The views of Freud, Proust and Lacan are depicted through this staging of a series of provocative dialogues between psychological science and imaginative literature of the twentieth century.

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

This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.

Self --Time --Art --Politics --Morality --Sex --Death.

Bowie (French language and literature, U. of London) traces the development of famed French psychoanalyst Lacan's (1901-1981) ideas over the 50-year span of his writing and teaching career, focusing on the mutations in Lacan's interpretation of Freud. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Eschewing the all-pervading contextual approach to literary criticism, this book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern democratic urban society in place of the traditional agrarian one. Moreover, counter-intuitively it turns out that fantasy literature is analogous to modern Galilean science in its manipulation of the symbolic thereby changing our conception of reality. It is imaginary devices such as vampires and ape-men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, repressed by the contemporary hegemonic discourses.

Élisabeth Roudinesco’s bold reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud is a biography for the twenty-first century—a sympathetic yet impartial appraisal of a genius admired but misunderstood in his time and ours. Alert to tensions in his character and thought, she views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as an interpreter of civilization and culture.