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Self Unhelped: On psychoanalysis and therapeutic culture
Reviewing books by two of the world’s leading psychoanalytic writers, Christian R. Gelder explores the challenge that psychoanalysis poses not only to conventional understandings of self and sex, but also to the prevailing therapeutic culture.
A particular therapeutic practice can thereby help to bring into being the self it seeks to describe (such as the epochal emergence of what Philip Rieff once called ‘psychological man’), as its models of successful treatment and its language for the mind, emotions, and behaviour become part of culture’s common-sense. Written over the last decade, the suite of essays covers a vast variety of material, far more than can be easily glossed here, and it sees Fink occupy several different modes: auto-biographical but also technical, with papers concerning the psychopathological distinction between neurosis and psychosis and the nature of the imaginary, as well as a fascinating and lengthy case study about a possible male hysteric. ‘The real nightmare’, he wrote in a follow-up article, ‘for most Lacanians, is that Lacan’s name will become just another reference in a list of footnotes – a polytheistic catastrophe that must be averted at all costs, with the unfortunate result that we risk losing out on everything we have to learn from American colleagues and from the history of psychoanalytic thought in the States’.
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