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Author: Rudolf Allers
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-26
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 1444659979
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Author: Richard Webster
Publisher:
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 673
ISBN-13: 9780951592250
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the first complete and coherent account of Freud's life and work to be written from a consistently sceptical point of view. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, the book is a devastating portrait of the interpreter of dreams.
Author: Rudolf Allers
Publisher:
Published: 1941-11-01
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 9780912141664
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Adolf Grunbaum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1985-12-16
Total Pages: 325
ISBN-13: 0520907329
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are themselves epistemically quite suspect.
Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1999-09-01
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 0674274423
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Freud is discredited, so we don’t have to think about the darker strains of unconscious motivation anymore. We know what moves our political leaders, so we don’t have to look too closely at their thinking either. In fact, everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. This book is a spirited assault on that deadening trend, especially as it affects our deepest attempts to understand the human psyche—in philosophy and psychoanalysis. It explodes the widespread notion that we already know the problems and proper methods in these fields and so no longer need to ask crucial questions about the structure of human subjectivity.“What is psychology?” Open Minded is not so much an answer to this question as an attempt to understand what is being asked. The inquiry leads Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, back to Plato and Aristotle, to Freud and psychoanalysis, and to Wittgenstein. Lear argues that Freud and, more generally, psychoanalysis are the worthy inheritors of the Greek attempt to put our mindedness on display. There are also, he contends, deep affinities running through the works of Freud and Wittgenstein, despite their obvious differences. Both are concerned with how fantasy shapes our self-understanding; both reveal how life’s activities show more than we are able to say.The philosophical tradition has portrayed the mind as more rational than it is, even when trying to account for irrationality. Psychoanalysis shows us the mind as inherently restless, tending to disrupt its own functioning. And empirical psychology, for its part, ignores those aspects of human subjectivity that elude objective description. By triangulating between the Greeks, Freud, and Wittgenstein, Lear helps us recover a sense of what it is to be open-minded in our inquiries into the human soul.
Author: Reuben Fine
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-08
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1317976126
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this book, originally published in 1963, Dr Fine sets out to describe what Freud said, and to re-evaluate his views critically in the light of the best knowledge of the time. Freud’s numerous changes of view, his constant searching for the truth wherever it might lead him, as well as his resolute adherence to certain hard-won positions once he had achieved them, are all skilfully traced. Freud’s intellectual Odyssey is divided into four periods. From 1886 to 1895 he was a neurologist investigating hysteria and other ‘nervous’ disorders. Then came his self-analysis, from 1896 to 1899, the real matrix from which psycho-analysis grew. The first psycho-analytic system of psychology was developed in the period from 1900 to 1914. The remainder of his life, from 1914 to 1939, was devoted to the elaboration of ego psychology, and heart of contemporary psycho-analysis. Dr Fine undertook, in writing this book, the formidable task of examining the whole body of Freud’s thought, to clarify what he said, and to review his ideas critically in the light of the best available existing knowledge. As he says ‘In this process of criticism I have tried to specify which aspects of Freud have stood the test of time and which have not.’ ‘So far as I can see no one has ever before taken the trouble to ask: "What did Freud actually say? How does what Freud said stand up in terms of what we now know?"’ In answering these questions, Dr Fine develops a major thesis that all modern psycho-analysis derives from Freud, though it has moved far in many different directions. The contention is that emphasis on schools is misleading and has obscured the actual historical growth of the science. As he states in his Preface to this volume, Dr Fine’s conviction is: ‘By building on Freud’s fundamental insights, we can move on most readily to empirical research and thus construct a more satisfactory science of psychology.’
Author: Richard Webster
Publisher:
Published: 1995-09-07
Total Pages: 696
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The importance of Sigmund Freud to the history of the twentieth century needs no demonstration. Yet, as criticism of Freud has mounted, all the major biographies of this central figure in our culture have been written either by admirers or by authors who are themselves psychoanalysts. Why Freud Was Wrong sets out to redress the imbalance and to offer a definitive answer to controversies that have raged with increasing bitterness in recent years. It is the first complete and coherent account of Freud's life and work to be written from a consistently skeptical point of view. It is also an unusual and successful exercise in intellectual archaelogy. In a new analysis of the origins of psychoanalysis, Richard Webster traces Freud's essentially religious personality to his childhood and shows how the founder of psychoanalysis, burdened by his parents' reverence and expectations, allowed his messianic dreams to shape the "science" he created. He examines the manner in which Freud - far from being the fearless and independent thinker of psychoanalytic legend - repeatedly fell under the spell of charismatic theorists who were mistaken or deluded. Having shown how Freud again and again misdiagnosed his patients and failed to work the cures he claimed, Webster goes on to question his most important theoretical formulations. Through a careful analysis of cultural history, he shows that Freud's sexual theories were in reality religious doctrines in disguise, safe from the attacks of science precisely because they were presented as science.
Author: Elisabeth Roudinesco
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2004-03-10
Total Pages: 199
ISBN-13: 0231518420
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why do some people still choose psychoanalysis-Freud's so-called talking cure-when numerous medications are available that treat the symptoms of psychic distress so much faster? Elisabeth Roudinesco tackles this difficult question, exploring what she sees as a "depressive society": an epidemic of distress addressed only by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs. Far from contesting the efficacy of new medications like Prozac, Zoloft, and Viagra in alleviating the symptoms of any number of mental or nervous conditions, Roudinesco argues that the use of such drugs fails to solve patients' real problems. In the man who takes Viagra without ever wondering why he is suffering from impotence and the woman who is given antidepressants to deal with the loss of a loved one, Roudinesco sees a society obsessed with efficiency and desperate for the quick fix. She argues that "the talking cure" and pharmacology represent not just different approaches to psychiatry, but different worldviews. The rush to treat symptoms is itself symptomatic of an antiseptic and depressive culture in which thought is reduced to the firing of neurons and desire is just a chemical secretion. In contrast, psychoanalysis testifies to human freedom and the power of language.
