Psychoanalysis and the human sciences

Resource Information

The work Psychoanalysis and the human sciences represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Psychoanalysis and the human sciences

Statement of responsibility

Louis Althusser ; translated by Steven Rendall

Creator

• Althusser, Louis, 1918-1990

Subject

• Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981
• Psychology -- Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis -- Philosophy

Language

• eng
• fre
• eng

Summary

"What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou"--

Member of

• Lectures., Selections
• European perspectives

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Index

index present

Language note

Translated from the French

Literary form

non fiction

Series statement

European perspectives : a series in social thought and cultural criticism