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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 theoreticalinterlocutors, 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.
List of contents
Chapter 1: The Family Crisis and Liberation.- Chapter 2: The Socialization of Reproduction and the Family.- Chapter 3: The Superego and the Paradox of Liberation.- Chapter 4: The Crisis of Initiation.- Chapter 5: Oedipus: A Function of Initiation.- Chapter 6: Accelerate the Social Superego? A Critique of Deleuze and Guattari.- Chapter 7: Initiation: René Girard and Alain Badiou.- Chapter 8: The Post-Oedipal and the Political.- Chapter 9: Postscript: Re-Configuring the Superego.
About the author
Daniel Tutt, Ph.D. is Professorial Lecturer in Philosophy at George Washington University, a member of the Lacanian Forum of Washington, DC and an award-winning film producer. His writing has appeared in Historical Materialism, Philosophy Now, and multiple book collections on psychoanalysis and contemporary culture. His research is concerned with the intersection of contemporary politics, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
