- Hardcover: 279 pages
- Publisher: Free Association Books (1 Jan 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 185343051X
- ISBN-13: 978-1853430510
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 14.5 x 2.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,482,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Outside analytic circles one often hears it said that psychoanalysis is only concerned with the individual. The work of Menzies Lyth is a powerful answer to that claim. Continuing the themes of Containing Anxiety in Institutions, she reflects here on a variety of social situations: the dynamics of the Fire Brigade, conflicts between psychiatric hospitals and the communities that they serve and family patterns of consumption. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging survey of the psychological aftermath of disaster, which makes new links between a Kleinian model of the earliest mental states and both the immediate and longer-term needs of disaster survivors - be it an earthquake or a plane crash. The work is a reminder of the need for a sophisticated psychoanalytic perspective on the social. Its publication confirms that Isabel Menzies Lyth's writings constitute the most important body of psychoanalytic work on the social bearings of the psyche.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Painstakingly accurate
11 July 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I read, this morning, this book which is engaged in applying Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to institutions. I found it to be worthwhile, very clear minded and painstakingly careful in its examination of the "psychosis" that can lurk within institutions -- especially, according to the author, those that are of a larger size. Since the papers she published go back to the late 60s, some of the contexts she analyses may be a bit dated.
It struck me, however, that the author's point of view should have been quite liberatory, but for one crucial failing. Whereas she sees that people in institutions can develop themselves in a more mature way if they refrain from using anxious defence mechanisms of a primitive sort, she does not see that human beings could constructively get along in a society not dominated by bourgeois ideology.
The mistake, in my view, is to see that a certain anxiety produced in having to get along with others is somehow an automatic part of human nature. I say, no it isn't -- rather, the anxiety is manufactured by a particular sort of society itself, which teaches us that we can only get ahead if we compete against our peers. Hence the ubiquity of social anxiety which permeates relationships between peers in the workplace, and makes it hard to get along. It would seem to me that this, in turn, produces mechanisms of repression and projection, which leads to immaturity and regression to a mindset of primitive group-think.
Perhaps societies which do not promote such rugged individualistic values would not produce such strong intra-psychic pressures, leading to this primitive regression that she outlines?
That strikes me as a strong possibility.
It struck me, however, that the author's point of view should have been quite liberatory, but for one crucial failing. Whereas she sees that people in institutions can develop themselves in a more mature way if they refrain from using anxious defence mechanisms of a primitive sort, she does not see that human beings could constructively get along in a society not dominated by bourgeois ideology.
The mistake, in my view, is to see that a certain anxiety produced in having to get along with others is somehow an automatic part of human nature. I say, no it isn't -- rather, the anxiety is manufactured by a particular sort of society itself, which teaches us that we can only get ahead if we compete against our peers. Hence the ubiquity of social anxiety which permeates relationships between peers in the workplace, and makes it hard to get along. It would seem to me that this, in turn, produces mechanisms of repression and projection, which leads to immaturity and regression to a mindset of primitive group-think.
Perhaps societies which do not promote such rugged individualistic values would not produce such strong intra-psychic pressures, leading to this primitive regression that she outlines?
That strikes me as a strong possibility.
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