Les transformations des philosophies hellénistiques constituent, dans l'histoire de la pensée morale entre Renaissance et Lumières, un phénomène d'une fécondité extraordinaire, capital à beaucoup d'égards pour l'étude des "transferts" entre mondes antiques et Europe de la première modernité. Le cas du scepticisme offre de ce point de vue un terrain d'investigation de premier ordre. Or les relations entre scepticisme et pensée morale envisagées dans la longue durée et dans la multiplicité de leurs variations, entre philosophie et littérature, n'ont pas été (...) jusqu'ici étudiées avec l'attention qu'elles méritent. La présente enquête collective a pour ambition de remettre en évidence la finalité essentiellement éthique du scepticisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est issu d’une thèse d’histoire (2013, Paris VIII) qui a été récompensée par le prix de thèse du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (CTHS). L’originalité du travail de Caroline Fayolle est de relire l’histoire de la politique éducative menée depuis la Révolution jusqu’à la Monarchie de Juillet sous l’angle spécifique de l’éducation des filles. C’est à la redécouverte de ce « passé inachevé » de l’éducation féminine (pour reprendre une formule de Michèle Riot-Sarcey, p...

In this essay Charles Harvey offers a worried reflection on the range, extent, depth, affects, and effects of the perpetual assessment of the person in industrial nations in the contemporary world. Harvey begins his analysis by appealing to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard to provide an interpretive framework of our situation. He then focuses and concretizes these ideas through examples from his own life and, by extension, the readers. Finally, in light of (...) Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, Harvey speculates on the implications for selfhood in the contemporary world. Throughout the essay, Harvey uses assessment procedures in higher and public education as exemplary instances of his thesis. (shrink)

I argue that hopes and claims about the liberating power of liberal education are typically exaggerated, naive and wrong. Reflecting upon and borrowing terms from Jim Shelton's essay on "The Subversive Nature of Liberal Education," I use the work of Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to argue that social education—training in efficient and productive consumeristic life—absorbs, muffles and domesticates any radical content liberal arts education may manage to provide. As with virtually all education, liberal (...) education conserves the society from which it emerges. (shrink)

Lire Heidegger, c'est relire autrement tout ce que nous lisons. Ce Cahier invite à mieux comprendre la pensée heideggérienne autours des thèmes principaux qu'il aborde.Des essais, témoignages et lettres retracent l'impacte de sa pensée dans la culture moderne.Textes de : Walter Biemel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Jünger, Roger Munier, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Luc Marion, John Sallis, David Farrel Krell, Jean-François Courtine, Jean Beauffret, Dominique Janicaud, Otto Pöggeler, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Pierre Charcosset, F. Wybrands, Jacques (...) Taminiaux, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Marc Froment-Meurice, Jean-Michel Palmier, Reiner Schürmann, Jean-Marie Vaysse, Henri Birault, Jacques Derrida, Gérard Granel, Daniel Charles, Gabriel Liiceanu, Jean Greisch, René Gonner.Contient un choix de textes de Heidegger. (shrink)

Jean-Michel Beaudet est professeur d’ethnomusicologie à l’Université Paris-Nanterre. Spécialiste de la musique et de la danse amérindienne, il a publié en 1997 Souffles d’Amazonie. Les orchestres tule des Wayãpi, accompagné d’un CD qui restitue les enregistrements pratiqués lors de son séjour auprès des Wayãpi, et en 2010 Nous danserons jusqu’à l’aube. Essai d’ethnologie mouvementée en Amazonie, Paris, CTHS. Plus récemment, il a fait paraître Jouer, danser, boire. Carnets d’ethnographies musicales aux Éditions de l’EHESS, 2017, qui mêle réflexions sur (...) la pratique de l’ethnologie et souvenirs relatifs à son travail de terrain, qu’il conçoit moins comme une étude sur qu’une pratique avec les personnes rencontrées lors de ses différents voyages au Brésil (1975), en Guyane (1977-2023), en Nouvelle-Calédonie (1984-1988) – qui certes n’est pas en Amazonie – puis en Bolivie (1992-1998). (shrink)

Jean-Michel Vienne; IX*—Locke on Real Essence and Internal Constitution1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 139–15.

Delivered at the Collège de France between January and March 1980, the lectures entitled On the Government of the Living (Du gouvernement des vivants) seem to be the missing piece in the Foucauldian puzzle. Still unpublished, those eleven lectures were intended to set the theoretical foundation for the book announced as the fourth and last volume of the History of Sexuality, under the title Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair). This book, however, was never published, despite the (...) fact that his editor described it as the keystone for the entire History of Sexuality.1 The value of Michel…. (shrink)

We seem to be abandoning the codes that told previous generations who they should love. But now that many of us are free to choose whoever we want, nothing is less certain. The proliferation of divorces and separations reveal a dynamic we would rather not see: others sometimes reject us as passionately as we are attracted to them. Our desire makes us sick. The throes of rivalry are at the heart of our attraction to one another. This is the central (...) thesis of Jean-Michel Oughourlian's _The Genesis of Desire_, where the war of the sexes is finally given a scientific explanation. The discovery of mirror neurons corroborates his ideas, clarifying the phenomena of empathy and the mechanisms of violent reciprocity. How can a couple be saved when they have declared war on one another? By helping them realize that desire originates not in the self but in the other. There are strategies that can help, which Dr. Oughourlian has prescribed successfully to his patients. This work, alternating between case studies and more theoretical statements, convincingly defends the possibility that breakups need not be permanent. (shrink)

Comment comprendre que nous puissions avoir conscience de notre vie affective? Si l’on prend au sérieux les analyses de Michel Henry, cette expérience commune devrait être impossible. Si c’est la vie et l’expérience qui doivent nous servir de guides, alors il faut intégrer les acquis incontournables de la phénoménologie matérielle et la dépasser.

Despite its internal divisions and the uncertainty surrounding many of its foundations, there is a growing consensus that the on‐going search for an alternative model of the mind finds a minimal theoretical identity in the pursuit of an anti‐Cartesian conception of mental phenomena. Nevertheless, this anti‐Cartesianism remains more or less explicitly committed to the neo‐Brentanian idea that intentionality is an essential feature of the mental—an idea that has prevailed since the advent of modern cognitive science in the 1950s. An issue (...) of compatibility is thereby raised, as neo‐Brentanism arguably sides with cognitive Cartesianism. The main goal of the paper is to put into full light one specific aspect of this largely unperceived problem of compatibility by arguing that the neo‐Brentanian property of intentionality is an essentially representational one that runs counter to the salient anti‐representationalism of anti‐Cartesianism. And, that this representational essence confronts the search for alternative models of the mind of an anti‐Cartesian kind with the following theoretical issue: To what extent is it possible to devise a non‐Brentanian property of intentionality, particularly one that is fully dissociated from the property of representation? This issue is shown to be much deeper and more difficult than it looks once the nature of representation is properly apprehended; it seems to be still waiting for an answer in the current search for an alternative model of the mind, if only because it has not yet be set in fully adequate terms. (shrink)

La pensée du cinéma ne rencontre d'ordinaire Jean-François Lyotard, dans ses textes sur le cinéma ou non, que par le biais de deux activateurs : l'acinéma et le figurai. Ces deux activateurs, au demeurant, sont fortement représentatifs de la position paradoxale de Lyotard pour les études cinématographiques : si l'acinéma a été le plus souvent critiqué pour sa radicalité voire son sectarisme, n'ayant de fait guère de postérité, il en va tout autrement du figurai, lequel a trouvé dans les (...) films un terrain fertile d'investigation. Tout autant représentative est la méconnaissance en théorie du cinéma de nombreux autres textes de Lyotard portant sur le cinéma ou sur des films, et dont on ne parle jamais, ainsi que de sa philosophie postérieure à sa période libidinale, qui ne semble pas avoir encore trouvé d'échos particuliers en régime filmique. Le présent ouvrage fait précisément le pari de ces deux directions. A partir d'un autre Lyotard, ou du même mais envisagé très différemment, se dessinera progressivement une possibilité de penser le cinéma qui ne devra plus rien au figurai, à l'abstrait ou à l'expérimental, dont Lyotard le premier a fini par revenir, mais qui, singulièrement, ouvrira à une originale théorie du cinéma figuratif. " Méfiance envers les figuratifs quand ils ont de l'âme ", peut-on lire dans Que peindre?... (shrink)

In this volume, five of Erasmus’s polemical texts are presented, on issues related to the Latin translation and Greek text of his New Testament and other theological issues.

Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a "pathos of distance," the notion that certain values cannot originate in a community but are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. The expression of "pathos of distance" impressed would-be modernists like the American James Huneker and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats as they confronted the new in the arts. Later, it helped Deleuze and Barthes make (...) sense of modernity when they tried to tease out all the implications of "distance." Despite Benjamin criticism of Nietzsche's doctrine of the "eternal return of the same" in the Arcades Project, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin envisions a redeemed history that follows Nietzsche's basic intuition about the need to make every moment count for history. By first establishing this unlikely meeting of Nietzsche and Benjamin through their ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté is able then to provide an original genealogy for the ethics of the modern, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, Gide and Genet's ethical impulse to combine erotic liberation with the motivation for political revolution, and Derrida's reading of Joyce's Ulysses and a modern mode of writing that sought to get closer to the senses. The result is a fascinating critique of Nietzsche, Benjamin, affect theory, and the origins of the ethics of modernism. (shrink)

Jean-Michel Roessli | : Cette brève contribution a pour but de revenir sur une question soulevée par Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, à propos de la façon dont les historiens de l’Antiquité tardive envisagent les contacts ou échanges entre Juifs, chrétiens et païens et, plus particulièrement, les phénomènes d’acculturation ou d’appropriation culturelle. Cette question est abordée à la lumière de la figure d’Orphée, dont Miguel Herrero se sert pour illustrer sa thèse dans le domaine de l’iconographie religieuse, alors qu’il (...) recourt à d’autres thèmes ou motifs pour vérifier son hypothèse dans la sphère des rites et de la poésie. La question soulevée est de savoir si l’opinio communis selon laquelle certains éléments de la culture païenne ont été « assimilés » à et par la culture chrétienne est une représentation biaisée qui se fonde sur une construction apologétique plus ou moins inconsciente ou s’il s’agit d’une réalité culturelle historiquement attestée. | : This short paper aims to respond to a question raised by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui with respect to the way historians of Late Antiquity see contacts or exchanges between Jews, Christians and Pagans and, more specifically, the phenomenon of acculturation or cultural appropriation. This question is addressed in the light of the mythological figure of Orpheus, which Miguel Herrero uses to illustrate his thesis in the field of religious iconography, while referring to other themes or motifs to verify his hypothesis in the area of rites and poetry. The issue raised is to know whether the opinio communis according to which elements of the pagan culture were “assimilated” to and by the Christian culture is a biased representation based on a more or less unconscious apologetic construction or if it relies on a historically attested reality. (shrink)

Retention of structure across theory change has been invoked in support of a ‘structural’ alternative to more traditional entity-based scientific realism. In that context the transition from Newtonian mechanics to the Special Theory of Relativity is often regarded as a very significant instance of structural preservation, or retention, associated with correspondence-based recovery. The joint derivation, from a small set of elementary and ontologically neutral assumptions, of both the Galilei and the Lorentz transformation exemplifies the virtues of structural approaches to the (...) foundations of physical theories. The common origination of the resulting two relativistic frameworks sheds light on both the successes and the limitations of correspondence claims. However, the cognitive-operational character of the basic assumptions lends no support to the structural realist’s ‘inference to the best explanation’. (shrink)

The financial sector likes to call itself a "service industry". As such, its role is to guarantee the fluidity of transactions which are essential to economic activity by ensuring the best possible use of available capital. If finance is a service activity, it is important to specify what services it renders, to whom, in return for what, and for what purpose. In the absence of such clarification, finance may slide out of control and be left at the mercy of mass (...) enthusiasm or hysteria. This document, which is the result of work by people who hold senior positions in Geneva's financial sector or are external observers of the financial world identifies the issues and suggests some avenues for possible solutions. (shrink)

Pendant des millénaires, il fut attendu des victimes confrontées à des circonstances extrêmes que leurs conduites se conforment à des codes d'honneur terriblement exigeants. A-t-il trahi les siens celui qui a survécu à la torture? A-t-elle trop facilement cédé celle qui a connu le viol? Ces survivants suspects ont-ils sacrifié leur honneur à leur survie? Questions traumatisantes, disent certains. Questions pourtant posées avec une surprenante récurrence pendant des siècles et des siècles, comme l'explique Jean-Michel Chaumont. Or, depuis quelques (...) décennies, dans les sociétés occidentales, ces codes d'honneur sont frontalement contestés, et sont même perçus comme d'intolérables blâmes adressés aux victimes. Si tout le monde s'accorde à reconnaître le progrès moral que cette critique fait advenir dans le cas du viol (la morale n'attend plus que la femme victime se justifie de son comportement), elle tend à promouvoir une éthique de la survie à n'importe quel prix dans les situations de péril extrême. Ce livre ambitieux reconstruit les critères qui ont pu départager les conduites honorables et les conduites déshonorantes, et montre, archives à l'appui, qu'il y a peu encore ces critères furent appliqués à des résistants communistes et aux victimes de la Shoah, en particulier les membres des Sonderkommandos. Il signale les évolutions considérables de nos sensibilités morales et pointe les régressions associées au risque d'un " chacun pour soi " décomplexé. Si la trahison devenait la norme implicite, si l'éthique de la survie devait passer avant celle de l'honneur, et de la fidélité aux siens, ne serait-il pas à craindre que le jour venu, face à l'extrême, nous ne perdions nos âmes? (shrink)

