This book integrates thinking about dilemmas faced in the context of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis today, with contemporary social and political concerns specific to the age of the global consumer marketplace. Beginning with an analysis of the fate of the concept of sublimation in Freud’s work, and its relationship to the elaboration of the concept of the superego in 1923, Jared Russell examines how these concepts provide a lever for integrating psychoanalytic thinking with topics of urgent social concern, beyond the critique of ideology. Taking up topics such as the experience of time, addiction to consumption, and the general consequences of the insinuation of digital technologies at increasingly earlier stages in human development—and thinking these through the lens of what the clinical practice of psychoanalysis teaches us about intimate human relatedness—the book addresses how a philosophically oriented approach to psychoanalysis can illuminate our response to the problems of everyday life under conditions of late capitalism. Drawing on a diverse range of authors such as Freud, Heidegger, Hans Loewald, Christopher Bollas, Lacan, Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, it is argued that the concepts of sublimation and of the superego must be reinvented with regard to both clinical and critical discourse today if psychoanalysis is to remain relevant to the major issues we face, both individually and collectively, in the twenty-first century. Sublimation and Superego: Psychoanalysis Between Two Deaths stages a unique encounter between philosophy, critical theory and clinical practice that will be of interest to psychoanalysts, scholars of twentieth-century continental philosophy, critical social theorists and mental health practitioners.

This book is the only full-length treatment of the relationship between aesthetic truths and psychoanalytic discoveries--of art, artists, and a new concept of sublimation. It provides a radical and unique study of the concept of sublimation and proposes a modest replacement for it. In the first third of the book the author reviews critically the psychoanalytic sources of the concept of sublimation. In the second third he shows how the concept developed from Freud's nineteenth-century notions of perception. In the last third he revises a concept of sublimation using a contemporary theory of perception. In the final chapter he examines four works of literature: short stories of John Cheever, a Japanese novel, portions of Hamlet, and sublimation and perversion in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality. Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

Over the course of three decades, in works spanning questions of theory, technique, and clinical practice, Charles Brenner has emerged as one of the preeminent analysts of his generation, a thinker whose probing estimation of mental conflict has promoted the evolutionary growth of analysis as theory even as it has clarified the clinical import of analysis as therapy. In Psychoanalysis: The Science of Mental Conflict, distinguished theorists and clinicians pay homage to Brenner by presenting original essays that converge in their estimation of analysis as "the science of mental conflict." In sections that encompass "The Theory of Psychoanalysis," "The Concepts of Psychoanalysis," "The Technique of Psychoanalysis," "The Clinical Practice of Psychoanalysis," "The Teaching of Psychoanalysis," and "The Application of Psychanalysis," the contributors show how the perspective of conflict - broadened and refined by the clinical findings of recent decades - offers a vehicle for creative theory-building and, as such, a conceptual handle for apprising the indications for, and action of, psychoanalytic therapy. Arnold Richards' comprehensive overview of Brenner's ranging contributions to theory and practice, along with Martin Willick's critical introductions to the various sections of the book, round out a collections whose scope is complimented by its unusual coherence and thematic unity. Taken together, the essays comprising this book present readers with a cogent summary of current psychoanalytic thinking, along with an exciting preview of where it is heading in the future. As such, this volume will be welcomed not only by analysts, but by all mental health professionals who draw on, and learn from, the psychoanalytic assessment of conflict in mental life. It is a work that follows Brenner's own example in promoting the critical understanding of a generation of theorists, clinicians, and educators.

Can capitalism and citizenship co-exist? In recent years advocates of the Third Way have championed the idea of public-spirited capitalism as the antidote to the many problems confronting the modern world. This book develops a multi-disciplinary theory of citizenship, exploring the human abilities needed for its practice. It then argues that capitalism impedes the nurturing of these abilities. In advancing these arguments, Kathryn Dean draws on the work of a wide range of thinkers including Freud, Marx, Lacan, Habermas and Castells.

Rereading Freud assembles eminent philosophical scholars and clinical practitioners from continental, pragmatic, feminist, and psychoanalytic paradigms to examine Freud's metapsychology. Fundamentally distorted and misinterpreted by generations of English speaking commentators, Freud's theories are frequently misunderstood within psychoanalysis today. This book celebrates and philosophically critiques Freud's most important contribution to understanding humanity: that psychic reality is governed by the unconscious mind. The contributors focus on several of Freud's most influential theories, including the nature and structure of dreams; infantile sexuality; drive and defense; ego development; symptom formation; feminine psychology; the therapeutic process; death; and the question of race. In so doing, they shed light on the ontological commitments Freud introduces in his metapsychology and the implications generated for engaging theoretical, clinical, and applied modes of philosophical inquiry.

A major influence on French intellectuals in the twentieth century, Jacques Lacan has been referred to as ‘the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud’. Routledge Library Editions: Lacan offers a selection of titles, which examine the influence of Lacan’s theories in a number of disciplines and includes an annotated bibliography of his works. It brings together as a set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print titles, originally published between 1983 and 1991.