(Mis)Understanding Freud with Lacan, Zizek, and Neuroscience

Description

This book sets out to clarify five key Freudian concepts (the pleasure principle, the primary processes, the unconscious, transference, and the reality principle) elaborated early on in Freud’s work but, it is argued, rarely understood―even by psychoanalysts themselves. It examines in turn the post-Freudian paradigms employed in neuropsychoanalysis, Lacan, Zizek, object relations, and psychoanalytic approaches to identity politics, and in doing so reveals the extent to which they have been distorted and repressed in these new contexts. Over the course of the book the author demonstrates how Freud’s unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology can be seen as a complete system of core concepts that both ground psychoanalysis in neurology and also introduce a vital challenge to the brain sciences. This book will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and psychoanalytic theory. Contents 1: Introduction Book Outline Method 2: Freud’s Project The Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive What Is Consciousness? Transference and the Demand The Unconscious The Defensive Ego of Attention The Reality Principle 3: Neuroscience and the Repression of Psychoanalysis Natural Feelings An Imaginary Unity The Computer Brain The Pleasure Principle Revised Pleasure and the Unconscious Are You Unconscious? Feelings, Consciousness, and the Pleasure Principle Nurture and Nature From Theory to Practice Defending the Science of Psychoanalysis 4: Moving from Freud’s Five Principles to Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts The Unconscious and the Primary Processes The Dream of the Subject Repetition and Desire Repression and Consciousness Transference The Unconscious and Sexuality The Drives and the Pleasure Principle Working Through Transference and the Drives at the End of Analysis 5: The Desire of the Analyst and the American Repression of Psychoanalysis The Ethics of Care Comforting the Patient Writing about Analysis From Hypnosis to Neutrality Theory and Practice The Known Desire of the Analyst The Resistance of Narcissism 6: Zizek and the Empty Unconscious From Freud to Lacan The Death Drive Distortion Defining Culture From Lacan to Marx and Back Again Exchange Value Cynical Behaviorism The Return of the Repressed From Lacan to Marx to Hegel The Displacement of Ideology From Transference to Social Reality 7: Misunderstanding Psychoanalysis from the Left Warning: Reader Be Aware Identity in Analysis How Identity Politics Affects Clinical Practice Neutrality and Free Association The Limits of Identity Politics in Analysis 8: Conclusion: Still (Mis)Understanding Psychoanalysis Index