Redefining psychoanalysis, this book challenges traditional assumptions about the unconscious mind and personal history, while exploring the complexities of human sexuality. It delves into the significance of the "Oedipus Complex," offering fresh insights that provoke thought and discussion on these foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory.
Exploring the depths of psychic life, this work presents a fresh perspective on psychoanalysis, emphasizing its radical potential as a healing science. Barnaby B. Barratt advocates for a deeper awareness in therapeutic practices, challenging conventional approaches and revitalizing the discourse surrounding psychoanalysis. The book serves as a call to embrace the transformative power of genuine psychoanalytic engagement, positioning it as a vital tool for understanding and healing the human psyche.
The critique focuses on contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy practices that overlook Freud's foundational concept of free association. It examines how this oversight affects therapeutic effectiveness and explores the implications for understanding the human psyche. By revisiting Freud's insights, the book aims to reintegrate this essential technique into modern therapeutic approaches, emphasizing its significance in fostering deeper self-exploration and healing.
According to the author, psychoanalytic theory and practice ¿ which discloses ¿the interminable falsity of the human subject¿s belief in the mastery of its own mental life¿ ¿ is in part responsible for the coming of the postmodern era. In this title, originally published in 1993, Barratt examines the role of psychoanalysis in what he sees as the crisis of modernism, shows why the modernist position ¿ what he calls the ¿modern episteme¿ ¿ is failing, and proposes that psychoanalysis should redefine itself as a postmodern method. In Barratt¿s innovative account of psychoanalysis, which focuses on the significance of the free-associative process, Freud¿s discovery of the repressed unconscious leads to a claim that is basic to postmodern ideas: ¿that all thinking and speaking, the production and reproduction of psychic reality, is inherently dynamic, polysemous, and contradictorious .¿ He argues that subsequent attempts to ¿normalize and systematize¿ psychoanalysis are reactionary and antipsychoanalytic efforts to salvage the modern episteme that psychoanalysis itself calls into question.
How do we know our mental life, and how is our mental life altered by our efforts to know it better? Originally published in 1984, this title attempts an epistemological and ontological discourse concerning the understanding of human mental processes, and it aims toward a definitive thesis on the dialectics of knowing and being in this work of psychological understanding. What this work reconfronts are questions pertaining to all psychology and to all human sciences. Yet much of its focus is on the understanding of unconscious mental contents, on the question of knowing and being in Freud¿s psychology.