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The Seductions of Psychoanalysis

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis

Freud, Lacan and Derrida
John Forrester
November 1991
Available
Paperback
9780521424660
£42.00
GBP
Paperback

    The Seductions of Psychoanalysis reflects on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. John Forrester probes the origins of psychoanalysis and its most beguiling concept, the transference, which is at once its institutional axis and experimental core. He explores the most seductive of all recent psychoanalytic traditions, that inspired by Jacques Lacan, whose radical questioning of psychoanalytic effects has been continued implicitly by Michel Foucault and explicitly by Jacques Derrida. Other key questions addressed include the significance of speech in the talking cure, and the relationship between the 'real' of psychoanalysis and the fictionality of the 'truth' it offers. Dr Forrester also focuses on the relationship between psychoanalysis and the feminine, on analysis and gossip, on the borderline of seduction and rape, and on the women who have played such a crucial role in the history of psychoanalysis, as patients, analysts or both.

    • This volume complements The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, vols 1 & 2, Translated by FORRESTER (Cambridge University Press 1988). Two chapters of the seminar, especially, relate very closely to this book, so readers of the earlier book should be targeted
    • This is the first book to bring together enough on psychoanalysis which bears on a wide variety of subject areas and disciplines while at the same time retaining a strong inner coherence, a clear analytical style and a searching - even sceptical - critical intelligence

    Reviews & endorsements

    'Forrester traces out the lineage from Freud to Lacan to Derrida with great sophistication and erudition … Throughout, there is his usual exemplary clarity, and a wealth of supporting illustration. Indeed there is no doubt this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the wider intellectual influence of Lacan's thought.' Martin Stanton, The Times Higher Education Supplement

    'John Forrester has written the sort of book that makes the reader yearn for prolonged after dinner conversation with the author, there being not a chapter that does not stimulate the senses towards discussion … I can imagine returning again and again for clarification and further insight over the coming years.' Jean Knowles, British Medical Journal

    'The seduction of psychoanalysis is an excellent example of how, by focusing on details … a study can open out into an understanding of something as broad as the place of a discipline and a discourse within our culture. With admirable clarity and persistence, John Forrester attempts to show how it is that psychoanalysis has retained its institutional and discursive identity despite the changes and challeges it has undergone.' Dan Gunn, The Times Literary Supplement

    See more reviews

    Product details

    November 1991
    Paperback
    9780521424660
    440 pages
    217 × 140 × 30 mm
    0.625kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgements
    • List of abbreviations
    • Introduction
    • Part I. The Temptation of Sigmund Freud:
    • 1. The true story of Anna O.
    • 2. Contracting the disease of love: authority and freedom in the origins of psychoanalysis
    • 3. Freud, Dora and the untold pleasures of psychoanalysis
    • 4. Rape, seduction, psychoanalysis
    • 5. ' … a perfect likeness of the past'
    • Part II. The Moment of Jacques Lacan: A note on Translation
    • 6. 'In place of an introduction', The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, books I & II
    • 7. What the psychoanalyst does with words: Austin, Lacan and the speech acts of psychoanalysis
    • 8. Dead on time: Lacan's theory of temporality
    • Part III. The Destiny of Psychoanalysis:
    • 9. Who is in analysis with whom? Freud, Lacan, Derrida
    • 10. Psychoanalysis: gossip, telepathy and/or science?
    • 11. Transference and the stenographer: on Dostoevsky's The Gambler
    • 12. Michel Foucault and the history of psychoanalysis
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Author
    • John Forrester