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"In the current Freud/Anti-Freud battles, the most important task for each side is to rise above cliché. This book does so in its attempt to integrate the Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi into history of psychoanalytic thought. In particular, it names amei-the 'the expectation to be indulgently loved'-as a missing ingredient in Freud's own account of infant development. And it shows, in an informed and sophisticated way, how much Western psychoanalytic thought after Freud can be seen as attempts to fill in and fill out this missing conception. Thus, not only does this book provide an overview of post-Freudian thinking about infant development, it shows how Western and Japanese approaches to psychological theory might be integrated."-Jonathan Lear Where do we fall when we fall in love? For psychoanalysts, this is a difficult question to answer. What are the differences between narcissistic love and affectionate love? What are the contrasts between sexual instinctual relations and ego relations? Are all human beings by nature bisexual? How did one type of female homosexual end up the only type in psychoanalytic literature? These are some of the subjects that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl explores in her upcoming collection of essays. She traces the mystery of love to its sources, bringing her expertise as a philosopher and a writer to focus on the subject from a psychoanalytic perspective. In these new writings, many of them published for the first time in this volume, the author reconceptualizes psychoanalytical theory of instinctual drives and object relations. Among a wide range of issues, she considers sexual identity and gender theory along with character theory. -- from the publisher |