In this volume, Paul Verhaeghe's lectures on the development of psychoanalytic theory between Freud and Lacan are reproduced as a written work of astonishing versatility, which stands at the vanguard of Lacanian studies. Beyond Gender examines Freud's discovery of the unconscious, and Lacan's elaboration of this discovery as a gap in the subject between what (s)he knows and the real driving forces in the psyche. The implications of this gap are manifold, and their impact on areas of study and practice from gender theory to obsessional neurosis, trauma, hysteria, and dream interpretation are profound. It is Verhaeghe's contention that, far from being the bedrock of gender differentiation, castration masks another anxiety over another, original lack that is beyond gender. This book elaborates the relationship between body and psyche beyond the classic binary opposition. Beyond Gender postulates that the sexual relationship must be re-examined, as does the troublesome notion of gender identity.

Beyond Gender

Health, Fitness & Dieting

VERHAEGHE, PAUL

Psychology & Counseling

Other Press Professional

Modern individuals often enter analysis because of a feeling of hollowness--a deadened absence of aliveness, meaninglessness, and a sense of being alone in a world that seems otherwise exciting, engaging, and alive. Joseph Newirth believes that these feelings reflect a disease of modern man that can be traced to a failure in the development of subjectivity. Through a careful reading of theory and well-reasoned presentations of case material, Newirth vivdly evokes the contemporary dilemma of the individual's lack of subjectivity. The author positions this lack of subjectivity as a failure in the development of the unconscious, an understanding that provides the foundation for the development of a two-person theory of the unconscious. Newirth proposes a neo-Kleinian model of the unconscious, the "generative unconscious" in contrast to the "repressed unconscious" of classical theory or the "relational unconsciousness" of interpersonal and relational theory. He defines the "generative unconscious" as a source of creativity, of apprehending and generating experience in terms of emotional meanings through the development of metaphors, transitional experiences, and poetic images. "Brilliantly illustrated with case material." –Choice "Scholarly, thoughtful, and astute. . . . An excellent example of a seasoned clinician describing his own mature thinking about the clinical psychoanalytic enterprise, and making suggestions regarding newer, helpful ways for others to think about their patients." –Psychologist-Psychoanalyst "Newirth's conceptualization of the generative unconscious will help a new generation of clinicians struggling to treat the psychopathology of psychological deadness and meaninglessness." –Lewis Aron, Ph.D., New York University

Between Emotion & Cognition

Newirth, Joseph

Mental Health

Bad feelings are ubiquitous to human experience. Everyone deals with grief, envy, disappointment, dejection, humiliation, mortification, and anxiety. However, when we consciously push troubling feelings aside and then avoid them, we should be under no illusions that such repression empowers us to lead untroubled lives. The price that we pay, simply, is feeling less alive. Our attempts to avoid feeling pain manifest themselves in feelings of disconnection and numbness. To make matters worse, bad feelings often bring moralistic self-condemnation that arises unconsciously or even consciously: "It is bad of you to feel that way!" "You're being a nuisance to worry about that!" Many families even elevate mental health to the status of an Eleventh Commandment. They believe that when they have negative feelings and express them, this constitutes behavioral problems. When they begin to feel anxious, glum, or ashamed, they are stricken with guilt or fears of punishment. Their goal is perfect adjustment, and their taboo is the secret forbidden pleasure hidden by pain. This book demonstrates how psychoanalytic understanding can reduce the painfulness of negative feelings and increase our tolerance for emotional pain. This work can enable freedom from frightening, vengeful, and guilt-ridden fantasies, decrease reliance on passive and masochistic ways of being, and increase our ability to take pleasure in the body, to enjoy relations with others, the use of one's assets, and to take pride in one's achievements. These changes outweigh the emotional pains that we inevitably suffer by living, and they help us feel that it is worth our while to enjoy a lively existence.

