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Researching the Unconscious provides an exposition of key issues in the philosophy and methods of the social sciences which are relevant to psychoanalysis as both a clinical practice and a human science.
List of contents
Series editors' preface; Acknowledgements; Preface; Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: Psychoanalysis as a scientific paradigm; Chapter 3: The consulting room as the psychoanalytic laboratory; Chapter 4: Philosophical realism and its relevance; Chapter 5: Meanings and causes in psychoanalytical explanation; Chapter 6: On classification; Chapter 7: Case-study methods in psychoanalysis; Chapter 8: Parts and wholes: different kinds of explanation; Chapter 9: Complexity theory and psychoanalysis; Chapter 10: Clinical facts; Chapter 11: Grounded theory in psychoanalysis and child psychotherapy; Chapter 12: Grounded theory in child psychotherapy: an example; Chapter 13: Outcome studies; Chapter 14: Observational research methods; Chapter 15: Socio-psychoanalytic research; Chapter 16: Psychoanalytic cultural methods; References
About the author
Michael Rustin is a Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, UK. He has been a significant contributor to psychoanalytic debates over many years and is the author and editor of many books, including The Good Society and the Inner World (1991), Reason and Unreason (2001), and, with Margaret Rustin, Mirror to Nature (2002) and Reading Klein (2017). He has played a major role in the development of postgraduate and doctoral research at the Tavistock Clinic. He is an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Summary
Researching the Unconscious provides an exposition of key issues in the philosophy and methods of the social sciences which are relevant to psychoanalysis as both a clinical practice and a human science.
Additional text
'How can psychoanalysis be a research activity when its task is not a generalizing one, but a particularizing one, that is, to impart the nuance and convey complexity? Michael Rustin has some fascinating and learned answers to this question. He shows how psychoanalysis does generate knowledge and should respect its own methods of doing so. Read him and learn!'-Anne Alvarez, PhD, MACP, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist.
'Michael Rustin is an outstanding contributor to the development of psychoanalytic studies, and author of several works of seminal importance in British sociology. In this lucid and rational book, he distils his thinking from many years of teaching and scholarship to offer a persuasive defence of psychoanalysis as a rational and progressive social science of huge cultural significance. The book is crucial reading for everyone interested in the standing of psychoanalysis as a human science.'-Stephen Frosh, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
'This is an impressive work. Rustin is uniquely equipped to show how methods of research consistent with psychoanalytic approaches can produce an objective body of knowledge. His book continues the remarkable tradition of Jaspers and Ricoeur. It provides a great deal of what researchers and mental health therapists will need to meet the challenges of the future'-David Taylor, psychoanalyst and Visiting Professor, UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, UK
