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This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society's modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures.
Experts from a range of disciplines offer a complex understanding of how humans are shaped by history, tradition, and institutions. Drawing upon the work of Lacan, Fanon, and Foucault, this text examines cultural memory, modern ideas of race and gender, the roles of symbolism and mythology, and neoliberalism's impact on psychology. Through clinical vignettes and suggested applications, it demonstrates significant alternatives to the isolated individualism of Western philosophy and psychology.
This interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for clinicians and anyone looking to augment their understanding of how human beings are shaped by the societies they inhabit.
List of contents
Preface Notes on Contributors Introduction: Intergenerational Strains Chapter 1. Open Wounds: Discerning, Owning, and Narrating Deep History Chapter 2. Frantz Fanon and Psychopathology: The Progressive Infrastructure of Black Skin, White Masks Chapter 3. American Cultural Symbolism of Rage and Resistance in Collective Trauma: Racially-Influenced Political Myths, Counter-Myths, Projective Identification, and the Evocation of Transcendent Humanity Chapter 4. Neoliberalism and the Ethics of Psychology Chapter 5. Black Rage and White Listening: On the Psychologization of Racial Emotionality Chapter 6. Jouissance and Discontent: A Meeting of Psychoanalysis, Race and American Slavery Chapter 7. The Nasty Woman: Destruction and the Path to Mutual Recognition Chapter 8. Another Voice from Radical Ethics: Denmarks Knud Løgstrup Chapter 9. Identity-as-disclosive-space: Dasein, Discourse and Distortion Chapter 10. Finding the Other in the Self Chapter 11. After the World Collapsed: Two Culturally Embedded Forms of Service to Others Following Wide-Scale Societal Traumas
About the author
David M. Goodman is interim dean at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, associate professor of the practice in the Philosophy department, director of Psychology and the Other, and a teaching associate at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Hospital.
Eric R. Severson is author of the books Levinas's Philosophy of Time and Scandalous Obligation, and the editor of seven other volumes. He lives in Kenmore, Washington, with his wife Misha and their three children, and teaches philosophy at Seattle University.
Heather Macdonald's scholarly research focuses on the interface between relational ethics and clinical practice. Her first monograph, titled Cultural and Critical Explorations in Community Psychology, further considers the implications of psychological assessment and historical trauma.
Summary
This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society’s modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures.
