Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions Book

Dispatches from the Freud Wars consists of six of John Forrester's recent essays on Freudian psychoanalysis and its cultural implications, as well as an amusing epilogue in which the ghost of Freud is allowed to comment on current reactions to his thoughts. In the introduction, Forrester states the underlying rationale of the essays: "The more one knows about Freud--the more one has unlearned what one was culturally hard-wired to know about him--the more interesting and surprising and thought-provoking he becomes." Forrester is at his best in the essays that are primarily historical. His discussions of the bizarre love triangle involving Freud's disciple Sandor Ferenczi; Freud's penchant for collection (of objets d'art as well as dreams, jokes, and parapraxes); and the historiography of the psychoanalytic movement are lucid, insightful, and eminently worthwhile. His critical essays are not as good. While "Justice, Envy, and Psychoanalysis" interestingly criticizes John Rawls's arguments against the idea--found in Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Freud--that justice is ultimately based on envy, it is regrettably also somewhat silly on the topic of penis envy. The title essay, moreover, is captious in argument and peevish in tone, as Forrester reacts to the anti-Freudian animadversions of Frederick Crews and Stanley Fish by focusing on rhetorical weaknesses in their arguments rather than on the arguments themselves. Read Dispatches from the Freud Wars for the historical background to the struggle, but not for the latest news from the front. --Glenn Branch Read More

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  • Product Description

    In this challenging collection of essays, noted historian and philosopher of science John Forrester raises a provocative point: no matter how you feel about Freud, you can't escape the influence of his theories. Through questions central to our century's ways of thinking, Forrester explores dreams, history, ethics, political theory, and psychoanalysis as a scientific movement. By taking nothing for granted and leaving no clich of psychobabble--theoretical or popular--unturned, Forrester gives us a sense of the ethical surprises and epistemological riddles that a century of tumultuous psychoanalytical debate has often obscured.

  • 0674539605
  • 9780674539600
  • JO Forrester
  • 30 April 1997
  • Harvard University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 309
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