Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on Culture

Description

While many of Freud's original formulations have required either revision or rejection and replacement with newer models, his cultural books, such as Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, though extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, have more recently been either neglected or else dismissed as long-outdated fantasies. Robert A. Paul shows that Freud's ideas in these books, and his thinking on how human society is possible, given the unpromising materials out of which it is constructed (i.e. human beings), can appear in a different and more favorable light when viewed through the lens of contemporary anthropology, cultural studies, and evolutionary theory.

Robert A. Paul is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University, USA, and an Adjunct Professor in the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute and the Emory Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is the author of three books, including Moses and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud's Myth (1996), which won the Heinz Hartmann Award in Psychoanalysis, the Bryce Boyer Prize in Psychoanalytic Anthropology, and the Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought. Dr. Paul is one of a very few people trained both in anthropology and in clinical psychoanalysis.

Based on his dual inheritance theory, Robert Paul provides us with an excellent integration of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, evolutionary theory, and cultural anthropology, without minimizing the contributions of each of them. This thought-provoking book shows ways to bridge the gap between the disciplines and how this opens up new insights and approaches for psychoanalytic theory-building. * Werner Bohleber, PhD, psychoanalyst, former editor-in-chief of the German psychoanalytic journal Psyche *