Noted French psychoanalyst Francois Roustang examines both historical psychoanalytic relationships and associations in France today to show the destructive power of discipleship and how it related to the new theory of psychosis. This book is a paperback reprint of the classic text originally published in 1982.

The Wolf Man was Sigmund Freud's most famous patient, a man whose enigmatic childhood dream of being gazed at by wolves outside his bedroom window bedeviled the founding practitioners of psychoanalysis. More than simply a rich source of imagery and meaning, though, the Wolf Man case might be interpreted as the primal scene of psychoanalysis itself. Lawrence Johnson regards the creation of the psychoanalytic case study as the writing of two lives--those of the analys and and the analyst--so Freud's own biography and subjective viewpoint could hardly fail to bear a direct influence on the institution of psychoanalysis. When Freud met the patient known as the Wolf Man, Johnson maintains, psychoanalysis was at an impasse because of Freud's inability to work through repressed material from his own childhood. Freud overcame this impasse through a countertransference that cast his patient in the role of a rival for the control of psychoanalysis; his means for vanquishing him set the terms for Freud's legacy to psychoanalysis. Johnson offers a rigorous methodological framework for discussing the relationship between psychoanalytic writing and the lives of those who engage in it. He fruitfully extends the work of Nicholas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Jacques Derrida into the realm of Freud's own life. The result is both sophisticated psychobiography and psychoanalytic theory grounded firmly in historical lives.

"The essays collected here ... are centrally concerned with conflicts of value: the aesthetic value that is ascribed to texts; the economic value that accrues to intellectual property; the processes of social valuation that turn waste into worth and back again; the structures of valued knowledge that shape both the disciplines of knowledge and everyday life; and the political struggles over social and cultural difference that give rise, at their most intense, to the desolation of communities and the destruction of cultures."--Publishers website

This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women’s agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim – to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.