This book examines the contentious relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology as it has played out in disputes surrounding the Oedipus complex. Here, Eric Smadja explores the complicated historical and epistemological conditions leading up to the emergence of the conflict between the two disciplines. He considers the origins of each science, the "creation" of the Oedipus complex, and the place, role and influence of Freud's key and controversial work Totem and Taboo, both in the history of psychoanalysis (...) and as it connects with anthropology internationally. Focusing on such key figures as Bronislaw Malinowski, Ernest Jones, Franz Boas, Georges Devereux, Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, Smadja charts the course of the debate as it unfolded during the twentieth century and tracks its contemporary status of the debate, with a focus on figures in both France and the United States. Discussing the divergences and convergences between the two fields, he compares and contrasts their historical, epistemological and methodological features and reflects on the new "acculturative" disciplines emerging from their interaction. The book concludes with a look at what the conflictual history of these two human sciences can tell us about the history of ideas and their processes and modes of communication. Exploring a dispute which reaches back to the very beginnings of psychoanalysis and anthropology, The Oedipus Complex will appeal to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, psychotherapists and academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, anthropology and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Analysis of the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipus myth which functions as a paradigm case for the Oedipus complex reveals the neglect of certain essential details. Moreover, it appears that clinical material as presented by psychoanalysts in support of the Oedipus complex is strongly biased towards the acceptance of the hypothesis that the Oedipus complex is a universal phenomenon. In this article arguments are given that cast serious doubt on the validity of psychoanalytic (...) theory. The author proposes a new interpretation which explains the putative Oedipal conflict in the child as the projection of parental aggression on the child. (shrink)

_Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex_ examines the progressive construction of the notion of paternal function and its central relevance in psychoanalysis. The distinction between the _murdered father _and the _dead father_ is seen as providing a paradigm for the understanding of different types of psychopathologies, as well as works of literature, anthropology and historical events. New concepts are introduced, such as "_a father is being beaten_", and a distinction between the _descriptive après coup_ and the _dynamic (...) après coup_ that provides a model for a psychoanalytic understanding of temporality. The book includes a reflection on how the concepts of the _death instinct_ and the _negative_, in their connection with that which is at the limits of representability, are an aid to an understanding of Auschwitz, a moment of rupture in European culture that the author characterizes as " the murder of the dead father". Perelberg’s book is an important clinical and intellectual marker, and will be required reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as students in all these disciplines. (shrink)

프로이트는 19세기 말에 ‘의식’의 세계에 의혹을 제기하면서 의식의 세계는 빙산의 일각일 뿐 진정으로 자신을 지배하는 것은 ‘무의식’이라고 주장하면서 정신분석학이 태동하게 되었다. 인간은 무의식의 세계를 가지고 있으며 무의식의 지배를 강력하게 받고 있는 것이다. 무의식의 핵심적 위치를 차지하고 있는 것이 바로 오이디푸스 콤플렉스이다. 한 자연인이 사회적, 문화적 주체로 탄생하는 과정을 설명해주는 이 오이디푸스 콤플렉스의 영향력은 막강했다. 라캉은 프로이트의 자연주의적, 생물학적 접근법의 한계를 언어 기호적 관점에서 재해석함으로써 프로이트의 한계를 완전히 극복한다. 인간의 욕망은 결국 타자와의 관계 속에서 발생하는 욕망으로서 그 욕망은 결핍을 초래한다. 라캉은 (...) 그 결핍을 통해서 타자와 분리된 주체가 상징질서에 진입하게 되는 과정을 분석한다. 라캉의 오이디푸스 콤플렉스의 인식론에서 가장 중요한 개념이 바로 ‘팔루스’(phallus)와 ‘상징적 아버지’의 존재성이다. 팔루스는 상징질서에 남녀의 성을 위치시키는 기표로서 아버지의 권력과 거세의 공포를 의미한다. 상징적 아버지는 생물학적 아버지를 말하는 것이 아니라 ‘아버지의 이름’(Name-of-the-Father)이라는 상징적 기표이다. 이 과정을 통해서 인간은 존재차원에서 의미차원으로, 자연상태에서 문화의 공간으로 이동하는 성적 정체성을 가진 인간으로 탄생되는 과정을 설명해준다. 그러나 이 글에서 프로이트가 우연히 알게 된 오이디푸스신화에서 오이디푸스 콤플렉스의 개념을 차용하게 된 과정과 그것이 어떻게 라캉에게서 변주되었으며, 그것과 정신병리현상과의 관계를 살펴보고 오이디푸스 콤플렉스의 의와 한계를 비판해보고자 한다. (shrink)

If the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to rigorous and thoroughgoing analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology, and narratology, might it invalidate the approach to the 'Oedipus complex' that Freud derived from his psychoanalytic experience? This book answers 'yes', arguing that instead of the Oedipus complex explaining the myth, the Oedipus myth explains the complex. The author argues that the Oedipus myth is an historical anomaly, a myth of (...) failed royal investiture or of avoided masculine initiation. Does this mean that we must return to the wisdom of tradition and strike out twenty-five centuries of Oedipal history? The author knows very well that such a solution would be fantasy, and he concludes by speculating on how his analysis might contribute to a vision that has eluded Freudian psychoanalysis: how to surpass the Oedipus complex, with all the ethical consequences this would entail. (shrink)

First English translation of Nasio's groundbreaking work on the Oedipus complex.

This article develops an analysis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in relation to the mythological and literary-theatrical place the play holds in the history of psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan, not to mention Foucault’s counter-psychoanalytic reading. How do we see the constitutive relation between this play and the Freudian complex? Does Lacanian psychoanalysis help illuminate the play as a tragedy of desire in alienation? The paper argues for a tragedy of desire’s Otherness in Sophocles’ play, showing how the parental (...) alterity is configured in the shifting dynamics of paternal and maternal signifiers. Be it in the divine oracle or the chorus, the play accentuates the field of Other to activate the tragedy of desire and chanellizes it through affects like guilt, shame and self-reproach, inscribed on the subject’s body in the form of scopic and invocatory drives. The paper concludes by reflecting on the status of the unconscious as knowledge, complicating Foucault’s interpretation and presenting a tragedy of the desire-to-know that produces existence without desire as an experience of suffering. (shrink)

The article shows the importance of the paternal metaphor and the function of the father in psychoanalysis, as well as some misunderstandings that can occur regarding this function in philosophy, namely Deleuze and Guattari's critique of the father as a normative function of castration. It focuses on Freud's and Lacan's conception of the Oedipus complex and underlines some crucial changes that Lacan introduced while reading Freud's work and while constantly returning in his teaching to his own previous conceptions. (...) Finally, the article argues that it is not possible to ignore the function of the father and aspire to create a new sort of psychoanalytic practice by entirely avoiding the difficult and constitutive role of this function. (shrink)

_First English translation of Nasio's groundbreaking work on the Oedipus complex._.

_First English translation of Nasio's groundbreaking work on the Oedipus complex._.

A reassessment of Freud's central concept of the Oedipus complex, using the interlocking perspectives of biography, intellectual history and Greek tragedy. The study establishes how Freud reached his formulation through his own self-analysis and clinical work.

Avec Totem et tabou, Freud entame la première démarche majeure d’interprétation psychanalytique de données ethnographiques, le conduisant en particulier à situer le complexe d’Œdipe au fondement des premières institutions sociales et à repérer l’action de processus inconscients dans leur élaboration. De plus, en posant l’universalité du complexe d’Œdipe tant psychique que culturelle, il réalise une véritable effraction dans le champ d’investigation des anthropologues, suscitant chez eux des réactions aussi violentes que variées. C’est cette histoire souvent faite de méconnaissance, de défiance (...) et de malentendus entre la psychanalyse et l’anthropologie — ces deux sciences de l’homme toutes deux nées au XIXe siècle — que relate Éric Smadja. Après avoir exposé les conditions épistémologiques et historiques d’instauration de ce débat conflictuel, l’auteur le développe suivant un fil chronologique qui l’amène à explorer ses déterminants et ses enjeux, mais aussi les caractéristiques de ces deux disciplines. Se dévoile alors un moment de l’histoire des idées. (shrink)

In recent years there has been great attention paid to the so-called Italian theory in the field of political philosophy. This definition has brought to the fore Italian thinking, but at the same time also covers many reflections of the past several decades, by creating a category easily disclosable but also restricted to a few authors and topics. To this regard, I want to highlight the philosophical work of Ubaldo Fadini, professor of philosophy at the University of Florence, who for (...) many years has been dedicated to the German and French philosophical tradition, crossing different disciplines and combining aesthetic and ethical issues to frame the subjectivity and the institutions into the post-Fordist era. -/- Since his work is multi-faceted and broad, I would suggest first reading Il desiderio in America (The desire in America) for his ‘achipelago-politics’. Fadini addresses the issue of desire in Deleuze with an approach that escapes the opportunity and claim to be an interpretive key from which to see everything systemically. His work wisely touches on several authors and issues, from Kafka to Melville, Spinoza and Nietzsche, and many others, addressing the dynamics of a desire, debt, conscience, responsibility and law. These are, therefore, multiple inputs to desiring, which does not hide the dotted plurality of the brothers in the world, beyond the tight grip of the Oedipal triangle, i.e. the father-mother-child relationship. It follows a not only a psychological issue but also a political one, thus it regards the delineation of a field of forces in which ‘who’ acts – and speaks – is not only the person (a term which in Latin refers to theatrical mask, but well-defined identity fictitious necessary to enter the scene and carry on a story), but the scene itself, produced by relations not illuminated by the light of the show. The plural world of the brothers is the American one, in which the Oedipal relationship with the father-homeland is cut in the name of equality, contrary to colonial subjection (of which Fanon has also shown the psychic character revealing the mechanism of the colonized that internalized the oedipal function of the dominus. Fanon, in fact, has linked the production of subjectivity employee with the apparatus of colonial subordination). -/- To this aside to Deleuzian thought, Fadini adds another, but productively connects to the first: from the cut with the father was not born the son (as in Hegelian-Lacanian interpretation or dialectical-psychoanalytic who wants the definition of the son from by the conflict with his father), but the brothers, the concrete manifold in which the father is not necessary but is placed from time to time in the decision-making function of the uncertainty, in the mobile uncertainty of the brothers in their organization. That this is happening is not a scandal. That this would represent a danger, as Fadini states, is a necessary point to be aware. Maybe, the problem arises when this function is preached the need: no, the fathers are not necessary. And even mothers. We reiterate: it is a political issue around which affirms or denies the legal capacity of the many in favor of the one. The one may be different persons: those who came before, the old, the wise, the priest who runs the border between the world and underworld with the rules applied on the swinging from one place to another, the legislature, the owner. The reason why the scope of the one is so problematic is mainly related to the mechanism he establishes so to ex-istere. It is a mechanism for fault-liability-debt, such as a pyramid which is based on a ‘primary’ concept, namely that of the absence. The paternal function certainly sums up everything in a person: the father is the legislator, he was there before, is older, closer to the world of the dead, but even in that of the living, owns the world, provides rules – even interpretation – to be applied to the fluctuations of life. A really great invention, no doubt about it, higher than that of basileus-priest, more functional, yes, more functional. -/- As in The Wizard of Oz, a narrative that is served in an American election campaign and, as Graeber reminds us, explains the necessity of the idea of debt so to found the new relationship between money and gold, the legislator is microscopic compared to the effects of the conviction that is produced on a large scale, not only on his community but also on the foreigners who come to him in search of completeness. The vacuum is once again an instrument of domination, nothing else. Lack of confidence, of course. Lack of confidence in the ability of the brothers. In the story of The Wizard of Oz, the wizard was well-intentioned and therefore the trick is revealed, however, he reaffirms his role by giving foreigners a certificate of completion that settles the existential debt. Lack of confidence and perhaps even the reading of fairy tales. We don’t need ‘real’ narrations but concrete tales, and, as Fadini says, archipelagos and pirates and cartographers. (shrink)

