Product Description
This book will not conceive of the subject as supposed to represent the human person as a whole, nor as the narcissistic image the latter can have of him/herself, still less as the reflexive notion of self which tends to designate an overall self-referential ('self-centered') function. The subject the author is trying to define psychoanalytically is not characterized by plenitude or naturalness, but seems rather to define itself as a precarious function, resulting from the human newborn's condition of prematuration, and therefore from the earliest drive transactions between the baby and its mother, including the mother's verbal and gestural responses. The condition of the human subject demands that he acquire his existence at the price of a real passion. And what indeed could inspire more passion than this ambiguous being, constantly trying to balance dynamically where nature and of culture intersect? The psychoanalytical approach launched by Freud a century ago has constantly posited as a structural fact the precarious position of human subjectivity. It conceives the latter as knocked off center, even torn apart, by the different logics emanating from the instances that make up the psychical apparatus. The most fundamental point of both the topics formalized successively by Freud is that the psychical apparatus is constituted of a structural heterogeneity, comprised of different systems, which are, in sum, strangers to each other to the extent that what is pleasing to one, he says, could be displeasing to the other. What Freud named the Unconscious in his first topic does indeed constitute a sort of elsewhere within each human being, an intimate stranger from which emanate all those messages the psychoanalyst works to decipher through dreams, parapraxes and symptoms... Undoubtedly echoing Plato's famous myth of the cave, Freud says in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that unconscious complexes are played out on 'another stage' of representation than that of our waking psychical life. For this structural heterogeneity within the human being, Freud's topics of the psychical apparatus offer models that engender, not a new psychology, but rather, as Feud himself emphasizes, a meta-psychology.
Synopsis
The condition of the human subject demands that he acquire his existence at the price of a real passion. And what indeed could inspire more passion than this ambiguous being, constantly trying to balance dynamically where nature and of culture intersect? The psychoanalytical approach launched by Freud a century ago has constantly posited as a structural fact the precarious position of human subjectivity. It conceives the latter as knocked off center, even torn apart, by the different logics emanating from the instances that make up the psychical apparatus. The most fundamental point of both the topics formalized successively by Freud is that the psychical apparatus is constituted of a structural heterogeneity, comprised of different systems, which are, in sum, strangers to each other - to the extent that what is pleasing to one, he says, could be displeasing to the other.What Freud named the Unconscious in his first topic does indeed constitute a sort of elsewhere within each human being, an intimate stranger from which emanate all those messages the psychoanalyst works to decipher through dreams, parapraxes and symptoms...In these, the Unconscious system finds its own way of expressing itself, according to rules different from those of conscious thought.
The dream-work, for example, organizes "thing representations" in accordance with the principle of contiguity, condensation and non-contradiction that Freud attributes to the primary thought process - so that we must decipher these clues as we would figurative signs in another language (like that of ideograms and rebuses). Undoubtedly echoing Plato's famous myth of the cave, Freud says in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that unconscious complexes are played out on "another stage" of representation than that of our waking psychical life.For this structural heterogeneity within the human being, Freud's topics of the psychical apparatus offer models that engender, not a new psychology, but rather, as Feud himself emphasizes, a meta-psychology. This book will not conceive of the subject as supposed to represent the human person as a whole, nor as the narcissistic image the latter can have of him/herself, still less as the reflexive notion of self which tends to designate an overall self-referential ("self-centered") function.
The subject the author is trying to define psychoanalytically is not characterized by plenitude or naturalness, but seems rather to define itself as a precarious function, resulting from the human newborn's condition of prematuration, and therefore from the earliest drive transactions between the baby and its mother, including the mother's verbal and gestural responses.Working as a psychoanalyst to help a patient establish better bonds between the different registers of his psyche does not imply giving in to unifying, globalizing, simplifying, or isolating illusions, but rather requires that we never lose sight of the heterogeneity (including the irremediable differentiation of the sexes) which is just what Freud's metapsychology introduced. Thus the ordeal of otherness - with regard to the sex we don't have, the language we don't speak, the means we don't possess - is indispensable in affirming a subjectivity.
See all Product Description