Le présent ouvrage vise à présenter des approches non-duales de la réalité issues d'aires géographiques et d'horizons disciplinaires différents: Advaita Vedanta, bouddhisme Chan et Dzogchen, soufisme, philosophie occidentale, sciences, arts et spiritualités contemporaines. Si le thème de la non-dualité est fréquent aujourd'hui dans divers types d'approches spirituelles, force est de constater qu'il n'a été que peu traité à un niveau académique. Les différents chapitres s'efforcent de cerner avec rigueur ces approches dans leur spécificité, préalable à toute véritable recherche transdisciplinaire. Ce (...) volume est le fruit d'un séminaire de métaphysique organisé à l'Université de Louvain au cours de l'année académique 2017-2018. Contributions de Michel Hulin, Viktoria Lyssenko, Philippe Cornu, Dylan Esler, Grégory Vandamme, Daniel Proulx, Hervé Pasqua, Jean-Michel Counet, Marc Maesschalck, Manoé Reynaerts, Alexis Filippucci, Bertrand Hespel, Olivier Sartenaer, Philippe Filliot, José Le Roy et Christophe Vielle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Karl Jaspers’s Phenomenology”Jean Naudin (bio) and Jean-Michel Azorin (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, intentionality, intuition, empathy, ambiguitySchwartz and Wiggins’s paper clearly shows that Jaspers’s comprehensive psychiatry draws mainly from Husserl’s phenomenology. This thesis enters a current debate opened by Chris Walker and German Berrios about the influence of Husserlian philosophy on Jaspers’s work. This debate, which emerged at the end of the so-called decade (...) of the brain, could be considered perfectly obsolete. But its topicality relies on taking up the challenge of the scientific bases of comprehension in psychiatric experience. Wiggins and Schwartz perfectly achieve this aim by opposing a theory of seeing and a theory of thinking. Works such as Walker’s are grounded on thinking; they are works about theory. They are not works about experience, but rather epistemological or historical works. In contrast, Wiggins and Schwartz suggest to see, as Jaspers did, and not to think, following Husserl by grounding their psychopathology on intuition and presuppositionlessness. They emphasize Jaspers’s method of “making present” by doing a perfect analysis of the issues of translation of vergegenwärtigung as a co-experiencing of mental processes as if they were directly given. These main principles of direct-givenness, presuppositionlessness, and making present pull the Jaspersian concepts to the Husserlian phenomenological reduction and seem like the foremost principle in Husserlian phenomenology: the intuition of the thing in itself. Whereas Jaspers refuted the principle of eidetic reduction, Wiggins and Schwartz clearly show how much he grounded on the basis of the concept of intentionality, discovered and enlightened during Husserl’s life within the horizon of phenomenological reduction. Actually, it seems that the authors take the side of Jaspers to better support their own vision of psychiatric experience, which they more explicitly argued in Husserlian terms of the later period in some other papers (Schwartz and Wiggins 1985; Wiggins and Schwartz 1988, 1991; Wiggins, Schwartz, and Northoff 1990). However, they take care here to struggle exclusively with the epistemological field of their opponents, considering only Jaspers’s own writings and the Husserlian texts that were accessible to Jaspers when he wrote his psychopathology. There is no room for Kant in Jaspers’s main [End Page 37] principles, and this assumption must lead us to consider the horizon opened by Jaspers, that is, the horizon of a science of meaning essentially built on the lived experiences and the bracketing of any kind of a priori. In contrast to the slight influence of Kant, one idea that emerges is that of the straight impact of Dilthey on both Jaspers and Husserl. We perfectly agree with Wiggins and Schwartz that Jaspers, grounding both on Husserl and Dilthey, arrives at a methodological principle that is all his own, by considering both the connections of the life-stories and the objectivity of symptoms. In other words, we can find the originality and maybe the astonishing modernity of Jaspers in his perfect description of the balance between comprehension and observation, between empathy and its limits, that are obviously found in psychotic processes.We thus focused our comments on the following critiques to Jaspers, although they were already well argued in the brief conclusion of Wiggins and Schwartz: (a) the issue of empathy, (b) the limits of Jaspersian phenomenology, and (c) the merits of its genuine ambiguity.The Issue of Empathy. Indeed we have no reliable scientific mean to guarantee the correctness of our intuitions of the other’s mental life, and this problem might lead one to globally reject the method. The discussion of this problem, classical in the Continental literature since the twenties, led the Continental psychiatrists to unfortunately abandon their own traditions. And it is surprising for a Continental psychiatrist to see this debate coming back into the English-speaking literature. When we address the issue of empathy, we have no easy means to abandon folk psychology. Using philosophical slang weakens the attempt to enlighten its foundations instead of describing its values. The suspicion regarding empathy is partially legitimated by the prejudices of Jaspers himself. As psychiatrists, we have to carry on the Jaspersian research by progressively abandoning it and coming back... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Desire is Mimetic: A Clinical Approach Jean-Michel Oughourlian Université de Besançon, American Hospital ofParis What is the clinical expression ofmimetic desire? Rivalry. What I see every day in my practice is not mimicking, nor copying, nor learning; it is rivalry. Rivalry is recurrent, it repeats itself. The repetition syndrome identified by psychoanalysis is mimetic for two reasons: 1) because it is always the clinical expression of a (...) rivalry and that rivalry is always mimetic; 2) because it reproduces itself, duplicates itself, imitating the circumstances of the first rivalry and always looking for an impossible victory. That victory is impossible, since it stems from a situation which mimics the circumstances of defeat. But those circumstances are the only ones of interest, since the only battle worth winning is the one that has every chance to be lost. Mimetic rivalry (as I have tried to show elsewhere1) is always rooted in one ofthe two following claims: the claim ofthe selffor the ownership of its own desire; and the claim of desire for its anteriority, its seniority over the other's desire, the other desire that has generated it, on which it is modeled. Clinically, the self and the desire are going to develop various strategies to ascertain those two claims. The interdividual psychotherapy has to diagnose the nodal points of the mimetic conflict. It has to see ' See Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Puppet ofDesire: The Psychology ofHysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis, trans. Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Ed. 44Jean-Michel Oughourlian through the clinical variety of strategies and symptoms to the essential unity ofthe two claims underlying it. Let me give a few examples. Vengeance As we know, violence is mimetic. When violence cannot be immediately retaliated, imitated, duplicated, the energy for that retaliation is saved for later use. The more humiliating the violence, the greater the stored-up energy. Humiliation, in turn, stems from weakness: the humiliation of a child raped by an adult, ofa civilian beaten up by soldiers, ofa poor person insulted by a rich one, or, generally speaking, ofthe weak overpowered by the strong. Ifa weak person is the perpetrator ofthe first violence, it does not generate humiliation and, most ofthe time, does not entail vengeance. When an angered child kicks an adult, for example, this usually produces laughter rather than violence precisely because the child is smaller and weaker. As time goes by, the energy of postponed or deferred violence accumulates and increases. Clinically, it manifests itself in two ways: as a feeling ofhatred; and as a strength, a drive, a compulsive desire to destroy which will animate the offended and organize all his efforts in view ofthe vengeance that will set him free. The mimetic retaliation ofviolence will drive him until that retaliation is accomplished. In my experience, all the young girls who were raped by their fathers could not restore their mental health and psychological balance unless they were able, in one way or another, to avenge themselves. In the absence of such revenge, the enormous energy built up throughout their childhood and adolescence produced psychological symptoms which last for a lifetime. One such example is a patient, Miss L., 35 years old, who seeks treatment for alcoholism. It is a strange type ofalcoholism: each time, she must enter a meeting and speak before a group of people—and especially if her boss is in the group—she goes to the bathroom and drinks white rum from a hidden bottle. She has been in psychoanalysis for the past 12 years with no significant results. The history of her malady shows that she has wide mood swings, ups and downs often labeled as manic-depressive. Very quickly I see that she has stored within herself an enormous amount of violence which is fairly well controlled, but which manifests itselfthrough different types of aggressive behavior, especially towards men. A few sessions later, she finally tells me that she had been raped by her father and, as a consequence, that her parents had divorced. She was then obliged to remain with her father and take care ofhim. Psychoanalysis, of course, has Desire is Mimetic: A Clinical Approach45 commented extensively on the actual achievement ofher oedipal... (shrink)

