Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution

Review "A shrewd and witty account of the belated invasion of French intellectual life by psychoanalysis and of the way in which French culture and politics have in turn remade it in their image—modish and radical." —Stanley Hoffman, Harvard University"This is an illuminating and entertaining book on the sociology of psychoanalysis in France over the past decade.... Turkle dates the beginning of Freud's 'French Revolution' with the student upheavals of 1968. Since then under the leadership of the 'French Freud,' Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis has invaded every aspect of French culture, thought, and politics and in turn has itself been recast in the characteristic French image—a dramatic fusion of science and poetry. A major achievement of the book is the lucid exposition which Turkle provides of Jacques Lacan's linguistically based psychoanalytic theory." —Modern Psychoanalysis"In researching Psychoanalytic Politics, Miss Turkle talked at length with Mr. Lacan, who dominates the French scene even more than Freud did Vienna, as well as with 150 other French psychoanalysts. She shows an almost haute bourgeois tact in keeping a straight face while discussing some of the more outré aspects of the French infatuation with Freud—or with their Freud, as Mr. Lucan is sometimes known." —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times"Turkle...focuses on the brilliant, enigmatic, and, for many, impenetrable Jacques Lacan.... [She] provides an explanation of the meteoric rise of the French interest—both academic and popular—in psychoanalysis, together with an analysis of Lacan's most important ideas: on the 'trinity' of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real; on the ego as neurosis bearer; on the significance of wordplay." —Peter Gardner, Psychology Today About the Author Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press.