Mourning Freud

by Sprengnether, Madelon; Rashkin, Esther; Ruti, Mari; Rudnytsky, Peter L.

• ISBN13: 9781501327995
• ISBN10: 1501327992
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-10-19
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Mourning Freud describes and explores the changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century.

The modernist Freud of the early 20th century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the 21st. Madelon Sprengnether examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud's self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience concerning the unreliability of memory. She offers a significant interpretation of major biographical episodes in Freud's life, arguing that Freud's inability to mourn the losses of his early life shaped his theories of mourning, which in turn opened the field of pre-oedipal studies to his successors, enabling a host of new psychoanalytic theories such as Object Relations, intersubjective and countertransference theories, Lacanian analysis, and Trauma theory. Many of these approaches converge on the formulation of mourning as critical to the process of ego development. Through this argument, Sprengnether traces the shift from modernism to postmodernism-from an emphasis on mastery to vulnerability, from vertical to horizontal systems of meaning-making, and from what is representable in words to the realm of the nonverbal.

Mourning Freud not only releases Freud from frozen idealization, but also demonstrates the relevance of his work to the 21st century.

Author Biography

Madelon Sprengnether is a poet, memoirist, and literary critic, and Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. She has published numerous books in the field of feminist, psychoanalytic criticism and theory, including The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (2011) and the path-breaking The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1992). In addition to her academic publishing, she is the author of three books of poetry, three memoirs, and co-editor of a collection of travel essays by women, The House on Via Gombito (1991, 1997 2e). She is a regular blogger for Psychology Today.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Insight and Blindness

Biography and Theory
Chapter 1: Reading Freud's Life
Chapter 2: Mourning Freud
Chapter 3: Undoing Incest
Chapter 4: Freud, Irma and the Dream of Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis in Process
Chapter 5: Freud as Memoirist
Chapter 6: Feminist Criticism and Psychoanalysis
Chapter 7: Literature and Psychoanalysis

Ghosts and Ancestors
Chapter 8: Reflections on Melancholia and Mourning

Conclusion: Mourning Freud

Bibliography
Index