The Seductions of Psychoanalysis

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