Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

Front Cover
Peter Brooks, Alex Woloch, Professor of English at Stanford University Alex Woloch
Yale University Press, 2000 M01 1 - 342 pages
One hundred years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remains the most frequently cited author of our culture -- and one of the most controversial. To some he is the presiding genius of modernity, to others the author of its symptomatic illnesses. The current position of psychoanalysis is very much at issue. Is it still valid as a theory of the mind? Have its therapeutic applications been rendered obsolete by drugs? Why does it still figure in debates about sexual identity, despite its rejection by many feminists? How docs it contribute to cultural analysis?

This book offers a new assessment of the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and a discourse in contemporary culture. It brings together an exceptional group of theorists and practitioners, such partisans and critics of Freud as Frederic Crews, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Wollheim, Jonathan Lear, and others. These contributors, who are active in literature, philosophy, film, history, cultural studies, neuroscience, psychotherapy, and other disciplines, debate how psychoanalysis has enriched -- and been enriched by -- these fields.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Part One Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents
13
Between Therapy and Hermeneutics?
65
Part Three Psychoanalysis and Sexual Identity
139
Part Four Psychoanalysis and the Historiography of Modern Culture
173
Part Five Psychoanalysis and Theories of Mind
243
What Kind of Truth?
291
List of Contributors
333
Index
337
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