Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences

Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319718916
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book argues that neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics often function as a political ideology masquerading as a new science. In looking at works by Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, Richard Thaler, Cas Sunstein, and John Tooby, Robert Samuels undertakes a close reading of the new brain sciences, and by turning to the works of Freud and Lacan, offers a counter-discourse to these new emerging sciences. He argues that an unintentional political manipulation of scientific thinking serves to repress the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and sexuality as it reinforces neoliberalism and promotes the drugging of discontent. This innovative book is intended for those interested in science, psychoanalysis, and politics and offers a new definition of neoliberal subjectivity.

Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences

Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319718916
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics often function as a political ideology masquerading as a new science. In looking at works by Antonio Damasio, Steven Pinker, Richard Thaler, Cas Sunstein, and John Tooby, Robert Samuels undertakes a close reading of the new brain sciences, and by turning to the works of Freud and Lacan, offers a counter-discourse to these new emerging sciences. He argues that an unintentional political manipulation of scientific thinking serves to repress the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and sexuality as it reinforces neoliberalism and promotes the drugging of discontent. This innovative book is intended for those interested in science, psychoanalysis, and politics and offers a new definition of neoliberal subjectivity.

Teaching Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing University

Teaching Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing University PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000259927
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This timely intervention into composition studies presents a case for the need to teach all students a shared system of communication and logic based on the modern globalizing ideals of universality, neutrality, and empiricism. Based on a series of close readings of contemporary writing by Stanley Fish, Asao Inoue, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek, and Steven Pinker, this book critiques recent arguments that traditional approaches to teaching writing, grammar, and argumentation foster marginalization, oppression, and the restriction of student agency. Instead, it argues that the best way to educate and empower a diverse global student body is to promote a mode of academic discourse dedicated to the impartial judgment of empirical facts communicated in an open and clear manner. It provides a critical analysis of core topics in composition studies, including the teaching of grammar; notions of objectivity and neutrality; empiricism and pragmatism; identity politics; and postmodernism. Aimed at graduate students and junior instructors in rhetoric and composition, as well as more seasoned scholars and program administrators, this polemical book provides an accessible staging of key debates that all writing instructors must grapple with.

(Mis)Understanding Freud with Lacan, Zizek, and Neuroscience

(Mis)Understanding Freud with Lacan, Zizek, and Neuroscience PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031133277
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book sets out to clarify five key Freudian concepts (the pleasure principle, the primary processes, the unconscious, transference, and the reality principle) elaborated early on in Freud’s work but, it is argued, rarely understood—even by psychoanalysts themselves. It examines in turn the post-Freudian paradigms employed in neuropsychoanalysis, Lacan, Zizek, object relations, and psychoanalytic approaches to identity politics, and in doing so reveals the extent to which they have been distorted and repressed in these new contexts. Over the course of the book the author demonstrates how Freud’s unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology can be seen as a complete system of core concepts that both ground psychoanalysis in neurology and also introduce a vital challenge to the brain sciences. This book will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and psychoanalytic theory.

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000880184
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason examines the ways in which we can use psychoanalysis in order to better understand humanity and explores the question of what makes us human. For thousands of years, thinkers have been trying to define what makes us human. Some of the main questions they have asked is: What is consciousness? Do we have free will? Do animals use language? And what does reason mean? Samuels argues that we need to better understand the psychoanalytic approach to human nature in order to answer these questions, as well as using it to provide a new way of understanding issues such as addiction, political conflict, ideology, and destructive personal relationship. This book will be of vital interest to psychotherapists, as well as students and researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and psychology.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman PDF Author: Vanessa Sinclair
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000787990
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman presents a contemporary Freudian-Lacanian assessment of this classic director. This collection is the first to bring together this unique psychological perspective on Bergman’s work. While Bergman and his films have been written about throughout the decades, until now there has not been a collection anthologizing Freudian-Lacanian perspectives on his work. Vanessa Sinclair brings together an international community of scholars and practicing psychoanalysts – some of whom are also filmmakers – to reflect on Bergman’s films, life, and work in philosophical, historical, and cultural contexts. They assess individual films in depth, compare multiple films, and focus on Bergman’s life and work in a cultural context. This book includes chapters on seminal films including Persona and The Silence. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman will be essential reading for academics and students of film studies, psychoanalytic theory, and Lacan, and of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Culture Wars, Universities, and the Political Unconscious