_Electra vs Oedipus_ explores the deeply complex and often turbulent relationship between mothers and daughters. In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s conviction that the father is the central figure, the book puts forward the notion that women are in fact far more occupied with their mother. Drawing on the author’s extensive clinical experience, the book provides numerous case studies which shed light on women’s emotional development. Topics include: love and hate between mothers and daughters the history of maternal love childbirth (...) and depression rejected mothers. _Electra vs Oedipus_ will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and all those with an interest in the dynamics of the mother–daughter relationship. (shrink)

Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is an extended meditation on the limits of human intelligence, or more precisely, on how a man renowned for the power of his intellect could fail to know the most important truths. One could argue, however, that Sophocles intended for his audiences to take away a second, narrower lesson: namely that divinely inspired seers such as Tiresias have a surer claim on truth than do those who, like Oedipus, seek to gain knowledge through their (...) own efforts. Thus, the Oedipus can be seen as a defense of prophecy and a reaction against the complex of scientific and philosophical ideas known as “the 5th-century Enlightenment.” I offer some support for this reading of the Oedipus. I also argue that part of the cultural background of the Oedipus consisted of ideas about knowledge introduced into Greek thought by the outspoken critic of Greek popular religion, Xenophanes of Colophon. (shrink)

Published in 1972, Anti‐Oedipus was the first of a number of collaborative works between the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and the French psychoanalyst and political activist, Felix Guattari. As the first of a two‐volume body of work that bears the subtitle, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti‐Oedipus is, to say the least, an unconventional work that should be understood, in part, as a product of its time – created as it was among the political and revolutionary fervour engendered by the (...) events of ‘May 1968’. However, this paper will suggest that Anti‐Oedipus – as a critique of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex, as well as being a study of the relationship between capitalism and schizophrenia – should also be understood in a less ‘time‐bound’ fashion. In particular, the paper will examine Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of a concept of ‘desire’ and its employment in relation to subjectivity, time, capitalism, representation, and the radical ‘therapeutic’ practice that they refer to as ‘schizoanalysis’. Moreover, nearly 40 years after the events of May 1968 and against possible doubts concerning the contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis, it will be suggested that psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex are to be understood as symptomatic of a wider ‘malaise’ that can be discerned within psychiatry, psychotherapy, and contemporary capitalist society itself, and that it is this that forms the broader target of the book’s critique. Accordingly, by providing an accessible and critical introduction to Anti‐Oedipus, the paper also hopes to stimulate further discussion and research regarding both the critique and the contribution that the work can make to contemporary psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Medusa Complex:Matricide and the Fantasy of CastrationJessica Elbert MayockThe theoretical structures of psychoanalysis have excluded the female subject by placing her outside of the Symbolic, and feminist theorists' responses to this problem have been divided. Some theorists (such as Kristeva) accept the notion of an unalterable Lacanian Symbolic, while others (such as Irigaray) maintain that the current Symbolic is a manifestation of male fantasy, and suggest that (...) feminist thinkers explore the possibility of reorganizing the Symbolic. Amber Jacobs, in her recent work On Matricide (2007), takes up this challenge by analyzing matricide in myth in order to reveal matricide as latent content untheorized within psychoanalysis. Jacobs claims that the structure of the Lacanian Symbolic illegitimately asserts the "law of the father" as the only possible law, excluding any possibility of a "law of the mother" by erasing the maternal role in theory and symbolization. Her project, following Irigaray, is to make visible those unconscious contents excluded by the patriarchal imaginary in order to "be able to intervene into psychoanalysis for the purpose of working toward theorization of unconscious structures that are not reducible to the structure of Oedipus alone" (Jacobs 2007, x). If Jacobs's suggestion is correct, then analysis of Freud's evidence for the Oedipus Complex (and its accompanying concepts) will reveal repressed contents and traces of these untheorized unconscious structures—particularly those associated with the maternal body.With these considerations in mind, I take up the Freudian case of Little Hans, where Freud finds his most seminal evidence for castration anxiety [End Page 158] and the Oedipus Complex. I will demonstrate Freud's systematic occlusion of the maternal body through his overvaluation of the male body/the phallus in order to expose the elements of male fantasy that construct the Oedipus Complex. I organize these psychical elements in a configuration called "The Medusa Complex," since Freud uses the image of Medusa to explain his theory of castration. In rereading the details of this case, a powerful male fantasy begins to emerge: the desire to appropriate the female generative power. This is achieved through the theory of castration, which the decapitation of Medusa symbolizes, and the unconscious wish for male parthenogenesis—one product of this wish is the Lacanian Symbolic structure, where only the male principle of the phallus is generative. The Medusa Complex is comprised of the two intertwined male fantasies of female castration and male parthenogenesis, as well as the associated resistances that result from initiation into this paradigm. The theory of castration and the Oedipus Complex are attempts to conceal the powerful maternal body and assert male superiority and dominance.In the case of Little Hans, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy" (1909), Little Hans develops a fear of horses (especially biting horses) and is afraid to go out into the street. Hans's treatment is undertaken by his father, a medical doctor, who keeps careful notes and acts under Freud's supervision (mostly via letters). The boy's phobia begins around the time his little sister Hanna is born, as Freud and the father eventually admit, though her role in their narrative is nonexistent.1 They interpret Hans's phobia as a classic Oedipal triangle in which he desires his mother and fears the hostility of his father; his fear is translated into fear of the castrating father. Throughout the case, Freud and the father emphasize the boy's alleged awe of the adult male genital organ. In this paper, I will revisit the case (preserved in careful detail by the boy's father) and systematically return the maternal body to its rightful place within the narrative, shifting both the structure and the meaning of the phobia.I am here reading the case as an example of manifest content—like the surface content of a dream—in order to expose the male desires that create it. The current Symbolic is essentially a dream of the male imaginary, and my method is to reveal the latent content of the dream, especially the fantasies that inform it. Desire is the generating force behind this dream, and until we encounter and understand this desire, it will continue to compulsively... (shrink)

