D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory

D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory PDF

Author: Matthew H. Bowker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-31

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1137575336

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In this volume, the work of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott is set in conversation with some of today’s most talented psychodynamically-sensitive political thinkers. The editors and contributors demonstrate that Winnicott’s thought contains underappreciated political insights, discoverable in his reflections on the nature of the maturational process, and useful in working through difficult impasses confronting contemporary political theorists. Specifically, Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory and practice offer a framework by which the political subject, destabilized and disrupted in much postmodern and contemporary thinking, may be recentered. Each chapter in this volume, in its own way, grapples with this central theme: the potential for authentic subjectivity and inter-subjectivity to arise within a nexus of autonomy and dependence, aggression and civility, destructiveness and care. This volume is unique in its contribution to the growing field of object-relations-oriented political and social theory. It will be of interest to political scientists, psychologists, and scholars of related subjects in the humanities and social sciences.

Fear of Breakdown

Fear of Breakdown PDF

Author: Noëlle McAfee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0231549911

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What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the subterranean anxieties behind current crises and the ways in which democratic practices can help work through seemingly intractable political conflicts. Working at the intersection of psyche and society, McAfee draws on psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the fear of breakdown to show how hypernationalism stems from unconscious anxieties over the origins of personal and social identities, giving rise to temptations to reify exclusionary phantasies of national origins. Fear of Breakdown contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss in order to create a more democratic politics. Coupling robust psychoanalytic theory with concrete democratic practice, Fear of Breakdown shows how a politics of working through can help counter a politics of splitting, paranoia, and demonization. McAfee argues for a new approach to deliberative democratic theory, not the usual philosopher-sanctioned process of reason-giving but an affective process of making difficult choices, encountering others, and mourning what cannot be had.

Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life

Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life PDF

Author: Nathan Gerard

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 1000999831

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Nathan Gerard draws upon the pathbreaking insights of a pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to offer a new set of ideas in the novel domain of contemporary work life and its discontents. Locating Winnicott within a broad landscape of critical scholarship that dissects work’s perils, the book positions Winnicott as both a radical critic and creative advocate for building a different kind of work life—one that might make room for the presence of self. By shuffling the discourse on neoliberal subjectivity to reclaim what Winnicott calls “unit status” of the separate self, Gerard differentiates Winnicott from the relational tradition by advocating for Winnicott’s non-relational aspects. Through such analysis, the book reveals how work and home have become two sides of the same impoverished coin, each contributing to a legitimately “bad environment” that perpetuates self-absence and annihilates one’s unique sense of “feeling real” and alive. Winnicott and Labor’s Eclipse of Life will be of interest to readers of Winnicott and psychoanalysis, organization and management studies, and anyone hoping to deepen their engagement with the dynamics of contemporary work life.

Winnicott and Labor's Eclipse of Life

Winnicott and Labor's Eclipse of Life PDF

Author: Nathan Gerard

Publisher:

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781003398912

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"Nathan Gerard draws upon the pathbreaking insights of pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to offer a new set of ideas in the novel domain of contemporary work life and its discontents. Locating Winnicott within a broad landscape of critical scholarship that dissects work's perils, the book positions Winnicott as both a radical critic and creative advocate for building a different kind of work life-one that might make room for the presence of self. By shuffling the discourse on neoliberal subjectivity to reclaim what Winnicott calls "unit status" of the separate self, Gerard differentiates Winnicott from the relational tradition by advocating for Winnicott's non-relational aspects. Through such analysis, the book reveals how work and home have become two sides of the same impoverished coin, each contributing to a legitimately "bad environment" that perpetuates self-absence and annihilates one's unique sense of "feeling real" and alive. Winnicott and Labor's Eclipse of Life will be of interest to readers of Winnicott and psychoanalysis, organization and management studies, and anyone hoping to deepen their engagement with the dynamics of contemporary work life"--

Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care

Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care PDF

Author: Joanna Kellond

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-03-20

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3030914372

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This book explores the significance of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s ideas for contemporary debates about care. Locating Winnicott in relation to a range of fields, including psychology, philosophy, sociology, critical theory and feminist theory, it examines the implications of his thinking for understanding and transforming the relationship between care and society. Winnicott was unique amongst psychoanalysts for the emphasis he placed on care in the development of subjectivity. The book unpacks Winnicott’s understanding of care and assesses its relevance for conceptions of social responsibility, justice and transformation. In a world where care is in crisis, how might we theorise the conditions necessary for the development of caring subjectivities, and is it possible to infer a relationship between those conditions and progressive social change? This unique book will be of interest to readers in psychosocial studies, politics and anyone concerned with thinking about the relationship between care and social transformation.

Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory

Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory PDF

Author: Yannis Stavrakakis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 631

ISBN-13: 1315524759

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The emerging field of ‘psychoanalytic political theory’ has now reached a stage in its development and rapid evolution that deserves to be registered, systematically defined and critically evaluated. This Handbook provides the first reference volume which showcases the current state of psychoanalytic political theory, maps the genealogy of its development, identifies its conceptual and methodological resources and highlights its analytical innovations as well as its critical promise. The Handbook consists of 35 chapters offering original, comprehensive and critical reviews of this field of study. The chapters are divided into five thematic sections: Figures discusses the work of major psychoanalytic theorists who have influenced considerably the development of psychoanalytic political theory. Traditions genealogically recounts and critically reassesses the many attempts throughout the 20th century of experimenting with the articulation between psychoanalysis and political theory in a consistent way. Concepts asks what are the concepts that psychoanalysis offers for appropriation by political theory. Themes presents concrete examples of the ways in which psychoanalytic political theory can be productively applied in the analysis of racism, gender, nationalism, consumerism, etc. Challenges/Controversies captures the ways in which psychoanalytic political theory can lead the way towards theoretical and analytical innovation in many disciplinary fields dealing with cutting-edge issues. The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory will serve as scholarly reference volume for all students and researchers studying political theory, psychoanalysis, and the history of ideas.

Winnicott and Labor's Eclipse of Life

Winnicott and Labor's Eclipse of Life PDF

Author: Nathan Gerard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2023-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781032505374

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Nathan Gerard draws upon the pathbreaking insights of pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to offer a new set of ideas in the novel domain of contemporary work life and its discontents. Locating Winnicott within a broad landscape of critical scholarship that dissects work's perils, the book positions Winnicott as both a radical critic and creative advocate for building a different kind of work life--one that might make room for the presence of self. By shuffling the discourse on neoliberal subjectivity to reclaim what Winnicott calls "unit status" of the separate self, Gerard differentiates Winnicott from the relational tradition by advocating for Winnicott's non-relational aspects. Through such analysis, the book reveals how work and home have become two sides of the same impoverished coin, each contributing to a legitimately "bad environment" that perpetuates self-absence and annihilates one's unique sense of "feeling real" and alive. Winnicott and Labor's Eclipse of Life will be of interest to readers of Winnicott and psychoanalysis, organization and management studies, and anyone hoping to deepen their engagement with the dynamics of contemporary work life.

Public Things

Public Things PDF

Author: Bonnie Honig

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0823276422

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In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health .State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of “pursuing in common the objects of common desires,” Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

Ruthless Winnicott

Ruthless Winnicott PDF

Author: Sally Swartz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 0429791542

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Ruthless Winnicott is an extended exploration of the role of ruthlessness in psychic development. That survival is of no use unless it is preceded by a ruthless attack is one of D. W. Winnicott’s most resonant paradoxes. The book links this with the search for subjective freedom for those traumatized by colonialism, and in doing so draws on the work of Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary psychoanalytic thinker Frantz Fanon. Sally Swartz examines essential pieces of Winnicott’s work on ruthlessness as central to the emergence of concern for the Other. She illustrates, with clinical examples, ways in which the ruthless use of the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic space allows the patient either to enter fully into a process that allows growth, or to defend ruthlessly against the anxieties provoked by psychic change. Ruthless Winnicott also maps decolonial challenges to psychoanalytic theory, and the role of ruthlessness in protest movements demanding radical subjective change. Swartz’s exploration of ruthlessness as both zest and defense in individual development and in protest movements illuminates processes of psychological collision and change. It traces links between individual trauma and collective turbulence, and maps ways in which ruthlessness is essential to subjective change. Ruthless Winnicott will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars of colonialism, decolonization and post-colonialism.