DOCSLIB.ORG

'The Freud Squad' To

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
'The Freud Squad' To From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 31 Journal Title: Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011 ISSN: 2047-0622 URL: www.freeassociations.org.uk FROM ‘THE FREUD SQUAD’ TO ‘THE GOOD FREUD GUIDE’: A GENEALOGY OF MEDIA IMAGES OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS ON THEIR ROLE IN THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION CAROLINE BAINBRIDGE Abstract: Since Jeffrey Masson published The Assault on Truth (1984) some twenty-seven years ago, popular media representations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have taken on a number of guises. These encompass a full spectrum of perspectives on the values and pitfalls of psychoanalysis as both a mode of therapeutic intervention and a tool for the scrutiny of the self. Such representations include both those premised on profound suspicion (seen, for example, in print media coverage of ‘false or repressed memory’ debates) and others grounded in a mode of reification (for example, the idealised images of therapy seen in TV dramas such as The Sopranos [HBO, 1999-2007]). This article considers the shifting cultural contexts surrounding the emergence of such representations of psychotherapy in order to offer a genealogy of its popular media images. It draws on the work of D.W. Winnicott to explore what such a genealogy suggests about the role of psychoanalysis in shaping the emergence of a culture of feeling in this period. It considers debates about notions of ‘therapy culture’ and discusses the overarching preoccupation with matters of emotion that appears to dominate media images on the contemporary Western cultural scene. How are such cultural developments linked to the rise of ‘mediatisation’ and its impact on notions of selfhood and subjectivity? Arguing that the media have now come to function as objects of our internal worlds, this article explores what can be learnt from object relations psychoanalysis in attempting to grapple with such shifts in experience, and it deploys a psycho-cultural approach to the ideas that emerge when such questions are posed. Since the publication of Jeffrey Masson’s book, The Assault on Truth (1984), some 27 years ago, and following on from that, Frederick Crews’ The Memory Wars (1995), popular media representations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy have taken on a number of guises. In part, the shifting fortunes of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the media eye can be understood as pertaining to the dominant cultural disposition. During the period that has elapsed since the ‘Freud Wars’ that ensued on the back of the Masson/Crews debates, the notion that we now reside in a ‘therapy culture’ has come to the fore, marking out the past Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011 From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 32 two decades as particularly interesting in terms of understanding what has been at stake in shaping our notions of therapeutic culture and their relationship to popular media perceptions of psychoanalysis as an intellectual force (Furedi, 2004; Giddens, 1992; Lunt and Stenner, 2005; Richards and Brown, 2002).1 This article sets out to chart the ways in which such media representations have shifted in shape during the last two decades. It contextualises this in relation to the now widely accepted commonplace that ours is indeed a culture where notions of emotional correctness and well-being dominate the media landscape of identity. How are media images of psychoanalysis related to the cultural reception of its theoretical ideas and cultural currency? To what extent can it be argued that psychoanalysis has become a central object of struggle in the formation of newly emergent subjectivities that are grounded in emotional concerns and endeavours? The broad-based acceptance that we live in a mediatised age has impacted on ideas about identity so that it is now assumed that these are intimately bound up with our encounters with mediated forms of experience. Given the widespread emotional inflection that dominates many media platforms in contemporary popular culture, the aim of this article is to make sense of the changing media attitudes to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy during the period in which ‘therapy culture’ has become entrenched in the mediatisation of everyday life. In order to explore the questions this poses, I will offer a case study of representations of British psychoanalytic positions in the UK national press and also make references to its representations in TV drama.2 To this end, the article draws on some 400 newspaper articles published between 1989 and 2009.3 In setting out this case study, my focus is on tracing the discourses around ideas related to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the press and on making use of psychoanalytic insights to explore the relationship between the media and the inner world. In particular, the case study will be used to show how press images impact upon media consumers, demonstrating the ever closer imbrication of mediatisation and everyday life and raising a number of important issues about the potential of psychoanalytic theory to illuminate what is at stake in such processes for notions of the self in contemporary popular culture. This article, together with the others in this special issue, emerges from the Media and the Inner World project4, which draws on object relations psychoanalysis as a framework for critical and theoretical thinking about emotion and popular culture. The project sets out to create new perspectives on processes of mediatisation and enculturation in contemporary life and pays attention to the fact that these are so frequently grounded in discourses of Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011 From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 