Why is culture a problem that can never be solved? Charles W. Nuckolls poses this question to his readers, and offers a genuinely synthetic approach to culture that is both cognitive and psychoanalytic. He develops a theory of cultural dialectics based on the concept of paradox, in which he shows how ambivalence and conflicts, and the desire to resolve them, are at the heart of all cultural knowledge systems.
Nuckolls combines and synthesizes the ideas of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud—major influences in the cognitive and psychoanalytic paradigms—and develops the concept basic to both: the dialectic. He recovers the legacy of Gregory Bateson, who provided the foundation for a theory of paradox in culture. With his integrated theory, Nuckolls explains the conflicts of knowledge and desire in a South Asian knowledge system, in particular the religious mythology and divinatory system of the Jalaris, a Telugu-speaking fishing caste on the southeastern coast of India.
This provocative book allows us to rethink the relationship between the currently competing discourses in psychological and cultural anthropology, and at the same time offers a general synthetic theory of cultural dynamics.
Psychology is the dogma of our age; psychotherapy is our means of self-understanding; and "repressed memory" is now a universally familiar form of trauma. Jeffrey Prager, who is both a sociologist and a psychoanalyst, explores the degree to which we manifest the clichés of our culture in our most private recollections.
At the core of Presenting the Past is the dramatic and troubling case of a woman who during the course of her analysis began to recall scenes of her own childhood sexual abuse. Later the patient came to believe that the trauma she remembered as a physical violation might have been an emotional violation and that she had composed a memory out of present and past relationships. But what was accurate and true? And what evidence could be persuasive and valuable? Could the analyst trust either her convictions or his own? Using this case and others, Prager explores the nature of memory and its relation to the interpersonal, therapeutic, and cultural worlds in which remembering occurs.
Synthesizing research from social science, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, Prager uses clinical examples to argue more generally that our memories are never simple records of events, but constantly evolving constructions, affected by contemporary culture as well as by our own private lives. He demonstrates the need that sociology has for the insights of psychoanalysis, and the need that psychoanalysis has for the insights of sociology.
Repossessions was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A double-edged critical forum, this volume brings early modern culture and psychoanalysis into revisionist dialogue with each other. The authors reflect on how psychoanalysis remains
"possessed" by its incorporation of early modern mythologies, visions, credos, and phantasms. Their essays explore the conceptual and ideological foundations of psychoanalysis while articulating fresh insights into the vicissitudes of autobiography, translation, mourning, and eroticism in the transitional period from the waning of feudalism to the emergence of capitalism.Employing a broad spectrum of the most recent, Continental psychoanalytic approaches, the book covers topics and figures ranging from King James to Leonardo, demonology to cartography, astronomy to cross-dressing, and mythology to biology. Its detailed readings of Boccaccio, Ficino, Finé, Michelangelo, Montaigne, and others dramatically reassess the foundational concepts of cultural history, secularization, autobiography, reason, and government. Through a sustained focus on visual and verbal residues of personal and cultural trauma, the essays generate innovative analyses of the interrelation of writing, graphic space, self, and social identification in early modern texts, paintings, maps, and other artifacts.
Contributors: Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Tom Conley, Mitchell Greenberg, Kathleen Perry Long, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Christopher Pye, Juliana Schiesari.
Timothy Murray is professor of English and director of graduate studies in Film and Video at Cornell University. Alan K. Smith is assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah.
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