Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis: Literature, Belief, and Neurosis - Brossura

Gay, Volney Patrick

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0791451003 ISBN 13: 9780791451007

Casa editrice: State Univ of New York Pr, 2001

Riassunto

For more than a hundred years, psychoanalysts have applied their theories of neurosis to objects of culture, including literature. In this book, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and scholar of religion Volney P. Gay reverses field and uses literature to reevaluate psychoanalysis. Arguing that neurosis occurs when we cannot recollect joy, Gay focuses upon the nature of joy as articulated in drama and literature. It is the absence of joy, he suggests, that evokes in children a lifelong quest for repair and restitution, usually through the stories they tell themselves. Therefore, Gay argues, literary accounts of joy are essential to contemporary psychoanalysts because they illuminate the nature of an "object" that, when absent, produces the form of human suffering that Freud named "neurosis." Throughout the book, case studies are juxtaposed with analyses of works by Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Wharton, and others in order to explore the notion that the objects of psychoanalysis (and similar psychotherapies) are structured like narratives rather than organisms or other natural objects.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Volney P. Gay is Professor of Religion, Professor of Psychiatry, and Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. His previous book, Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations, published by SUNY Press, won the Heinz Hartmann Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: State Univ of New York Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0791451003
• ISBN 13: 9780791451007
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 243
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile