The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida

Description

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 traces out the lineage from Freud to Lacan to Derrida with great sophistication and erudition ... Throughout, there is his usual exemplary clarity, and a wealth of supporting illustration. Indeed there is no doubt this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the wider intellectual influence of Lacan's thought.' Martin Stanton, The Times Higher Education Supplement 'John Forrester has written the sort of book that makes the reader yearn for prolonged after dinner conversation with the author, there being not a chapter that does not stimulate the senses towards discussion ... I can imagine returning again and again for clarification and further insight over the coming years.' Jean Knowles, British Medical Journal 'The seduction of psychoanalysis is an excellent example of how, by focusing on details ... a study can open out into an understanding of something as broad as the place of a discipline and a discourse within our culture. With admirable clarity and persistence, John Forrester attempts to show how it is that psychoanalysis has retained its institutional and discursive identity despite the changes and challeges it has undergone.' Dan Gunn, The Times Literary Supplement