The Psychoanalytic Movement The Cunning of Unreason

by Gellner, Ernest; Brunner, Jose

• ISBN13: 9780631234135
• ISBN10: 0631234136
• Edition: 3rd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-27
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The Psychoanalytic Movement explains how the language of psychoanalysis became the dominant way in which the middle classes of the industrialized West speak about their emotions. Explains how the language of psychoanalysis became the dominant way for the industrialized West to speak about emotion. Argues that although psychoanalysis offers an incisive picture of human nature, it provides untestable operational definitions and makes unsubstantiated claims concerning its therapeutic efficacy. Includes new foreword by Jose Brunner that expands on the central argument of the book and argues that Gellner and Freud might be seen as kindred spirits.

Author Biography

Ernest Gellner was born in Paris in 1925, and was educated in Prague and England. He was professor of philosophy and sociology at the London School of Economics from 1949 to 1984. In 1984 he became the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Nations and Nationalism (Blackwell Publishers, 1983), Anthropology and Politics (Blackwell Publishers, 1996), and Encounters with Nationalism (Blackwell Publishers, 1995). Dr Gellner died in 1995.

Table of Contents

Foreword	x
Jose Brunner
Acknowledgements	xxxi
Introduction to the Second Edition	xxxiii
Back to Nature	1	(26)
Gibbon's Problem	1	(3)
Some Basic Facts and Questions	4	(6)
The Last Angel	10	(5)
The Harbinger of the Pays Reel	15	(8)
The Battering-Ram	23	(4)
The Plague	27	(12)
Give Us This Day	27	(4)
Original Sin	31	(1)
Pastoral Care	32	(2)
The Click	34	(1)
The Wager	35	(4)
The Pirandello Effect	39	(26)
Free-Fall	39	(5)
Inside and Out	44	(2)
Transference (Greater Love Has No Man)	46	(3)
Conceptual Deprivation	49	(9)
The Terminal Valve	58	(2)
The Implicit Promise	60	(5)
On the Rack	65	(20)
Licensed to Cure	65	(4)
A State of Grace	69	(2)
A Realist Theory of Knowledge	71	(3)
Hire-purchase Stoicism	74	(2)
From Adjustment to Identity	76	(1)
The Errors of Realism	77	(8)
The Cunning Broker	85	(23)
The Concept of the Unconscious	85	(10)
Psycho-hydraulics	95	(2)
A Cunning Bastard	97	(3)
Reduction at the Service of Man (or, a Plethora of Omens)	100	(8)
Reality Regained	108	(12)
An Emaciated World	108	(1)
The Servicing of Reality	109	(2)
A Habitable World	111	(5)
The Bourgeois Dionysiac	116	(4)
The Embourgoisement of the Psyche	120	(10)
The New Guardians	120	(3)
Plato Up-ended	123	(2)
Transvaluation of Values, to Customer Specification	125	(2)
Socrates and the Cave	127	(3)
Anatomy of a Faith	130	(26)
The Erring Husband and the Principle of Recursive Cunning	130	(2)
Brief Checklist and a Much Worse Murder	132	(2)
Data and Theory	134	(2)
Some Outside Comments	136	(5)
The Trickster	141	(4)
Freud and the Art of Daemon Maintenance	145	(7)
Eternal Corrigibility	152	(4)
The Bounds of Science	156	(21)
Testability	156	(5)
Testability Vindicated?	161	(6)
The Natural Transcendent	167	(2)
Swichens	169	(2)
The Three-horse Race	171	(2)
Beast, Shaft and Test	173	(4)
La Therapie Imaginaire	177	(17)
Float and Sail	177	(1)
Truth and Ideology	178	(2)
The Well	180	(2)
The Pineal Gland	182	(4)
Captain of His Soul	186	(4)
Conclusion	190	(4)
Appendix	194	(2)
Notes	196	(9)
Select Bibliography	205	(2)
Index	207