One of the world’s most provocative philosophers attacks the obsession with comprehensive intellectual systems—the perceived need for a world view.
We live in a unitary cosmos created and cared for in all its details by a benevolent god. That, for centuries, was the starting point for much philosophical and religious thinking in the West. The task was to accommodate ourselves to that view and restrict ourselves to working out how the pieces fit together within a rigidly determined framework. In this collection of essays, one of our most creative contemporary philosophers explores the problems and pathologies of the habit of overly systematic thinking that we have inherited from this past.
Raymond Geuss begins by making a general case for flexible and skeptical thinking with room for doubt and unresolved complexity. He examines the ideas of two of his most influential teachers—one systematic, the other pragmatic—in light of Nietzsche’s ideas about appearance and reality. The chapters that follow concern related moral, psychological, and philosophical subjects. These include the idea that one should make one’s life a work of art, the importance of games, the concept of need, and the nature of manifestoes. Along the way, Geuss ranges widely, from ancient philosophy to modern art, with his characteristic combination of clarity, acuity, and wit.
Who Needs a World View? is a provocative and enlightening demonstration of what philosophy can achieve when it abandons its ambitions for completeness, consistency, and unity.
Daniel Burston chronicles Laing's meteoric rise to fame as one of the first media psychogurus of the century, and his spiraling decline in the late seventies and eighties. Here are the successes: Laing's emergence as a unique voice on the psychiatric scene with his first book, The Divided Self, in 1960; his forthright and articulate challenges to conventional wisdom on the origins, meaning, and treatment of mental disturbances; his pioneering work on the families of schizophrenics, Sanity, Madness and the Family (coauthored with A. Esterson). Here as well are Laing's more dubious moments, personal and professional, including the bizarre experiment with psychotic patients at Kingsley Hall. Burston traces many of Laing's controversial ideas and therapeutic innovations to a difficult childhood and adolescence in Glasgow and troubling experiences as an army doctor; he also offers a measured assessment of these ideas and techniques.
The R. D. Laing who emerges from these pages is a singular combination of skeptic and visionary, an original thinker whose profound contradictions have eclipsed the true merit of his work. In telling his story, Burston gives us an unforgettable portrait of an anguished human being and, in analyzing his work, recovers Laing's achievement for posterity.
Although he founded no school of his own, D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971) is now regarded as one of the most influential contributors to psychoanalysis since Freud. In over forty years of clinical practice, he brought unprecedented skill and intuition to the psychoanalysis of children. This critical new work by Adam Phillips presents the best short introduction to the thought and practice of Winnicott that is currently available.
Winnicott’s work was devoted to the recognition and description of the good mother and the use of the mother–infant relationship as the model of psychoanalytic treatment. His belief in natural development became a covert critique of overinterpretative methods of psychoanalysis. He combined his idiosyncratic approach to psychoanalysis with a willingness to make his work available to nonspecialist audiences. In this book Winnicott takes his place with Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan as one of the great innovators within the psychoanalytic tradition.
Wisdom Won from Illness brings into conversation two fields of humane inquiry—psychoanalysis and moral philosophy—that seem to have little to say to each other but which, taken together, form a basis for engaged ethical thought about how to live.
Jonathan Lear begins by looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for insight into what constitutes the life well lived. Socrates said the human psyche should be ruled by reason, and much philosophy as well as psychology hangs on what he meant. For Aristotle, reason organized and presided over the harmonious soul; a wise person is someone capable of a full, happy, and healthy existence. Freud, plumbing the depths of unconscious desires and pre-linguistic thoughts, revealed just how unharmonious the psyche could be. Attuned to the stresses of modern existence, he investigated the myriad ways people fall ill and fail to thrive. Yet he inherited from Plato and Aristotle a key insight: that the irrational part of the soul is not simply opposed to reason. It is a different manner of thinking: a creative intelligence that distorts what it seeks to understand.
Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a whole conception of the flourishing, fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. Wisdom Won from Illness illuminates the role of literature in shaping ethical thought about nonrational aspects of the mind, offering rich readings of Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, and others.
This first feminist book-length comparison of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce offers striking new readings of a number of the novelists’ most important works, including Lawrence’s Man Who Died and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson argues that a feminist reader must necessarily read with and against theories of psychoanalysis to examine the assumptions about gender embedded within family relations and psychologies of gender found in the two authors’ works. She challenges the belief that Lawrence and Joyce are opposites, inhabiting contrary modernist camps; instead they are on a continuum, with both engaged in a reimagination of gender relations.
Lewiecki-Wilson demonstrates that both Lawrence and Joyce write against a background of family material using family plots and family settings. While previous discussions of family relations in literature have not questioned assumptions about the family and about sex roles within it, Lewiecki-Wilson submits the systems of meaning by which gender is construed to a feminist analysis. She reexamines Lawrence and Joyce from the point of view of feminist psychoanalysis, which, she argues, is not a set of beliefs or a single theory but a feminist practice that analyzes how systems of meaning construe gender and produce a psychology of gender.
Lewiecki-Wilson argues against a theory of representation based on gender, however, concluding that Lawrence’s and Joyce’s texts, in different ways, test the idea of a female aesthetic. She analyzes Lawrence’s portrait of family relations in Sonsand Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love and compares Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Lawrence’s autobiographical text. She then shows that Portrait begins a deconstruction of systems of meaning that continues and increases in Joyce’s later work, including Ulysses.
Lewiecki-Wilson concludes by showing that Lawrence, Joyce, and Freud relate family material to Egyptian myth in their writings. She identifies Freud’s essay "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood" as an important source for Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which portrays beneath the gendered individual a root androgyny and asserts an unfixed, evolutionary view of family relations.
Psychoanalysis and writing instruction have much to offer each other, asserts Mark Bracher. In this book, Bracher examines the intersection between these two fields and proposes pedagogical uses of psychoanalytic technique for writing instruction.
Psychoanalysis reveals that the writing process is profoundly affected by factors that current theories have largely neglected—forces such as enjoyment, desire, fantasy, and anxiety, which, moreover, are often unconscious. Articulating an approach based on the work of Jacques Lacan, Bracher shows how a psychoanalytic perspective can offer useful insights into the nature of the writing process, the sources of writing problems, and the dynamics of writing instruction. He further demonstrates that writing instruction constitutes the most favorable venue outside of individual psychoanalytic treatment for pursuing psychoanalytic research and practice. Like psychoanalytic treatment proper, writing instruction can function as a way of reducing psychological conflict and as a means of pursuing psychoanalytic research into the workings of the mind. Empirical studies and personal testimonies have demonstrated the psychological (and even the physical) benefits of writing about personal conflict in an academic setting; such benefits promise to be enhanced and consolidated through the application of psychoanalytic principles to the teaching of writing.
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