In Western culture, the psychoanalysis that has guided popular psychology for almost a century is now on the retreat. Better equipped with proven results, cognitive and evolutionary psychology has driven psychoanalysis out of the spotlight. In cultural and film studies, however, the debate between cognitive sciences and psychoanalysis remains contentious. This volume explores this state of things by examining criticism of 18 films, juxtaposing them with cognitive-based films to reveal the flaws in the psychoanalytical concepts. It pays particular attention to simulation theory, the concept that narratives "learned" from films could work in human minds as simulations for solutions to particular problems. By introducing the idea of narrative stimulation to film studies, this work argues for a different method of film critique, encouraging further research into this nascent field.

Freud's 17-year-old case study "Dora" is well known in the literature of psychoanalysis. Yet few know the full story--told here for the first time--of this notable woman, who walked out on Freud after three months and, in a sense, cured herself. Born into an important Jewish-Austrian family, Ida Bauer Adler suffered from "petite hysteria"--loss of voice, difficulty breathing, migraines, fainting spells--brought on by the overt sexuality of her relatives. Growing up in a home beset with syphilis and tuberculosis, she overcame her father's marital infidelity, her mother's so-called housewife psychosis and her own seduction by the husband of her father's mistress. She married, raised a son, started a small business, stayed close with her brother, Otto, leader of the Austrian Socialist party, and survived Hitler's invasion of Vienna. Eventually, she made her way to the U.S. to rejoin her famous son, maestro of the San Francisco Opera House.

Possibly no other psychoanalytic concept has caused as much ongoing controversy, and attracted so much criticism, as that of 'repression'. Repression involves denying knowledge to oneself about the content of one's own mind and is most commonly implicated in disputes concerning the possibility of repressed memories of trauma (and their subsequent recovery). While fundamental in Freudian psychoanalysis, recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking (e.g., 'mentalization') have downplayed the importance of repression, in part due to less emphasis being placed on the importance of memory within therapy.

An analytical biography of the precursor of psychoanalysis and famous neurologist, which reveals his childhood, courtship and marriage, career, ill health and death from cancer. Bibliogs.

The author eloquently argues for a return to our understanding of how Freudian psychoanalysis works unconscious to unconscious. Failure to follow Freud's basic assumptions about psychoanalytical listening has resulted in the abandonment of searching for the 'the logic of sequence' which Freud regarded as the primary way we express unconscious thinking. In two extensive interviews and follow-up essays, all occurring in 2006, we follow the author exploring his most recent and radical challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis. The Freudian Moment, the author argues, realizes a phylogenetic preconception that has existed for tens of thousands of years. The invention of psychoanalysis realizes this preconception and institutes a profound step forward in human relations. The author's proposal that we use the image of the symphonic score to better imagine unconscious articulation opens up a new conceptual way for grasping the complexity of unconscious thought.