Toward a Social Psychoanalysis

Toward a Social Psychoanalysis
Author: Lynne Layton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000037436

Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Pierre Bourdieu, and Marie Langer are among those activists, clinicians, and academics who have called for a social psychoanalysis. For over thirty years, Lynne Layton has heeded this call and produced a body of work that examines unconscious process as it operates both in the social world and in the clinic. In this volume of Layton’s most important papers, she expands on earlier theorists’ ideas of social character by exploring how dominant ideologies and culturally mandated, hierarchical identity prescriptions are lived in individual and relational conflict. Through clinical and cultural examples, Layton describes how enactments of what she calls ‘normative unconscious processes’ reinforce cultural inequalities of race, sex, gender, and class both inside and outside the clinic, and at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Clinicians, academics, and activists alike will find here a deeper understanding of the power of unconscious process, and are called on to envision and enact a progressive future in which vulnerability and interdependency are honored and systemic inequalities dismantled.

Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis

Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis
Author: Elizabeth Abel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1989
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780226000817

"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley "Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society
Author: David Henderson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 144383811X

This collection embraces a range of lively and informed discussions of important themes in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. The chapters grow out of presentations at “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society,” a conference organised by the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, for post-graduate students and research fellows. The essays demonstrate that the future of psychoanalytic studies is full of promise.

With Culture in Mind

With Culture in Mind
Author: Muriel Dimen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1136893164

This is a new kind of anthology. More conversation than collection, it locates the psychic and the social in clinical moments illuminating the analyst's struggle to grasp a patient's internal life as voiced through individual political, social, and material contexts. Each chapter is a single detailed case vignette in which aspects of race, gender, sexual orientation, heritage, ethnicity, class – elements of the sociopolitical matrix of culture – are brought to the fore in the transference-countertransference dimension, demonstrating how they affect the analytic encounter. Additionally, discussions by three senior analysts further deconstruct patients' and analysts' cultural embeddedness as illustrated in each chapter. For the practicing clinician as well as the seasoned academic, this highly readable and intellectually compelling book clearly demonstrates that culture saturates subjective experience – something that all mental health professionals should keep in mind.

Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis
Author: Roger Frie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2022-05-23
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000575438

Winner of the 2023 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize! Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis traces the emergence of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and demonstrates how the radical, cross-disciplinary dialogues that form its foundation are relevant to present-day social and cultural challenges. Psychoanalysts today are grappling with how to address a host of societal and political crises. In the 1930s, a similar set of crises led a group of progressive practitioners and scholars to engage in a radical, cross-disciplinary dialogue that became the foundation for Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. Pioneering psychoanalysts created a form of thought and practice that viewed human suffering through the wider lens of society and culture and provided a means to address the pervasive issues of racism, sexuality and politics in human experience. With contributions from leading psychoanalysts and scholars, and by making use of original sources, this book evidences the significance of this approach to understanding marginalisation today. Written in an open and accessible fashion, Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis demonstrates the importance of the early interpersonal-cultural school for the present moment. The book will appeal to a broad audience in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the history of medicine, and social and cultural theory.

Freud and Culture

Freud and Culture
Author: Eric Smadja
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 042991394X

In this book Eric Smadja explores the representations of society and culture that Freud developed in the course of his work. Distinct from contemporary sociological and anthropological conceptions, they led to his construction of a personal socio-anthropology that was virulently criticised by the social sciences. But what exactly is meant here by 'culture' and 'society'? Do we mean Freud's own Viennese society or Western, 'civilised' society in general? In addition, Freud was interested in historical and 'primitive' societies from the evolutionist perspective of the British anthropologists of his time. This book considers the interrelationship between these different societies and cultures, and raises many questions. What constitutes a culture? What are its essential traits, its functions, its relationships with society, with nature, and with other aspects of 'reality' or of the 'external world'? How did Freud construct the idea of culture? What roles does culture play in the development of the individual, in the construction and functioning of his or her psyche?

Shrink

Shrink
Author: Lawrence R. Samuel
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1496211405

"Psychology has stepped down from the university chair into the marketplace" was how the New York Times put it in 1926. Another commentator in 1929 was more biting. Psychoanalysis, he said, had over a generation, "converted the human scene into a neurotic." Freud first used the word around 1895, and by the 1920s psychoanalysis was a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the United States. How it gained such purchase, taking hold in virtually every aspect of American culture, is the story Lawrence R. Samuel tells in Shrink, the first comprehensive popular history of psychoanalysis in America. Arriving on the scene at around the same time as the modern idea of the self, psychoanalysis has both shaped and reflected the ascent of individualism in American society. Samuel traces its path from the theories of Freud and Jung to the innermost reaches of our current me-based, narcissistic culture. Along the way he shows how the arbiters of culture, high and low, from public intellectuals, novelists, and filmmakers to Good Housekeeping and the Cosmo girl, mediated or embraced psychoanalysis (or some version of it), until it could be legitimately viewed as an integral feature of American consciousness.

Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture

Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture
Author: Jacob Johanssen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2018-10-31
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1351052047

Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture offers a comprehensive account of our contemporary media environment—digital culture and audiences in particular—by drawing on psychoanalysis and media studies frameworks. It provides an introduction to the psychoanalytic affect theories of Sigmund Freud and Didier Anzieu and applies them theoretically and methodologically in a number of case studies. Johanssen argues that digital media fundamentally shape our subjectivities on affective and unconscious levels, and he critically analyses phenomena such as television viewing, Twitter use, affective labour on social media, and data-mining. How does watching television involve the body? Why are we so drawn to reality television? Why do we share certain things on social media and not others? How are bodies represented on social media? How do big data and data mining influence our identities? Can algorithms help us make better decisions? These questions amongst others are addressed in the chapters of this wide-ranging book. Johanssen shows in a number of case studies how a psychoanalytic angle can bring new insights to audience studies and digital media research more generally. From audience research with viewers of the reality television show Embarrassing Bodies and how they unconsciously used it to work through feelings about their own bodies, to a critical engagement with Hardt and Negri's notion of affective labour and how individuals with bodily differences used social media for their own affective-digital labour, the book suggests that an understanding of affect based on Freud and Anzieu is helpful when thinking about media use. The monograph also discusses the perverse implications of algorithms, big data and data mining for subjectivities. In drawing on empirical data and examples throughout, Johanssen presents a compelling analysis of our contemporary media environment.

Psychoanalytic Culture

Psychoanalytic Culture
Author: Ian Parker
Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1997-09-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN:

Parker systematically reviews the key psychoanalytic theories and explores their significance to modern life. This analysis incorporates the work of figures ranging from Adorno, Habermas and Fromm to Klein, Kristeva, Winnicott and Zizek.

Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change

Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change
Author: Neil Altman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2015-03-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317515684

Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization addresses the current status of mental health work in the public and private sectors. The careful, thorough, approach to the individual person characteristic of psychoanalysis is mostly the province of an affluent few. Meanwhile, community-based mental health treatment, given shrinking budgets, tends to emphasize medication and short-term therapies. In an increasingly diverse society, considerations of culture in mental health treatment are given short shrift, despite obligatory nods to cultural competence. The field of mental health has suffered from the mutual isolation of psychoanalysis, community-based clinical work, and cultural studies. Here, Neil Altman shows how these areas of study and practice require and enrich each other - the field of psychoanalysis benefits by engaging marginalized communities; community-based clinical work benefits from psychoanalytic concepts, while all forms of clinical work benefit from awareness of culture. Including reports of clinical experiences and programmatic developments from around the world, its international scope explores the operation of culture and cultural differences in conceptions of mental health. In addition the book addresses the origin and treatment of mental illness, from notions of spirit possession treated by shamans, to conceptions of psychic trauma, to biological understandings and pharmacological treatments. In the background of this discussion is globalization, the impact of which is tracked in terms of its psychological effects on people, as well as on the resources and programs available to provide psychological care around the world. As a unique examination of current mental health work, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, community-based mental health workers, and students in Cultural Studies. Neil Altman is a psychoanalytic psychologist, Visiting Professor at Ambedkar University of Delhi, India, and faculty and supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute. He is an Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society and Editor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Author of The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2010)