The Seductions of Psychoanalysis reflects on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines. John Forrester probes the origins of psychoanalysis and its most beguiling concept, the transference, which is at once its institutional axis and experimental core. He explores the most seductive of all recent psychoanalytic traditions, that inspired by Jacques Lacan, whose radical questioning of psychoanalytic effects has been continued implicitly by Michel Foucault and explicitly by Jacques Derrida. Other key questions addressed include the significance of speech in the talking cure, and the relationship between the 'real' of psychoanalysis and the fictionality of the 'truth' it offers. Dr Forrester also focuses on the relationship between psychoanalysis and the feminine, on analysis and gossip, on the borderline of seduction and rape, and on the women who have played such a crucial role in the history of psychoanalysis, as patients, analysts or both. "Forrester interprets and develops Freud in extremely interesting ways, describing the discursive richness, intensity, and difficulties inherent in the 'analytic position' and vividly portraying the nature and structure of psychoanalytic discourse....The section on Lacan is especially clear....This excellent collection of essays is recommended...." Choice Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction Part I. The Temptation of Sigmund Freud: 1. The true story of Anna O. 2. Contracting the disease of love: authority and freedom in the origins of psychoanalysis 3. Freud, Dora and the untold pleasures of psychoanalysis 4. Rape, seduction, psychoanalysis 5. ' … a perfect likeness of the past' Part II. The Moment of Jacques Lacan: A note on Translation 6. 'In place of an introduction', The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, books I & II 7. What the psychoanalyst does with words: Austin, Lacan and the speech acts of psychoanalysis 8. Dead on time: Lacan's theory of temporality Part III. The Destiny of Psychoanalysis: 9. Who is in analysis with whom? Freud, Lacan, Derrida 10. Psychoanalysis: gossip, telepathy and/or science? 11. Transference and the stenographer: on Dostoevsky's The Gambler 12. Michel Foucault and the history of psychoanalysis Notes Bibliography Index. About the Author: John Forrester (1949–2015) was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Head of the HPS department for seven years. He was Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History from 2005 to 2014, and authored Freud's Women (with Lisa Appignanesi, 1992), Dispatches from the Freud Wars (1997) and Truth Games (1997), amongst other titles. He published over fifty papers in scholarly journals, principally concerned with the history and philosophy of psychoanalysis. His work on cases as a genre and as a style of reasoning was posthumously published as Thinking in Cases (2016). |