Culture Wars, Universities, and the Political Unconscious PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031612272
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description


Trauma, Pedagogy, and the College Mental Health Crisis

Trauma, Pedagogy, and the College Mental Health Crisis PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040268862
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Trauma, Pedagogy, and the College Mental Health Crisis argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice offers a solution to the large increase in students seeking mental health services. Robert Samuels returns to the roots of psychoanalysis, drawing from Freud’s and Lacan’s conceptions of hysteria and narcissism. This book examines the idea that the repression of psychoanalysis has resulted in a situation where students are being misdiagnosed and mistreated as the underlying structures shaping narcissism and hysteria are misrecognized. Samuels suggests that the more people are trained to focus on their own thoughts and feelings, the more they take on self-destructive thoughts and behaviors in a neurotic way and that psychoanalysis offers a solution. Trauma, Pedagogy, and the College Mental Health Crisis will be of interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as mental health professionals working with adolescents and professionals working in higher education. It will also be relevant to readers interested in adolescent mental health, higher education, parenting, and politics.

Freud for the Twenty-First Century

Freud for the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030243826
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 83

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Book Description
This book places Freud’s theory of the reality principle in relation to both everyday experience and global issues of the 21st century and illustrates how it may be practically applied. Arguing against more critical recent accounts of Freud’s science, the author seeks to show how one might apply the scientific method to everyday life. It demonstrates how Freud contributes to a better understanding of reason and how this in turn can be used to unravel the role of unreason in both politics and personal relationships. Including critical examinations of topics such as Narcissism, Victimhood and Empathy, this engaging reappraisal of Freud’s relevance to contemporary life offers fresh insights for psychology, psychoanalysis and cultural theory; as well as practical guidance for a general reader.

Schizoanalytic Ventures at the End of the World

Schizoanalytic Ventures at the End of the World PDF Author: jan jagodzinski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030123677
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book provides a thorough application of theoretical ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to a series of examples drawn from contemporary film and new media arts. Chapters demonstrate examples of how to do schizoanalysis in philosophically informed cinema studies, new media, and arts based education. Schizoanalysis, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in distinction to Lacanian psychoanalysis, provides an imaginary basis to address the precarity of the contemporary world order: from the growing populism with its authoritarian fascist tendencies to the growing concerns regarding climate change within the Anthropocene. Part I of this book initiates this understanding through cinematic examples. Part II calls for a schizoanalytic pedagogical imagination, which is needed to provide insight into the structures of desire as they circulate in media, especially videogames, and the tensions between analogue and digital technological manifestations. Such pedagogy enables an understanding of the ‘new materialism’ where nonhuman and inhuman (AI) agencies are taken into account. To this end schizoanalytic pedagogy calls for a ‘new earth’ of transformed values and relationships.

The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies

The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000457214
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
Inspired by Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this book examines the unconscious processes shaping contemporary political ideologies. Addressing ten fundamental questions, Robert Samuels identifies four basic political ideologies: liberal, conservative, Left, and Right, which are often placed in the structure of a logical square, determined by two binary oppositions, with a fifth structure of centrism complicating the square. He turns to psychoanalysis to explain the unconscious defense mechanisms that structure these political ideologies. Each chapter uses a recent, influential title as a gateway to the analysis of the ideologies and structures identified. Through this analysis, Samuels argues that belief in ideological structures is tied to triumvirates of institutions and ideals; conservatives being tied to premodern institutions of religion, feudalism, and monarchy, while modern liberals are tied to ideals of universality, objectivity, and empiricism. He concludes that this investment in universality shapes the ethics of modern globalization and democratic liberalism. Unlike other books, conclusions are reinforced through examples drawn from current events with an integrated model of different psychopathologies. The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies moves beyond providing an understanding of what drives different political investments, to offer a more rational and conscious comprehension of subjectivity and social organization. This book will be a great resource for those interested in politics, political science psychology, social psychology, globalization, and ideology.