33 emotionality and feeling. A key aim of the project is to raise questions about the implications of such developments for the study of media, culture and politics.5 It thus makes a contribution to the emergence of a ‘psycho-cultural’ model of engaging with media and culture that harnesses ideas about the roles of relatedness, on the one hand, and both internal and external psychological objects on the other, in the shaping of ideas about culture, selfhood and the politics of identity. In this respect, it draws upon the work of scholars such as Barry Richards and Roger Silverstone who have each argued for the importance of a psychoanalytic approach to the study of media, culture and politics (Richards 2004, 2007; Silverstone 1994, 1999).6 Richards suggests that Psychoanalysis is a highly developed form of reflexivity, requiring as it does of both analyst and analysand a relentless self-scrutiny. … This takes us to a crucial point about psychoanalysis as a body of ideas and as a force in understanding society and its future. Its insistence on constantly interrogating the meanings we give to experiences, and on revealing the hiding places for unconscious motivation in rationalised explanations, means that one of its roles in social and cultural analysis is a deeply sceptical one. (2004: 152) Arguing for the importance of enabling a cultural turn toward the psychoanalytic analysis of popular culture and the mass-mediated public sphere, Richards further suggests that ‘what matters here in determining the outcome are things like media content and media consumption’ (2004: 154). In his own work, Richards turns to the theories of Melanie Klein, demonstrating how psychoanalytic ideas such as those of containment, projection and introjection can provide new strategies for media analysts to grapple with the complexity of emotional experience in contemporary culture. For Richards, then, Kleinian object relations theory provides a means of understanding the interpersonal passions that circulate via media platforms and through mediated politics. It also offers a means of comprehending the relationship of such social and cultural phenomena to forces of unreasonable power and their influence on everyday lives and emotions. The usefulness of a Kleinian perspective on culture stems from its ability to highlight the slipperiness or messiness of emotional investments which seek to present themselves as grounded in reason and yet which are clearly inflected and underpinned by unconscious phantasies such as those associated with Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics Number 62, September 2011 From ‘The Freud Squad’ to ‘The Good Freud Guide’ 34 aggression, paranoia and annihilation. Richards’ work on the cultural politics of the mediatisation of terror provides rich pickings in this regard (Richards 2007). A key facet of Richards’ argument here is that a clinically-rooted form of psychoanalytic engagement with culture and society allows for the useful preservation of a sense of complexity in terms of cultural politics and any subsequent fashioning of policy development that may arise. The significance of being able to hold onto (unconscious) negativity in the shaping of innovative interventions becomes crucial in Richards’ arguments and this has interesting consequences for the analysis of the press coverage I undertake in the case study below. How is such a capacity to tolerate negativity represented in the shifting images of psychoanalysis that emerge from this case study and what does this suggest about the role of the media as objects of our inner worlds? In a similar vein, the work of D. W. Winnicott also becomes important – his notions of the ‘true’ and ‘false selves’, potential space and the shaping of creativity through the processes involved in relationality offer similarly constructive perspectives on what is at stake in the processes of mediatisation for both media producers and consumers. As Roger Silverstone has suggested, ‘the constant media mastication of everyday culture’ (1999: 1) reflects the role of the media in relation to the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of our lives, but it also highlights the need for media scholars to engage with notions of experience (1999: 5), something that was central to Winnicott’s engagement with psychoanalytic ideas (Abram, 2007: 5).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Why Freud Survives
    Why Freud Survives He’s been debunked again and again—and yet we still can’t give him up. By Louis Menand Sigmund Freud almost didn’t make it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on June 4th, on the Orient Express, three months after the German Army entered the city. Even though the persecution of Viennese Jews had begun immediately—Edward R. Murrow, in Vienna for CBS radio when the Germans arrived, was an eyewitness to the ransacking of Jewish homes—Freud had resisted pleas from friends that he flee. He changed his mind after his daughter Anna was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was able to get some of his family out, but he left four sisters behind. All of them died in the camps, one, of starvation, at Theresienstadt; the others, probably by gas, at Auschwitz and Treblinka. London was Freud’s refuge, and friends set him up in Hampstead, in a big house that is now the Freud Museum. On January 28, 1939, Virginia and Leonard Woolf came for tea. The Woolfs, the founders and owners of the Hogarth Press, had been Freud’s British publishers since 1924; Hogarth later published the twenty-four- volume translation of Freud’s works, under the editorship of Anna Freud and James Strachey, that is known as the Standard Edition. This was the Woolfs’ only meeting with Freud. English was one of Freud’s many languages. (After he settled in Hampstead, the BBC taped him speaking, the only such recording in existence.) But he was eighty-two and suffering from cancer of the jaw, and conversation with the Woolfs was awkward.
    [Show full text]
  • Failed Explanations and Criminal Responsibility: Experts and the Unconscious
    University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1982 Failed Explanations and Criminal Responsibility: Experts and the Unconscious Stephen J. Morse University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Evidence Commons, Law and Psychology Commons, Legal History Commons, Mental Disorders Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, and the Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Commons Repository Citation Morse, Stephen J., "Failed Explanations and Criminal Responsibility: Experts and the Unconscious" (1982). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 1351. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1351 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FAILED EXPLANATIONS AND CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY: EXPERTS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS* Stephen J. Morse** "There is no such thing as a bad boy." Fr. Edward Joseph Flanagan "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner." French Proverb TABLE oF CoNTENTs I. INTRODUCTION: A PROJECT FOR SciENTIFIC NlENTAL HEALTH EXPERTISE . 972 II. SUBJECTIVITY, RESPONSIBILITY AND EVIDENCE: FORMULATIONS ON THE Two THEORIES OF EXPERT TESTIMONY . 976 Ill. PSYCHODYNAMICS AND CRIMINAL LAW: THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS . 983 A. The Appeal of Theoretical Romances . 985 B. Does Psychodynamic Psychology Provide a Valid Causal Account of Human Behavior? Science and Its Vicissitudes . 991 * Copyright © 1982 by Stephen J.
    [Show full text]
  • Death and Mastery Psychoanalytic Drive...Ory and the Subject of Late
    !"#$% #&! '#($")* Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism Benjamin Y. Fong Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fong, Benjamin Y., author. Title: Death and mastery: psychoanalytic drive theory and the subject of late capitalism / Benjamin Y. Fong. Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2016] | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016014150| ISBN 9780231176682 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231542616 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Death instinct. | Death—Psychological aspects. | Capitalism—Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC BF175.5.D4 F66 2016 | DDC 150. 19/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014150 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Rebecca Lown The theory of the instincts [Triebe] is so to say our mythology. Instincts are myth- ical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a mo- ment disregard them, and yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly. —Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis Introduction In Defense of Drive Theory One could say that this book is an attempt to illuminate the var- ied psychic and social impediments to the achievement of mastery. When we hear the word mastery, it is natural to turn to Hegel or to think of some kind of domination or subjugation, but we very often use the word in a more everyday sense to designate the acquisition of a skill, a certain deftness of practice, or even the possession of a basic grip on a difficult situation.
    [Show full text]
  • English 987A, Psychoanalysis and Literature
    Pericles Lewis Revised Syllabus September 7, 2006 Psychoanalysis and Literature: An inquiry into Freud’s use of literature and literature’s use of Freud Class meeting time: Thursdays, 1:30-3:20, LC 319 Office hours: 451 College, room 213, Tuesdays, 2:00-3:40 by appointment Please contact Angelika Schriever at 432-2760 to make appointments for office hours. Readings Unit 1: The Interpretation of Dreams September 7 Syllabus Freud, Letter to Fliess of October 15, 1897 September 14 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapters I to IV Suggested reading: Alexander Welsh, Freud’s Wishful Dream Book September 21 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter V Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Roche or Grene Aristotle, Poetics September 28 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapters VI-VII Further discussion of Sophocles Suggested reading: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Unit 2: Freud’s Use of Literature October 5 Shakespeare, Hamlet Suggested reading: Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, part I, “Parapraxes” October 12 Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming” Suggested reading: Shakespeare, King Lear Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice October 19 No class meeting. Suggested reading: Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, part II, “Dreams” Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence October 26 Freud, “The Uncanny” E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann, especially “The Sandman” Suggested reading: Freud, The Freud Reader, Part Four, “Psychoanalysis and Culture”
    [Show full text]
  • Critical Discussion
    Critical Discussion TOWARD A CONSILIENT STUDY OF LITERATURE by S!"#"$ P%$&"' "()*" !"** +!('%"+. A** over the world, and probably for as long as Pthey have existed, people invent characters and recount their ,cti- tious exploits. This apparent frivolity is no small matter in human affairs. If one were to tally the number of hours and resources spent in enjoying ,ction in all its forms—story-telling, pretend play, myths and legends, fairy tales, novels, short stories, epic poems, television, movies, theater, opera, ballads, narrative paintings, jokes, comics, skits, video games, and pornography—it would surely account for a major portion of people’s time and a major portion of modern economic activity. Considering the costs in time, foregone opportunities to engage in practical pursuits, and the dangers of confusing fantasy with reality, our longing to lose ourselves in ,ction is a big puzzle for anyone seeking to understand human beings. All the more so from a Darwinian perspective, as one might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclina- tion to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one. Fiction is important not only in the lives of everyday people but in intellectual life. An acquaintance with major works of ,ction has long been considered essential to being an educated person, and it is probably a more common university requirement than patently useful subjects like biology or statistics. Departments of English (and other The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson; xxvi & 304 pp. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005, $79.95, $29.95 paper.
    [Show full text]
  • Deconstruction, Jurisprudence, & Textual Politics
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 1996 Reading personal legal narrative : deconstruction, jurisprudence, & textual politics. Elizabeth A. Myrick University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses Myrick, Elizabeth A., "Reading personal legal narrative : deconstruction, jurisprudence, & textual politics." (1996). Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014. 2544. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/2544 This thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. READING PERSONAL LEGAL NARRATIVE: DECONSTRUCTION, JURISPRUDENCE, & TEXTUAL POLITICS A Thesis Presented by ELIZABETH A. MYRICK Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS September 1996 Political Science READING PERSONAL LEGAL NARRATIVE- DECONSTRUCTION, JURISPRUDENCE, & TEXTUAL POLITICS A Thesis Presented by ELIZABETH A. MYRICK Approved as to style and content by: Barbara Cruikshank, Chair Nicholas Xenos, Member Eric Einhorn, Chair Political Science TABLE OF CONTENTS Pag e Chapter I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. DECONSTRUCTION AND POLITICS .... 10 III. TEMPTATIONS OF JURISPRUDENCE ... 27 IV. PERSONAL NARRATIVE AS TEXTUAL POLITICS
    [Show full text]
  • The Epistemic Predicament of a Pseudoscience: Social Constructivism Confronts Freudian Psychoanalysis
    The Epistemic Predicament of a Pseudoscience: Social Constructivism Confronts Freudian Psychoanalysis Abstract Social constructivist approaches to science have often been dismissed as inaccurate accounts of scientific knowledge. In this paper, we take the claims of robust social constructivism seriously and attempt to find a theory which does instantiate the epistemic predicament as described by SC. We argue that Freudian psychoanalysis, in virtue of some of its well known epistemic complications and conceptual confusions, provides a perfect illustration of what SC claims is actually going on in science. In other words, the features SC mistakenly ascribes to science in general correctly characterize the epistemic status of Freudian psychoanalysis. This sheds some light on the internal disputes in the field of psychoanalysis, on the sociology of psychoanalytic movement, and on the “war” that has been waged over Freud’s legacy with his critics. In addition, our analysis offers an indirect and independent argument against SC as an account of bona fide science, by illustrating what science would look like if it were to function as SC claims it does. Keywords : Social Constructivism, critique of psychoanalysis, pseudoscience, epistemic defects. Sigmund Freud, Frank Cioffi, David Bloor. Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Close encounter of a strange kind ..................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Jonathan Lear Curriculum Vitae Committee on Social Thought
    Jonathan Lear Curriculum Vitae Committee on Social Thought Department of Philosophy The University of Chicago 1115 East 58th Street 1130 East 59th Street Email: [email protected] Chicago, IL 60637 Employment: 1996-present: John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought and Department of Philosophy, The University of Chicago 1995-1996: Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities, Yale University 1986-1995: Professor of Philosophy, Yale University Chair, Department of Philosophy (1988-1990) 1985–1986 Associate Professor of Philosophy, Yale University 1979–1985 Fellow, Clare College, Cambridge 1982 –1985 Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cambridge 1979-1982 Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cambridge 1978-1979 Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Yale University 1977-1978 Research Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge Education: 1978 The Rockefeller University, Ph.D. in Philosophy 1973 The University of Cambridge, B.A. Philosophy (M.A., 1976) 1970 Yale University, B.A. in History (1995 Graduate, Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis) 2 Publications: Books Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005) Freud: L’invention de l’inconscient (French edition: Paris: Groupe Eyrolles, 2006) Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (New York: Other Press, 2003) L'azione terapeutica: Quando la conversazione produce un cambiamento psicologico (Milan: Apogee, 2007) (Italian translation) Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) Mutluluk, Ölüm ve Yaşmin Artakalani, (Turkish edition: Istanbul: Metis Yayinlan, 2006) Open Minded: Working Out The Logic of the Soul, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); La Psicoanalisi E I Suoi Nemici (Italian edition: Milano, Italia: McGraw-Hill Libri Italia, 1999); Turkish edition: Istanbul: Okuyanus Yayin, 2002.
    [Show full text]
  • The Consolation of Theosophy II by Frederick C. Crews the New York Review of Books Vol
    The Consolation of Theosophy II By Frederick C. Crews The New York Review of Books Vol. 43, No. 15 (October 3, 1996) Review Among the books discussed in this essay The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology; The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935 by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke New York University Press, 293 pp., $15.95 (paper) The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement by Richard Noll Princeton University Press, 387 pp., $27.95 Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, translated by Kirby Olson, in collaboration with Xavier Callahan Routledge, 144 pp., $14.95 (paper) Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington Schocken Books, 470 pp., $14.00 1. With the publication in 1995 of Peter Washington's admirable study Madame Blavatsky's Baboon , [1] readers now at last have access to a judicious as well as an entertaining account of Theosophy, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century movement that conjoined religious syncretism to esotericism on the one hand and liberal idealism on the other. The Theosophical Society was created in 1875 by Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who exerted a charismatic sway over converts until her death in 1891. In England, the United States, and India as well as elsewhere, Washington shows, Theosophy generated much bizarre metaphysics, absurd pomp, and petty factionalism, but it also exerted a surprisingly invigorating effect within the lives of many adherents. And its political influence, too, appears to have been largely benign; Theosophy allied itself not just with moralizing personal betterment but also with pacific internationalism and the self-determination of colonized "natives." Or so the indigenous activists were at first led to believe.
    [Show full text]
  • The Semiotic Review of Books Volume 11.1 July 2000 Issn 0847-1622
    THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKS VOLUME 11.1 JULY 2000 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb ISSN 0847-1622 Editorial: The Spell Dufresne’s central strategy is to provide a de- his later metabiology, bringing out the connnection tailed historical and theoretical accounting of between death, constancy (quantifiable energy by Gary Genosko Freud’s controversial and enormously influential bound and discharged) and pleasure, his goal is to late work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920; move toward this logical conclusion: “the ideal of If I have one regret from my graduate studies, henceforth, BPP). Dufresne’s Chapter 2, “The Het- constancy signified for Freud the ultimate pleasure from which I now have sufficient distance, it is that erogeneous ‘Beyond’: An Introduction to the Dead of death, that is, the orgasmic release from self” I devoted far too much time to the study of psy- and Dying,” (13-144) provides a “review and re- (51). Dufresne carefully investigates all of Freud’s choanalysis. It was not so much the critical atti- construction, an archaeology of BPP in general, and significant debts to 19th century psychology and tude of the time - reading Freud against Freud — of the theory of the death drive in particular” (13- biology, pointing out the problematic psychoana- that consumed me in the name of the endless prac- 14). There are, it seems, many Beyonds. Dufresne lytic interpretations along the way, with a view to tice of a clever literary criticism, but that many of begins by reviewing biographical material and com- exposing the Freudian view that life is encircled by my colleagues were under the spell of the clinical mentaries on Freud’s disruption of his own inven- death: one is not only already dead, but always be- version, which they wielded as if they held in their tion, his own revisionism, actually, with the late coming-dead (57).
    [Show full text]
  • Follies of the Wise
    Follies of the Wise The human penchant for disastrously confusing fantasy with fact is most plainly seen in the impulse to ascribe one’s own concerns to divine powers and then to harden one’s heart against unbelievers. FREDERICK CREWS Gerald Fried SKEPTICAL INQUIRER March / April 2007 27 n the day after Christmas 2004, a major earth- take a subtler track. Just such an adjustment was made with quake and tsunami devastated coastal regions considerable suavity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan around the Indian Ocean, killing as many as Williams, in a Sunday Telegraph article of January 2, 2005: O300,000 people outright, and dooming countless others to mis- The question: “How can you believe in a God who permits ery, heartbreak, and early death. Thanks to video cameras and suffering on this scale?” is . very much around at the moment, the satellite transmission of images, that event penetrated the and it would be surprising if it weren’t—indeed, it would be world’s consciousness with an immediate force that amounted, wrong if it weren’t. The traditional answers will get us only so psychologically, to a tsunami in its own right. The charitable far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to contributions that then poured forth on an unprecedented scale exist in an environment where we can live lives of productive expressed something more than empathy and generosity. They work and consistent understanding—human lives as we know also bore an aspect of self-therapy—of an attempt, however them—the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its symbolic, to mitigate the calamity’s impersonal randomness and own.
    [Show full text]
  • In Defense of Intelligent Design
    In Defense of Intelligent Design William A. Dembski Center for Science and Theology Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Louisville, Kentucky 40280 Preliminary Considerations Anyone new to the debate over intelligent design encounters many conflicting claims about whether it is science. A Washington Post front page story (Slevin 2005) asserts that intelligent design is “not science [but] politics.” In that same story, Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, claims that intelligent design is merely “a veneer over a certain theological message,” thus identifying intelligent design not with science but with religion. In a related vein, University of Copenhagen philosopher Jakob Wolf (2004) argues that intelligent design is not science but philosophy (albeit a philosophy useful for understanding science). And finally, proponents of intelligent design argue that it is indeed science (e.g., Dembski 2002a, ch. 6). Who is right? In determining how to answer this question, three points need to be kept in mind: (1) Science is not decided by majority vote. Can the majority of scientists be wrong about scientific matters? Yes they can. Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1970), in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, documented numerous reversals in science where views once confidently held by the scientific community ended up being discarded and replaced. For instance, until the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, geologists used to believe that the continents were immovable (compare Kearey and Vine 1996 to Clark and Stearn 1960). Intelligent design is at present a minority position within science. But that fact by itself does nothing to impugn its validity.
    [Show full text]