The distribution of the parts among the actors in the O.C. is a problem that has long defied solution. In all the other extant plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides the dramatis personae can without difficulty be divided between three actors: but the construction of the O.C. is so complex that it does not admit any such simple allocation. When the part of Oedipus has been assigned to the first actor, and that of Antigone to the second, the (...) roles of the Stranger , Ismene , Creon , and Polyneices must clearly belong to the third: who, then, is to play Theseus ? It seems impossible to allot the part complete to any one of the three actors. Faced by this crux, all those who have dealt with the subject have chosen one or the other of two clear-cut alternatives, either the assumption of a fourth regular actor, or else the splitting-up of the single part of Theseus between two or three actors. These two alternatives, both of which are far from satisfactory—the former infringing the three-actor rule, the latter offending against scenic probability and realism—are fully examined below; at the end of the paper a new part-distribution is suggested, which, it is hoped, avoids both these faults. (shrink)

The article discusses thematic representations of the city of Thebes in the two central myths of Phoinissai: that of autochthony and the family of Oedipus. The author examines the aberrant nature of autochthonic reproduction specifically in relation to the femaleness of the earth and the effect of this on the present generation, also taking into account the complex ‘gendering’ of the last of the autochthons, Menoikeus, who dies for the city. Discussion of the city’s role in the (...) class='Hi'>Oedipus myth includes the complex relationship of Oedipus’ two sons with their native city and associated difficulties of identity and belonging which are linked with the family history of violence between males and with a problematic connection with the native- or fatherland. (shrink)

While Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is concerned with psycho-sexual development, it concomitantly presents a novel historical-political imagination. This article compares the post-Oedipal self with the selves envisioned by Nietzsche and Marx, suggesting that while these 19th-century theorists constructed selves that are able to transcend the normalizing and subjugating circumstances of modernity, Freud’s theory defines a healthy self as irredeemably embedded in the prevailing culture and life-orders. In making his case, Freud spurns the quests of Nietzsche and (...) Marx for wholeness of the individual and for self-authorship, and presents the self as structurally agonistic, riven and thoroughly molded by society. (shrink)

This time travel story uses Novikov consistency to suggest a way out for a protagonist cast as an Oedipus character. Written as the staff writer for Philosofict.

