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

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siecle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory.

Modern society has introduced many new relationships and family forms and the pluralisation of sexual lifestyles in the hundred years since Freud. This book provides a systematic account of the current state of theory, developing a gender-wide model of human sexuality and outlining the implications of this for psychotherapy practice. The author argues that the development of human sexuality follows no innate biological programs, but takes place in an interpersonal relationship, often established in the early parent-child relationship. Whereas the current psychoanalytic discourse emanates from a rather rigid division of gender relations emphasizing the differences between men and women, the author develops a gender-wide model of human sexuality in which the 'masculine' and 'feminine' are integrated and contribute to the full diversity of gender identities and sexual varieties. She points to structural similarities of hetero-and homosexuality and perversion and calls for a general human sexuality that is based less on differences between men and women than with each other.

Psychoanalysts from diverse backgrounds (Freudian, Sullivanian, classical, interpersonal and self-psychological) discuss: "What is the Seduction Hypothesis?," "The Traumas of Everyday Life," and "Severely Traumatized Patients."

In a career spanning more than five decades the distinguished French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) elaborated a distinctive methodology for the reading of Freud's corpus and evolved, in connection with it, a radical new metapsychology - one that critically recast Freud's early 'seduction' theory of trauma and placed at the heart of psychic life a particular model of 'enigmatic signification.' Seductions and Enigmas is a volume dedicated to the implications of Laplanche's thought for reading and interpretation. It collects papers that elaborate Laplanche's unique method for the interpretation of Freud, with its attention to the decentering and recentering movements of thought that structure the psychoanalytic field, and explore how the metapsychological developments arising from the implementation of that method open up new horizons for the psychoanalytic reading of other texts and oeuvres in the cultural domain. The volume comprises essays by Laplanche as well as by clinicians and scholars whose work takes inspiration from his research. Authors variously establish, develop or consolidate Laplanche's critical methodology as such, or work through aspects of his major theoretical innovations as points of departure for the reading of cultural works of different kinds: fiction, drama, painting, visual and sound installations, and film. These theoretical innovations cover a breadth of topics including seduction, sublimation, gender, femininity, the functions of binding and unbinding, masochism and the role of the enigmatic. In their range, the texts brought together here are a testament to the vitality and fertility of Laplanche's theoretical endeavour, for anyone concerned with the re-reading of Freud or with continuing to recalibrate and advance the parameters of critical interpretation in light of Freud's legacy.

The authors explore the influence of Freud's thinking on twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life within Cambridge and beyond.

"The question, 'Who am I?' resounded throughout the surrealist movement. The exploration of dreams and the unconscious prompted surrealists to reject the notion of a unified, indivisible self by revealing the subject to be haunted by otherness and instability. In this book David Lomas explores the surrealist concepts of the self and subjectivity from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Employing a series of case studies devoted to individual artists, Lomas arrives at a radically new account of surrealist art and its cultural and intellectual roots." "Weaving together psychoanalytic and historical material, the author analyses works by Ernst, Dali, Masson, Miro and Picasso with regard to such themes as automatism, hysteria, the uncanny and the abject. Lomas focuses closely on individual artworks, examines the specific circumstances in which they were produced and offers new insights into the artists and their projects as well as the theories of Bataille, Breton and others. Lomas demonstrates the powerful connection between the history of psychoanalysis and the history of surrealism, and along the way shows the unique value of psychoanalytic theory as a tool for the art historian."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved