PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR:
- On Freud's Negation
- On Freud's A Child is Being Beaten
- On Freud's Creative Writers and Daydreaming
- On Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
- Homosexualities: Psychogenesis, Polymorphism, and Countertransference
1.Ever since Freud proposed that certain ideas can be permitted to become conscious only in their inverted and negative forms, interest has grown into the entire realm of the presence of absence, so to speak. Or, perhaps, it is better to term such mental contents as the presence in the form of absence. These two ways of conceptualizing Freud's negation have led to a panoploy of ideas that include negative hallucination, psychic holes, negative narcissism, selfishly motivated erasure of the Other, and the so-called "work of the negative".
This volume, edited by Salman Akhtar and Mary Kay O'Neil, elucidates these concepts and refines the distinction between Freud's negation and subsequently described mental mechanisms of denial, repudiation, isolation, and undoing. The book also provides contemporary perspectives on the developmental underpinnings of negation and the technical usefulness of the concept, including its implicit role in negative therapeutic reactions. A thought-provoking and conceptually illuminating volume.
2. This collection presents a classic essay by Sigmund Freud, followed by discussions that set Freud's work in context and demonstrate its contemporary relevance. The contributors to this volume represent diverse perspectives from different regions of the psychoanalytic world.
3. This volume contains Freud's essay "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" which explores the origins of daydreaming, and its relation to the play of children and the creative process. Each contributor offers an insightful commentary on the essay.
4. Besides constituting a fundamental milestone in contemporary Western thought, Sigmund Freud's monumental corpus of work laid the theoretical-technical foundations on which psychoanalysts based the construction and development of the comprehensive edifice in which they abide today.
This edifice, so varied in tones, so heterogeneous, even contradictory at times, has stood strong because of these foundations. Indeed, this book shows, through its various chapters written by psychoanalysts from different parts of the world and sustaining varied paradigms, this enriching heterogeneity coupled with the invisible thread which strings together the diversity lent to it by the Freudian foundations.
One of the characteristics of the Freudian opus that is highlighted when studied in this perspective is its incessant improvement, where ideas and concepts are reformulated and become more complex as clinical facts and methodological and epistemological resources call for it.
5. This latest volume in the Psychoanalysis and Women Series for the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association presents and discusses theoretical and clinical work from a number of authors worldwide. It clearly demonstrates that there is no typical development of homosexuality and that each individual's object-choice can only be grasped by examining their psychic history. While the therapeutic work requires no special adaptation of technique, countertransferential difficulties which may arise and stem in part from cultural representations about gender differences are fully explored. The book includes a unique retrospective view by Ralph Roughton over three time points which charts changes in considering the analyst's response within the wider cultural context.