosophy. It offers a critical account of a wide range of contemporary philosophical and feminist texts and it develops this account into an original project of critical feminist thought. Braidotti examines contemporary French philosophy as practised by men such as Foucault and Derrida, showing that they rely on a notion of 'the feminine' in order to undermine classical thought, which bears (...) no direct relevance to the historical experience of women. Braidotti then looks at the attempts of contemporary feminist thinkers in Europe and the United States to show the gendered nature of discursive power games. She discusses the contributions of Luce Irigaray and many other feminist theorists to the understanding of sexual difference and of its implications for philosophy and politics. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in women's studies, feminist theory, social theory, cultural studies, philosophy and literature, and anyone interested in contemporary feminism and the relation between feminist theory, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

_Gendered Agents_, edited by Silvestra Mariniello andPaul A. Bové, presents essays by influential feminist theorists who challenge traditional Western epistemology and suggest new directions for feminism. By examining both literary and historical discourses, such critics as Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers, and Lauren Berlant assess questions of sexuality, ethics, race, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and identity. Gathered from various issues of the journal _boundary 2_, the essays in _Gendered Agents_ seek to transform the model of Western academic knowledge by restructuring its priorities (...) and values. In the introduction, Mariniello urges feminists to begin anew but take as their starting place the achievements of feminism and feminist theory: an understanding of language that considers the implications of silence, the motivation to decompartmentalize experience, and the acknowledgement that everything is political._ _Challenging both a canonical organization of knowledge and the persistently self-referential "ghettoization" of feminism, contributors subsequently tackle subjects as diverse as pre-Marxist France, the American fetus, black intellectuals, queer nationality, and the art of literary interpretation. _Contributors_. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt. (shrink)

The experience of the Yugoslav war and the rise of "irrational" violence in contemporary societies provides the theoretical and political context of this book, ...

Following the International Women's Year in 1975, a group of men and women met every month for a year at the home of psychoanalyst Edith Weigert to reflect on what was then called the "psychology of women." Recently, a few members of that original group, joined by several others, began a seminar on gender and psychoanalysis with the goal of reexamining old and new writings infeminism, psychoanalysis, and related fields. The nine essays in this book (...) are a result of those discussions. Written by distinguished and varied contributors, they explore the complex relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis and address broader questions of gender. Psychiatry and the Humanities, Volume 14. (shrink)

This article argues that Stanley Cavell's notion of moral perfectionism must be understood, within the American cultural context, as deeply intertwined with myths of heroic American masculinity. It traces connections between Cavell's descriptions of moral perfectionism, the transcendentalist authors on whom he relies, and writings about the myth of the American frontier hero. When understood as a tradition of masculinity, it becomes possible to trace moral perfectionism across much wider areas of American cinematic culture than Cavell's reading suggests; Good Will (...) Hunting is used as an example which further illuminates the relationship between moral perfectionism and American masculinities. Psychoanalysis, a major feature of Good Will Hunting as well as an important aspect of Cavellian moral perfectionism, must also be revisited in terms of the differences in its popular mythologisation for men versus for women. (shrink)

_Psychoanalysis and Women_, Volume 32 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_, is a stunning reprise on theoretical, developmental, and clinical issues that have engaged analysts from Freud on. It begins with clinical contributions by Joyce McDougall and Lynne Layton, two theorists at the forefront of clinical work with women; Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and Ethel Spector Person, from their respective vantage points, all engage the issue of passivity, which Freud tended to equate with femininity. Employing a self-psychological framework, Christine Kieffer (...) returns to the Oedipus complex and sheds new light on the typically Pyrrhic oedipal victory of little girls. Section III broadens the historical context of contemporary theorizing about women by offering the personal reminiscences of Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Brenda Solomon, and Malkah Notman. A final section, dedicated to "women who shared psychoanalysis," features historical essays on Ida Bauer, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Edith Jacobson, and Therese Benedek, along with Linda Hopkins's revealing interview of Marion Milner. Of special note is Marian Tolpin's examination of three women - Bauer, Helene Deutch, and Anna Freud - who helped shape Freud's notion of the "femail castration complex," and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's exploration of how two women - Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham - developed parent-infant observation. _Psychoanalysis and Women_ is an extraordinary chronicle of the distance traveled since Freud characterized women's sexual life as "the dark continent." The contributors vitalize a half century of theory with the lessons of biography, and they broaden clinical sensibilities by drawing on recent developmental, gender-related, and socio-psychological research. In doing so, they attest to the ongoing reconfiguration of Freud's dark continent and show the psychoanalytic psychology of women to be very much a revolution in progress. (shrink)

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). We are not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. However, (...) we are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system. (shrink)

The last half-century has seen enormous changes in society’s attitude toward sexuality. In the 1950s, homosexuals in the United States were routinely arrested; today, homosexual activity between consenting adults is legal in every state, with same-sex marriage legal in Massachusetts and Connecticut. In the 1950s, ambitious women were often seen as psychopathological and were told by psychoanalysts that they had penis envy that needed treatment; today, a woman has campaigned for President of the United States. Mark Blechner has lived (...) and worked through these startling changes in society, and _Sex Changes _collects papers he has written over the last 45 years on sex, gender, and sexuality. Interspersed with these papers are reflections on the changes that have occurred during that time period, both within the scope of society at large as well as in his personal experiences inside and outside of the therapeutic setting. He shows how changes in society, changes in his life, and changes in his writing on sexuality - as well as changes within psychoanalysis itself - have affected one another. One hundred years ago, psychoanalysis was at the cutting edge of new ideas about sex and gender, but in the latter half of the 20 th Century, psychoanalysts were often seen as reactionary upholders of society’s prejudices. _Sex Changes _seeks to restore the place of psychoanalysis as the "once and future queer science," and aims for a radical shift in psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality, gender, normalcy, prejudice, and the relationship of therapeutic aims and values. (shrink)

This article discusses the methodological challenges posed for psychological research on whiteness at the intersection between race and gender in Germany. Much of the current research in the social science field in Germany focuses on violent expressions of racism or Fremdenfeindlichkeit and represents a collective immunization against the knowledge about the history and the historicity of whiteness as a history of seizure. Such approaches are motivated by fear and uncertainty. The author takes this uncertainty not only as a starting point (...) for an investigation into the heavily veiled history of whiteness, but also as a method in itself. (shrink)

The paper is an example of interdisciplinary research. It combines aspects of mythology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and feminism to support the analysis of images of water associated with woman and seduction, mainly in visual art. The author’s question is as follows: What are the basic characteristics of woman, water and seduction that have enabled them, throughout the world’s history, to fuse into a complex that can be found in myths, fairy tales, philosophical treatises, psychoanalysis and especially in works (...) of art? Is it a kind of Jungian archetypal image? To answer this question the author searches for a philosophical explanation of seduction in Jean Baudrillard’s On Seduction, and for an explanation of women’s identity in the works of Helene Cixous and Julie Kristeva. Further, an explanation of the development of the image of the mermaid is offered. The main emphasis is put on the interpretation of several works of art: What a Water Gave Me by Frida Kahlo, The Seduction and The Collective Invention by Rene Magritte, Queen of the Fish by Mimi Parent, and Bathing Nymphs by Paul Delvaux. (shrink)

Written in a readable, accessible style, with plenty of up-to-date examples Psychoanalysis and Culture provides a brilliant introduction to key issues in the area of application of psychoanalytic theories to culture. The author argues that we cannot grasp the complexity of contemporary global issues without understanding some of the unconscious processes which underlie them. After introducing some major modern and postmodern psychoanalytic approaches, Minsky offers a broad-ranging critique of Lacan's theory of culture and the unconscious. She explores a range (...) of crucial and topical questions: how should we explain women's historical subordination and what is now often seen as a crisis in male identity? What constitutes 'masculinity' apart from power and control? How important is the father, actually and symbolically in children's development in the context of lone-parent families? Why is contemporary culture often still so violent and destructive? Why is consumer culture so attractive to so many and why is it so difficult to put limits on economic growth in the interests of preventing environmental disaster? This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, women's studies, cultural studies, psychology and history as well as psychoanalytic studies. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in the psychology of cultural change. (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.

What is object-relations theory and what does it have to do with literary studies? How can Freud's phallocentric theories be applied by feminist critics? In Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader Rosalind Minsky answers these questions and more, offering students a clear, straightforward overview without ever losing them in jargon. In the first section Minsky outlines the fundamentals of the theory, introducing the key thinkers and providing clear commentary. In the second section, the theory is demonstratedn by an anthology (...) of seminal essays which include Femininity by Sigmund Freud; Envy and Gratitude by Melanie Klein; an extract from Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena by Donald Winnicot; The Meaning of the Phallus by Jacques Lacan; an extract from Women's Time by Julia Kristeva; and an extract from Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray. Psychoanalysis and Gender:An introductory Reader is designed especiallyfor students and written with unpretentious prose and carefully selected material. It is an invaluable guide to this major field. (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)

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading explores some of the ways in which we think about reading and the effects reading has on us. Whether considered as a process, a representation, or a cultural activity, reading involves the idea about inner and outer, absence and boundaries, and the transmission of thoughts and feelings between one person or historical period and another. These ideas provide the basis for much of our thinking about subjectivity and receive their fullest elaboration in the (...) twentieth-century discourse of psychoanalysis. Drawing on the rich tradition of British object relations, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading is a literary critics approach to the scene of reading understood from a pyschoanalytic perspective. Linked essays on books and interiority, memory and landscape, trauma and literary transmission provide a subtle account of writing by Woolf, Austen, Rousseau, and Romantic women, as well as fictional accounts of slavery and colonialism, and Holocaust memoirs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic StateNicole Fermon (bio)Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women’s erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”], Irigaray (...) conceives the contemporary ethical project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist “to keep relationships among men running smoothly” [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating.Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women’s distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the “neutral” citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nation-state. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, “citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference” [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics—that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that “the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations” and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial “circuits” alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power—women risk losing “everything without even being acknowledged” [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women’s obliteration under men’s interests and concerns. Women’s insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, [End Page 120] testifies to the obduracy of women’s difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women’s health and children’s physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective “mouthpiece” to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics’ insistence on sexual neutrality—that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway... (shrink)

This paper discusses the different explanatory approaches taken by feminists and (Kleinian) psychoanalysts to women's psychological illness. In particular, anorexia nervosa (a condition that has attracted much feminist attention) is used as an example. Examination of some Kleinian accounts of work with anorexic patients reveals the great disparity between the terms and focus of psychoanalytical explanation and those invoked in feminist discussions. Can the two perspectives be combined? It is argued that, despite its individualist methodology, psychoanalysis stands to (...) gain from a broader understanding (that feminists might supply) of the cultural "provocation" of psychic conflict. This reconciliation of perspectives would require feminists to go beyond the "common sense" psychology that they often presuppose and to acknowledge the mediating influence of unconscious symbolic significance in experience. In connection with this issue, some work by feminists that has sought to accommodate psychoanalytical ideas is criticized for its "literalism." The lesson to be learned from this discussion applies more widely than to the feminist case. (shrink)

Originally published in 1990, _Psychoanalysis and…_ brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan’s seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But _Psychoanalysis and… (...) _demonstrates that psychoanalysis – and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism – was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis has transformed our culture. We constantly use and refer to ideas from psychoanalysis, often unconsciously. Psychology, philosophy, politics, sociology, women's studies, anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines have been permeated by the competing schools of psychoanalysis. But what of psychoanalysis itself? Where is it going one hundred years after Freud's own speculations took shape? Does it still have a role to play in cultural debate, or should it perhaps be abandoned? Speculations After (...) Freud confronts the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis by bringing together some of the most influential and best known writers on psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. The advocates and critics of psychoanalysis, both institutional and theoretical, critically appraise the powerful role psychoanalytic speculation plays in all areas of culture. (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.

