Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation

Description

Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Family aims to raise a sophisticated and highly accessible debate around the family, self-making and the political and cultural implications of liberation. The text proposes a new way to read the Lacanian theory of Oedipus and through this reading resituate a series of important political and theoretical debates that have concerned intellectual life over the last forty years. It is written with an accessible style so that both specialists in Lacanian and Marxist theory and a broader cross-section of readers interested in understanding the implications of debates across populist and Marxist perspectives that have occupied the global left since the 2008 economic crash. The text aims to resituate the way theories of emancipation and liberation are theorized from a distinctive psychoanalytic and Lacanian point of view. In resituating the infamous “Oedipus complex” in a new light, the text re-opens a series of debates with important theoretical interlocutors, including the influential American historian and psychoanalytic thinker Christopher Lasch, whose thought has witnessed a significant renaissance of interest today, to the staunch critic of Freud and Lacan, René Girard, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their widely read Anti-Oedipus series that disputes the Freudian and Lacanian notions of Oedipus. Foreword Familism Mystification and Ontological Insecurity: R.D. Laing’s “Politics of the Family” Haven in a Heartless World The Family at an Evental Site References Preface Acknowledgments Praise for Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: The Family Crisis and Liberation References Chapter 2: The Family Spirit and Social Reproduction References Chapter 3: The Social Superego and the Paradox of Liberation References Chapter 4: The Crisis of Initiation References Chapter 5: Oedipus: A Function of Initiation References Chapter 6: Initiation: René Girard and Alain Badiou References Chapter 7: Accelerate the Social Superego? Critique of Deleuze and Guattari References Chapter 8: Liberalism and the Oedipal References Chapter 9: The Political Stakes of the Social Superego References Chapter 10: Conclusion: Toward a Dialectics of Liberation References Glossary of Key Concepts Index