Freud’s psychoanalysis of Little Hans is a defining moment in psychoanalytic theory, because it marks the first psychoanalytic attempt ever to analyze childhood as an actuality rather than a set of recollected experiences. This article aims to explain Deleuze and Guattari’s dismissal of Freud’s interpretation as an act of silencing the children that is meant to corroborate his own theories of psychosexual development and particularly the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari are not against psychoanalytic interpretation in and of (...) itself as a creative intervention into the lived actuality of the analysand, but they think that Freudian psychoanalysis misses the opportunity by tracing every aspect of individual existence back to familial figures and relationships. While Freud considers the case of Little Hans as a verification of his theory of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari regard the case as a perfect example of how psychoanalytic suggestion often distorts the utterances of the analysand for its own interests, thereby failing altogether to grasp the logic of becoming as an escape from familial determinations. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: A Dilemma for Moderate Constructivism Is the Dilemma Flawed? Intentional Objects Salience Creation as Property Change Can One Escape the Dilemma by Rejecting Bivalence? Indeterminacy and Imputation Historical Constructivism Oeuvres Conclusion Notes.

Questo articolo si occupa principalmente di tre questioni: come si interagisce quotidianamente con un messaggio codificato? Come questa interazione e la conseguente decodifica incidono sulla prassi dei soggetti interagenti? Come questo aspetto della vita quotidiana si riflette sulla pratica filosofica? Queste tre problematiche sono affrontate attraverso l’aiuto di due concetti: la “lettura affettiva” si rapporta principalmente alle prime due, mentre “l’ermeneutica strategica” si occupa più da vicino la terza problematica. Pertanto questo articolo inizia domandandosi cosa sia di preciso la lettura (...) affettiva e cerca di mostrare come questo particolare tipo di lettura è praticato quotidianamente per orientarci all’interno del nostro commercio con il mondo. L’attenzione si sposta quindi a quali siano le applicazioni filosofiche di tale concetto per mostrare come lo si possa ritrovare abbondantemente anche nella nostra pratica disciplinare. A questo punto l’ermeneutica strategica entra nel vivo della scena, poiché questo concetto è esattamente l’applicazione metodica della lettura affettiva come strumento filosofico. Viene quindi mostrato cosa significhi impiegare la lettura affettiva come metodo e viene fornito un esempio di tale attività. Viene infine mostrato come questo metodo filosofico influenzi la nascita e la formazione della soggettività filosofica attraverso la prospettiva fornita dalla teoria lacaniana del complesso edipico. (shrink)

This article aims to put face to face the positions of Deleuze and Lacan in relation to the theories regarding the idea of the Oedipus complex inherited from Freudian psychoanalysis. This confrontation will become manifest by reviewing the concepts of desire, repression and castration, from the point of view of the subject’s relationship with language. In order to achieve this purpose, we will go through the topological proposals whereby both Deleuze and Lacan render account of that which is (...) housed outside the signifying logic, the paradigmatic axis of which is precisely the Oedipal Logic, thus forging a cutting-edge work in which the materiality of language, its sonority and texture will acquire relevance to rethink the status of the unconscious itself. (shrink)

This book is based on the work done by a group of British and Italian psychoanalysts who have been meeting twice yearly since 2003 to study clinically the relationship between the mind and the body of their patients The analytical dyad became the focus of a dialectical movement between body and mind and between subject and object. Containing contributions from a range of distinguished British and Italian analysts, this book covers such key topics as somatic symptoms, the embodied unconscious, bodily (...) expressions of affect, sexuality, violence, self-harm, suicide attempts, hypochondria, hysteria, anorexia and bulimia, splits and fragmentation associated with the body. The theoretical understanding is inspired by various psychoanalytic theoreticians, including Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Bion and their theories on sexuality, infantile sexuality, libido, aggressiveness, dead instinct, Oedipus complex and mother-child relationship. Offering new advances in theoretical thinking and practical applications for clinical work, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and mental health clinicians interested in understanding serious mental disturbance that is represented in the body. (shrink)