Freudian psychoanalysis offers us often neglected but unique and very fruitful possibilities for an original interpretation of sport. In this article we first look at some basic Freudian concepts, such as the role of sexuality, the unconscious and dreams. In doing so, it becomes clear that sport can and should be interpreted in a similar way to Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Just as dreams need to be decoded and interpreted, sport needs to be decoded and interpreted in order to (...) understand it. On this basis, we then build a system for understanding sport that also incorporates the other important concepts of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The concepts of repression, symptom formation and the role of symbols prove to be particularly relevant for understanding sport. Decoding symbols in sport (e.g. scoring a goal) shows us that sport is a derivative of the libido and has an unconscious sexual structure. Unveiling the hidden unconscious sexuality of sport shows us that (male) sport was created for the sake of women, so that men (as winners) could gain a privileged status in female desire. Sport turns out to be a symbolic substitute for the satisfaction of human sexual needs. However, to better understand the competitive nature of sport, one must include the Oedipus and castration complex. It is castration anxiety that drives sporting competition. Victory is symbolically linked to the castration of the opponent. Next we turn to Freud’s concept of transference. It helps us to understand the complexity of the relationship between the athlete and the coach. This has a strong influence on athletic success. When things do not go as planned for an athlete and unexpected injuries occur, Freud’s concept of ‘advantage through illness’ can help us understand the athlete’s ‘escape into injury’. (shrink)

This collection of essays at the juncture between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural studies questions the future of a discipline which has emerged from the intimate experience of therapy to exert a powerful hold over contemporary culture.Psychoanalysis has transformed our culture. We constantly use and refer to ideas from psychoanalysis, often unconsciously. Psychology, philosophy, politics, sociology, women's studies, anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines have been permeated by the competing schools of psychoanalysis. But what (...) of psychoanalysis itself? Where is it going one hundred years after Freud's own speculations took shape? Does it still have a role to play in cultural debate, or should it perhaps be abandoned?Speculations After Freud confronts the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis by bringing together some of the most influential and best known writers on psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. The advocates and critics of psychoanalysis, both institutional and theoretical, critically appraise the powerful role psychoanalytic speculation plays in all areas of culture. (shrink)

This book investigates the nature of Feminist interventions in psychoanalysis by comparing the status and treatment of women in two different psychoanalytic ...

_Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World_, volume 29 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, is a comprehensive reassessment of the influence of Sigmund Freud. Intended as an unofficial companion volume to the Library of Congress's exhibit, "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," it ponders Freud's influence in the context of contemporary scientific, psychotherapeutic, and academic landscapes. Beginning with James Anderson's biographical remarks, which are geared specifically to the objects on display in the Library of Congress exhibit, and Roy (...) Grinker Jr.'s more personal view of Freud, the volume branches out in various directions in an effort to comprehend the multidimensional and multidisciplinary richness of Freud's contribution. In section II, we find authoritative summaries of Freud's scientific contributions, of his continuing impact as a thinker, of his notion of symbolization in the context of recent neuroscientific findings, and of his status as a "cultural subversive". In section III, contributors hone in on more specific aspects of Freud's legacy, such as an experimental method to review how Freud's idea of childhood sexuality has fared and a look at the women who became analysts in the United States. In the concluding section of the volume, contributors turn to Freud's influence in various humanistic disciplines: literature, drama, religious studies, the human sciences, the visual arts, and cinema. With this scholarly yet highly accessible compilation, the Chicago Institute provides another service to its own community and to the wider reading public. Sure to enhance the experience of all those attending "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," _Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World_ will appeal to anyone desirous of an up-to-date overview of the man whose work shaped the psychological sensibility of the century just past and promises to reverberate throughout the century just born. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural CriticismVera J. Camden (bio)Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller. New York: SUNY P, 2008. 258 pp.This collection takes up the uses of psychoanalysis for cultural studies in the new millennium. Its editors and contributors ask, “Where is psychoanalysis in contemporary thought?” At a time when the empirically based (...) psychologies have long repudiated the “talking cure” to the extent that the unconscious is not visible or easily measured, and when, on the other hand, psychoanalysis has been associated in the humanities with a radical political and social agenda, disappointed hopes for change have led many to throw the baby of psychoanalysis out with the bathwater of a utopian vision of transformation. The question now remains: “Whither psychoanalysis?” To answer this question (which is also a demand), the editors first acknowledge that the critique and curtailing of psychoanalytic thought in the cultural studies programs across the country in the last decade or so has been influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, his disciples, and the New Historicism. At the same time, they believe that the political, psychological, and moral dangers of embracing a knowing and cynical postmodernism that fosters hollow consumerism premised on modes of subjectivity that “neither ‘express’ interiority nor bear any relation to a lived past” are a real and present danger in contemporary life. “That the triumph of such a view has coincided with intellectuals’ renewed suspicion of psychoanalysis should, we believe, give us pause” (8). The essays that constitute the present volume thus insist on the persistence of the desire of the analyst: for knowledge of self and other, and by those who long for interpretive insight into interior lives and social places. The volume thus poses for its readers twin questions: “Why do we continue to desire psychoanalysis, and what should its role be in the cultural criticism of the new millennium?”This collection grew out of a conference organized around this question and thus reflects the varied but not necessarily interconnected papers offered in that setting. In an effort to provide some interconnections, the collection is divided into four sections grouped around the topics of psychoanalysis and the future of cultural criticism, collectivity, the author, and sexuality. The grouping does not, in my estimation, provide unity or coherence to the volume as a whole; nevertheless, each article emerges on its own terms as a strong contribution to the general field of psychoanalytic cultural criticism and critical theory. Henry Sussman’s “Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Cultural Criticism at the Millennium” provides an anchoring perspective to the volume, addressing with particular urgency the mutually transformative desire of and for analysis modeled on the transference/countertransference clinical encounter. This analogy [End Page 153] suggestively sets the stage for a like transformative intervention by the analyst in a cultural critique, while acknowledging that cultural studies provides the best interpretation and assessment of the ways that psychoanalysis operates historically and clinically in contemporary society. Sussman—and indeed many of the contributors—underscores the editors’ organizing declaration that since psychoanalysis derived from lived human experience it stands to reason that “analysis is both the product of and answer to suffering” (15).Thus it comes as something of a surprise that one of its editors, Greg Forter, in “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Psychobiography, and the Fin-de-Siecle Crisis in Masculinity,” locks the subject of psychoanalysis into a stranglehold with his presuppositions about the limits of history and the origins of psychoanalysis in the modern moment: “Because the theory and techniques of psychoanalysis were developed by analyzing modern men and women, psychoanalysis may be a theory of modern subjectivity rather than of subjectivity as such, and its mode of inquiry may be best suited to analyzing the phenomena of modernity” (148). Contrast this limiting and limited sense of the place of psychoanalysis in history (and the concomitant restriction of its utility expressed ironically in a volume with two major articles on premodern cultural texts!) to recent remarks in a new book by Christopher Bollas: “For thousands of years there has been an unconscious preconception of psychoanalysis. We [...] human beings [...] have been searching for... (shrink)

Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both. Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud (...) meets Sarah Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women ; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative. (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)

_Oedipus Lex_ offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions—the poets, women, and outsiders—that legal science has left in its (...) wake. Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law. (shrink)

"In this groundbreaking book Jean Walton subjects psychoanalysis to a sustained and highly illuminating ethnographic critique.

The author applies the fields of gender studies, psychoanalysis, and literature to Talmudic texts. In opposition to the perception of Judaism as a legal system, he argues that the Talmud demands inner spiritual effort, to which the trait of humility and the refinement of the ego are central. This leads to the question of the attitude to the Other, in general, and especially to women. The author shows that the Talmud places the woman (who represents humility and good-heartedness (...) in the Talmudic narratives) above the character of the male depicted in these narratives as a scholar with an inflated sense of self-importance. (shrink)

Although much attention has been given to Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and to French women analysts in their deconstruction of traditional psychoanalysis, little has been available in the US on contemporary male French analysts and their treatment of women. She Speaks/He Listens illustrates the range of thought among some well-known French male psychoanalysts today--from Lacanians to anti-Lacanians to eclectics--with regard to women and sexual difference. Through the interview format, with its possibilities for surprise (...) and spontaneity, the book makes available the thought of Alain Didier-Weill, Bela Grunberger, Patrick Guyomard, Serge Lebovici, Rene Major, Gerard Pommier and Francois Roustang, as well as the internationally famed analyst Otto Kernberg, who gives a fascinating account of the French influences on his work. Other themes addressed include the place of Freud and Lacan in current theory and the relation of feminism to contemporary French male psychoanalysts. (shrink)