Product Description
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.
About the Author
Dr Bernard Penot, is a Psychiatrist (Paris, Salpêtrière, 1972), member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and training analyst in the Paris Psychoanalytical Institute, (1992); he was director of the Cerep-Montsouris day hospital for teenagers in Paris from 1988 to 2004; since 1996 he has worked to train psychoanalysts in Istanbul. He is the author of various books published in France and Brazil as well as of several papers in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.
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