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`Ian Parker has made a major contribution to the phenomenon of psycho-analysis and the psycho-analytic movement... This is an exhaustive and convincing exposition of the relativity of psycho-analysis - relative to culture, relative to history and relative to language... Ian Parker's text is beautifully clear and ranges across a very wide cultural landscape from the Frankfurt school to ego-psychology to post-structuralism, new age body-piercing to the British Psychological Society, from Classical Freud to the post-modern individual, from the Lacanian return to Kleinian social science. It is always informative and digestible, and always to the point - psycho-analysis has created a wide social discourse which entraps thought in conformist patterns appropriate to our times. Parker's range of views upon that happy harmony strives for a critical purchase upon it and ultimately subversion of it' - Professor Robert D Hinshelwood, Centre for Psycho-Analytic Studies, University of Essex
List of contents
Introduction
Psychoanalysis and Discourse
PART ONE: OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES: SELF AND SOCIETY
Groups, Identity and Forms of Knowledge
Religious Belief, Charity and Crooked Cures
War Breaking Out, in Inner and Outer Space
PART TWO: CRITICAL THEORIES: INDIVIDUALITY AND CULTURE
Individuality, Enlightenment and the Psy-Complex
Authoritarianism, Ideology and Masculinity
Culture and Nature after Enlightenment
PART THREE: POST-THEORIES: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SOCIAL
Symbolic Orders, Subjects and Cyberspace
Mirroring, Imagining and Escaping the Local Economy
Real Things, Recovery and Therapy
About the author
Ian Parker is Professor of Psychology in the Discourse Unit at Bolton Institute. He is author of Psychoanalytic Culture (SAGE, 1997) and co-author of Deconstructing Psychopathology (SAGE, 1995).
CONTRIBUTORS
Steven D Brown Keele University
Vivien Burr University of Huddersfield
Andrew Collier University of Southampton
Bronwyn Davies James Cook University
Don Foster University of Cape Town
Kenneth J Gergen Swarthmore College
Rom Harre Oxford University
Maritza Montero Universidad Central de Venezuela
Jonathan Potter Loughborough University
Joan Pujol University of Huddersfield
Carla Willig Middlesex University
Summary
This text explores the place of psychoanalysis and its language in 20th-century culture. It systematically reviews key psychoanalytic theories and explores their significance to modern life. The analysis incorporates the work of key figures ranging from Freud to Zizek.