Although many people find fault with Freud, the horse that they flog is not yet dead. I should in fact maintain that we are all still under Freud's long shadow. Last autumn the American press reported a dreadful crime: a young man, egged on by his mother, murdered his father. The newspapers helpfully explained that the young man had a very prominent Oedipus complex. If we dismiss this as just a journalistic excess, we would do well to remember (...) how hard it is to open our own mouths without registering the effect of Freud upon the language. We converse casually about the sexual proclivities of infants, about sibling rivalries, about dependency upon the mother, about sadomasochistic impulses. When we forget things, we suspect ourselves of having wanted to forget them. We may shun the technical vocabulary of Freud, words such as ego, superego, id, the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the anal, oral, and genital stages, yet we are hardly likely to do without such words as aggression, anxiety, compulsion, the unconscious, defense mechanism, narcissism, death wish, erogenous zones, fixation, guilt feeling, sublimation, wish fulfillment. Freud may not have invented most of these words, yet he connected them together and he gave them a special color and shape. And quite apart from terminology, Freud has given us the conviction that a secret life is going on within us that is only partly under our control. (shrink)

Freud, the Contemporary Super ego and the West traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the twenty first century. Giosue Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as the return of the religious, presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud. Ghisalberti argues that the West has regressed to an infantile and (...) primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, the obsessional neuroses. The book reexamines Freuds early psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and returns to his grounding ideals and a comprehensive defense of the coming to be human in modernity. Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego and the West will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, political theory and the humanities. (shrink)

theories. What was Freud thinking, when, and why and what were the major influences which shaped his ideas? We follow the inner movement of his theory construction, its meaning and coherence, as well as his conceptual logic and personal directions concerning his evolving views of the reciprocal interactions between mind and body, the motivational force of instinctual drives, and the dominant role of sexuality rooted in evolutionary biology in human development, behaviour, and the creation of neurotic disturbances. We follow Freud's (...) construction and sequential reconstructions of his theoretical models concerning the nature, dynamics, and principles of unconscious mental functioning, including his changing concepts on the nature and purpose of dreams. We trace his changing views on the role of deferred action of early childhood experiences and the determining role of unconscious fantasy, psychic reality, in the formation of adult character structure and neuroses. Through such historical analysis this book provides grounding for a meaningful understanding of Freud's familiar concepts: id, ego, superego, and the Oedipus complex. We explore what these concepts meant to Freud, why he conceived them, and what functions they served in his theory of mind. This is the perfect book for students and trainees wanting to learn more about the development of Freud's ideas, as well as for established psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in expanding their knowledge of Freud's theories. (shrink)

A close examination of the relationship between media, art, and the "Electra complex" The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of "the girl" as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl's escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. Presenting an interpretation of contemporary technics, Anti-Electra argues that technology today encompasses Electra's gadgets (...) and toys. According to von Samsonow, satellite drive technologies such as wireless telephones, WLAN, and GPS echo the "preoedipal constellation" that the girl specializes in. And with the help of the girl, the cartography of overlapping zones between humankind and animals, as well as between humankind and apparatuses, is redesigned through what the book holds as a "radical totemism." Anti-Electra ultimately offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society. (shrink)

This book is based on the work done by a group of British and Italian psychoanalysts who have been meeting twice yearly since 2003 to study clinically the relationship between the mind and the body of their patients The analytical dyad became the focus of a dialectical movement between body and mind and between subject and object. Containing contributions from a range of distinguished British and Italian analysts, this book covers such key topics as somatic symptoms, the embodied unconscious, bodily (...) expressions of affect, sexuality, violence, self-harm, suicide attempts, hypochondria, hysteria, anorexia and bulimia, splits and fragmentation associated with the body. The theoretical understanding is inspired by various psychoanalytic theoreticians, including Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Bion and their theories on sexuality, infantile sexuality, libido, aggressiveness, dead instinct, Oedipus complex and mother-child relationship. Offering new advances in theoretical thinking and practical applications for clinical work, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and mental health clinicians interested in understanding serious mental disturbance that is represented in the body. (shrink)

