Susan Sugarman Boeken

This book works to expose that vision and to demonstrate its fertility for further inquiry. It reconstructs several of Freud's works on ordinary mental life, tracking his method of inquiry, in particular his search for the child within the adult, and culminating in a deployment of his tools independently of his analyses. It shows how to read Freud for his insight and generativity and how to push beyond the confines of his analyses in pursuit of new lines of exploration. In this endeavor, in turn, it at once echoes and encourages the spirit of play with ideas so characteristic of, and so engaging in, Freud.

Freud's theory of the mind is explored as a cohesive organic entity, illustrating its evolution from fundamental concepts to a more intricate understanding. The book delves into the foundational principles of his psychological framework, highlighting the progression and refinement of his ideas over time.

Through an exacting yet accessible reconstruction of eleven of Freud's essential theoretical writings, Susan Sugarman demonstrates that the traditionally received Freud is the diametric opposite of the one evident in the pages of his own works. Whereas Freud's theory of the mind is typically conceived as a catalogue of uninflected concepts and crude reductionism - for instance that we are nothing but our infantile origins or sexual and aggressive instincts - it emerges here as an organic whole built from first principles and developing in sophistication over time. Sugarman's exciting interpretation, tracking Freud's texts in the order in which he wrote them, grounds his claims in the reasoning that led to them and reveals their real intent. This fresh reading will appeal to specialists and students across a variety of disciplines.

The exploration delves into the relationship between children's reasoning and language development, highlighting that while both emerge simultaneously, they are distinct phenomena. Susan Sugarman examines how these elements interact and influence each other, offering insights into cognitive growth and communication in early childhood. This work emphasizes the complexity of understanding how children think and express themselves, providing a nuanced perspective on their developmental milestones.

This book, first published in 1988, provides a conceptual critique of six of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget's central, earlier works.

In this clear and concise volume, Susan Sugarman introduces the work of Sigmund Freud and keenly illustrates the impact his pioneering contributions have had on the way we think about ourselves and each other.

Freud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams, and in particular its thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, as his landmark contribution and the scaffolding of his subsequent work. Susan Sugarman, after carefully examining the text and scrutinizing a range of Freud's other works, shows that the dreams book is not and cannot be that scaffolding. For, not only does his argument on dreams falter, but his reasoning elsewhere - in his case histories, his accounts of phenomena of ordinary waking life, and even his avowedly speculative writing - displays a strength and precision his account of dreams lacks. She concludes by exploring what is then left of the dreams theory and Freud's overall vision of the mind.

This book analyzes a subtle but intriguing mental event—the paradoxical surprise that people sometimes feel when they come upon something that they have felt sure existed but are seeing for the first time. Noted first by Sigmund Freud, this common but odd experience proves remarkably resistant to trivial explanation.Upon seeing the Acropolis for the first time, Freud remarked, “So all this really does exist, just as we learned in school!” Similarly, in everyday life we often feel compelled to verify firsthand the scene of a recent event, even though we never doubted its occurrence. Susan Sugarman probes this experience and its relation to other everyday sensibilities, such as the pleasure of reencountering the familiar and people's fascination with authenticity. Although the experience manifests itself in a seeming lapse in logic and remains obscure in a way that one might—and that Freud did—associate with pathological formations, it is neither illogical nor pathological. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health and personal integration.Similar to approaches in modern philosophy and linguistics, Sugarman's analysis is applied here accessibly and in ordinary terms to concrete behavior and experience. As a result, thought and feeling, normally believed to elude systematic inquiry, yield to it, allowing for genuine progress in understanding the human mind.