Unconscious Incarnations: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Perspectives on the Body (Psychology and the Other)

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality.   The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious ‘real’ as an excessive remainder of flesh.  Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh.   Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.

Unconscious Incarnations (Psychology and the Other)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Manoussakis, John Panteleimon

Goodman, David M.

Mental Health

Routledge

How does psychology attend to the question of “goodness”? Does the sense of self that modern psychologies promote help to orient persons toward ethical responsibility for the other person? In this book, David Goodman engages these questions, demonstrating that the prevalent discourse and constructs of the self in modern psychology not only fail to address such issues, but also contribute to the formation of a self lived without ethical regard for the other.  In his penetrating and thought-provoking analysis of contemporary psychological theory and practice, Goodman critiques its “methodolatry” to scientific theory and emphasis on autonomous reason. Challenging the assumptions behind the naturalized, egological, and individualistic accounts of the self that dominate current approaches, he proposes an alternative by appealing to the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas. As Goodman indicates, Levinas’s phenomenology establishes an originary ethical attunement to the other, which precedes empirical and medical approaches to psychology that would consign ethics to a detached, secondary list of codes. Moving between historical analysis, illumination of contemporary psychological trends, and philosophical juxtapositions of Greek and Hebrew thought, Goodman demonstrates how the ethical dimension of human experience has too frequently been neglected within present constructs of the self and argues that Levinas’s demanded self serves as a radical corrective to the morally anemic definitions of the modern self. Ultimately, Goodman explains and details this countercultural version of the self—defined by its relation to the other and called into a “freedom born from responsibility”—and offers helpful corollary case studies and therapeutic practices that engender this sensibility. The Demanded Self provides a means of entering into the conversations taking place at the intersection of Levinas’s ethical theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, religion, and philosophy, and will appeal to scholars and advanced students in all of these fields.

The Demanded Self: Levinasian Ethics and Identity in Psychology

Business & Money

Business Culture

Duquesne Univ Pr

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Books by Goodman, David M.