A vivacious biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who along with Voltaire and Rousseau built the foundations of the modern world, and travelled as far as Russia to enlighten the Tsarina Catherine the Great. Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most compelling and personal writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his most daring books (...) for posterity-for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings that he left behind after his death, Diderot dreamed of natural selection before Darwin, the Oedipus complex before Freud, and genetic manipulation centuries before Dolly the Sheep was born. Even more audaciously, the writer challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of slave trade, to the limits of human sexuality. He was also keenly aware of the dangers of absolute power, about which he wrote so persuasively that it led Catherine the Great not only to support him financially but also to invite him to St. Petersburg. In this thematically organized biography, Andrew Curran vividly describes Diderot's tormented relationship with Rousseau, his feud with Voltaire, his tortured marriage, his passionate affairs, and his often-paradoxical stand on art, morality, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how a man's character flaws and limitations are often the flip side of his genius and his ability to break taboos, dogmas, and conventions. (shrink)

This essay argues that Freud’s case of Little Hans, while complicated by Hans’ father’s dual role in the analysis and in the Oedipal drama itself, provides valuable insight into the nature of psychoanalytic evidence and argument. The case provides direct, if sometimes ambiguous, evidence concerning primal phantasies and infantile sexuality--issues of universality, the role of experience, and the nature of phantasy are explored. Four strands of Freud’s analysis of Little Hans’ horse phobia are also explored. While the toxicological theory of (...) anxiety is problematical and was subsequently abandoned by Freud himself, the other strands have great explanatory power and offer advantages over behaviorist and other alternative accounts. A kind of theoretical rigor in the concepts employed is argued to be among those advantages. The inevitably theory-laden character of observation is emphasized throughout, and it is argued that psychoanalysis provides a far more powerful theory than certain critiques would allow. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic theory can be regarded as a cogent extension of commonsense psychology by interpretive means internal to it.

The immensely influential work of Jacques Lacan challenges readers both for the difficulty of its style and for the wide range of intellectual references that frame its innovations. Lacan’s work is challenging too, for the way it recentres psychoanalysis on one of the most controversial points of Freud’s theory – the concept of a self-destructive drive or ‘death instinct’. Originally published in 1991, _Death and Desire_ presents in Lacanian terms a new integration of psychoanalytic theory in which the battery of (...) key Freudian concepts – from the dynamics of the Oedipus complex to the topography of ego, id, and superego – are seen to intersect in Freud’s most far-reaching and speculative formulation of a drive toward death. Boothby argues that Lacan repositioned the theme of death in psychoanalysis in relation to Freud’s main concern – the nature and fate of desire. In doing so, Lacan rediscovered Freud’s essential insights in a manner so nuanced and penetrating that prevailing assessments of the death instinct may well have to be re-examined. Although the death instinct is usually regarded as the most obscure concept in Freud’s metapsychology, and Lacan to be the most perplexing psychoanalytic theorist, Richard Boothby’s straightforward style makes both accessible. He illustrates the coherence of Lacanian thought and shows how Lacan’s work comprises a ‘return to Freud’ along new and different angles of approach. Written with an eye to the conceptual structure of psychoanalytic theory, _Death and Desire_ will appeal to psychoanalysts and philosophers alike. (shrink)

This book is not concerned with the use of Freudian concepts for the interpretation of literary and artistic works. Rather, it is concerned with why this interpretation plays such an important role in demonstrating the contemporary relevance of psychoanalytic concepts. In order for Freud to use the Oedipus complex as a means for the interpretation of texts, it was necessary first of all for a particular notion of Oedipus, belonging to the Romantic reinvention of Greek antiquity, to (...) have produced a certain idea of the power of that thought which does not think, and the power of that speech which remains silent. From this it does not follow that the Freudian unconscious was already prefigured by the aesthetic unconscious. Freud's 'aesthetic' analyses reveal instead a tension between the two forms of unconscious. In this concise and brilliant text Rancière brings out this tension and shows us what is at stake in this confrontation. (shrink)

By ‘the unity of psychology’ I mean something one might also express by saying that the psychology of human beings is part of the psychology of animals generally. Perhaps there are several different ways of trying to trace out the ramifications of the idea that psychology is one. A central consideration, I think, is likely to be some sort of principle of continuity up and down the scale of nature. The idea would be that up and down the scale of (...) animated or ensouled things there are always psychological continuities, never any strict discontinuity. If human beings can get angry, can want to get ahead in life, can see an illusion, can develop an Oedipus complex, then so can some lower animal do either the very same thing, something similar, or at least something analogous. (shrink)