The Seductions of Psychoanalysis
Freud, Lacan and Derrida

Reflection on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines.

John Forrester (Author)

9780521424660, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 October 1991

440 pages
21.7 x 14 x 3 cm, 0.625 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]