Bad Feelings

Schafer, Roy

The Intervention of the Other deftly brings the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan into fruitful dialogue through a comparative analysis of these two seemingly disparate thinkers.Emmanuel Levinas, Lithuanian-born French phenomenologist of the nonphenomenon, and Jacques Lacan, controversial French psychoanalyst and (post)structuralist theorist of the Freudian Unconscious, lived and wrote in the same city, at the same time, among the same colleagues, often using the same language and the same sources, sometimes writing to the same audiencesóand yet they never wrote to or about one another. Following Sartre, Levinas thought that Freud had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of consciousness when he posited the Unconscious as a second, but hidden, consciousness. Despite this suspicion of psychoanalysis, however, Levinasí own work celebrated a certain something that could not be contained by thought. For his part, Lacan was suspicious of philosophical ethics. He subscribed to a Freudian critique of ethics as pathogenic. Nevertheless, he saw his own work as fundamentally about a kind of ethics, specifically an ethics concerned with how people live their lives in an already normative society.While the two never engaged with each otherís thought directly, Levinas and Lacan were interested in many of the same questions: What is the nature of the self? What is it to be a subject? Can the ethical be grounded in a post-foundationalist world?Through close textual analysis, David Ross Fryer shows how Levinas and Lacan offer two ways of positing the ethical subject in the post-humanist landscape of contemporary thought.

Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan

Literature & Fiction

Fryer, David Ross

History & Criticism

This groundbreaking book delivers a much needed bridge between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis. Freud hoped that the neurosciences would offer support for his psychoanalysis theories at some point in the future: both disciplines, after all, agree that experience leaves traces in the mind. But even today, as we enter the twenty-first century, all too many scientists and analysts maintain that each side has wholly different models of the origin and nature of those traces. What constitutes human experience, how does this experience shape us, and how, if at all, do we change our lives? Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences have failed to communicate about these questions, when they have not been frankly antagonistic. But in Biology of Freedom Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti are at last breaking new ground. This fully illustrated account, rigorous yet lucid and entirely accessible, shows how the plasticity of the brain's neural network allows for successive inscriptions, transcriptions, and retranscriptions of experience, leading to the constitution of an inner reality, an unconscious psychic life unique to each individual. In what amounts to a paradigm shift based on the concept of plasticity, this elegant, seamless collaboration of a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist bridges the gap between disciplines formerly believed to be incompatible. Ansermet and Magistretti have opened up new areas of exploration of the mind/body connection and profoundly new ways in which to understand the bodily underpinnings of personal freedom, identity, and change.

Biology of Freedom

Ansermet, François

Magistretti, Pierre

Why has American psychoanalysis been relegated to the margins of American mental health care? In this masterful summing up of three decades of experience as a psychoanalytic editor and publisher, Paul Stepansky tells the story of a once cohesive discipline that has splintered into rivalrous “part-fields” and now struggles to survive in a postanalytic world of cognitive-behavioral interventions, brief therapy, psychopharmacology, and managed care. Simultaneously, it isa cautionary tale of the inevitable marginalization of any profession that resists integration into the scientific mainstream of its time and place. Beyond its self-evident importance to psychoanalysts and other proponents of “talking” therapy, Psychoanalysis at the Margins provides an in-depth case study of the role of books, journals, and publishing in the rise and fall of a historically insular profession. For Stepansky, the near-demise of psychoanalytic publishing in America is a microcosm of the crisis of small scholarly and professional publishing in an era that has witnessed the ascendancy of internet chat groups, online seminars, Amazon.com, and electronic journal subscriptions. Positioning present-day psychoanalysis as an alternative healing modality, Stepansky explores the initiatives that have enabled other alternative professions to survive and even thrive in the face of mainstream opposition. Is it possible, he asks, that the lessons of alternative medicine can guide psychoanalysis to an “optimal marginality” that draws the mainstream to it? Pursuing pathways to this goal, Stepansky enjoins analysts to undertake a host of initiatives in the public interest that bring analytic knowledge to bear in those contexts where it can do the most good.

Psychoanalysis at the Margins

Stepansky, Paul E.

About this Book... "Here is a book that both creates and illuminates the space where psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, and sexualities join. . . . A collection of cutting edge work that brims with the excitement of new possibility." -Dr. Sam Gerson Combining clinical psychoanalysis with feminism, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic theory, this pioneering collection represents a major step forward in psychoanalytic gender studies.

Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between clinic and culture (Conteporary Theory Series)

"A magnificent book that analyzes prominent female writers (Plath, Nin, The Brontes, Dickinson, and Sitwell) from a psychoanalytic self/object relations point of view . . . a must read for all."

Compulsion to Create

Kavaler-Adler, Susan

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Other Press Professional publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Other Press Professional