For thousands of years, political leaders have unified communities by aligning them against common enemies. However, today more than ever, the search for “common” enemies results in anything but unanimity. Scapegoats like Saddam Hussein, for example, led to a stark polarization in the United States. Renowned neuropsychiatrist and psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian proposes that the only authentic enemy is the one responsible for both everyday frustrations and global dangers, such as climate change—ourselves. Oughourlian, who pioneered an “interdividual” psychology with (...) René Girard, reveals how all people are bound together in a dynamic, contingent process of imitation, and shows that the same patterns of irrational mimetic desire that bring individuals together and push them apart also explain the behavior of nations. (shrink)

_Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award!_ How has Hanna Segal influenced psychoanalysis today? Jean-Michel Quinodoz provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of Segal's life, her clinical and theoretical work, and her contribution to psychoanalysis over the past sixty years by combining actual biographical and conceptual interviews with Hanna Segal herself or with colleagues who have listened to Segal in various contexts. _Listening to Hanna Segal_ explores both Segal's personal and professional histories, and the interaction between the two. (...) The book opens with an autobiographical account of Segal's life, from her birth in Poland to her analysis with Melanie Klein in London where she became the youngest member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Quinodoz goes on to explain Segal's contributions in various fields of psychoanalysis including: the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients the introduction of the "symbolic equation" aesthetics and the creative impulse the analysis of elderly patients introducing the work of Melanie Klein. Quinodoz concludes by examining Segal's most recent contribution to psychoanalysis - exploring nuclear terror, psychotic anxieties, and group phenomena. Throughout the interviews Segal speaks of her close relationships with prominent colleagues such as Klein, Rosenfeld, and Bion, making this book both a valuable contribution to the history of psychoanalysis and an indication of the evolution of psychoanalytic ideas over the past six decades. This clear summary of Hanna Segal's life and her contribution to psychoanalysis will be an essential guide to anyone studying Segal and her contemporaries. (shrink)

_Melanie Klein and Marcelle Spira: Their Correspondence and Context__ _includes 45 letters Melanie Klein wrote to the Swiss psychoanalyst Marcelle Spira between 1955 and 1960, as well as six rough drafts from Spira. They were discovered in Spira’s library after her death in 2006. As only a few of the letters that Klein wrote to her colleagues have been preserved, this moving, historically important correspondence sheds new light upon the last five years of Klein’s creative life. The common theme of (...) the letters is their discussion of the French translation of _The Psycho-Analysis of Children_ by Boulanger in collaboration with Spira. The translation, first undertaken by Lacan, went through many ups and downs until it was published in 1959 by the Presses Universitaires de France. Klein also discusses her current work, in particular _Envy and Gratitude_. She encourages her pioneering Swiss colleague Spira to be patient in the face of the resistance shown towards Kleinian thinking. Identifying herself to some extent with her younger follower, Klein reveals a very touching autobiographical account of the difficulties that she herself had encountered in her work and how she overcame them. In _Melanie Klein and Marcelle Spira: Their Correspondence and Context_, Jean-Michel Quinodoz brings together these important letters. This rare collection of their correspondence is a valuable contribution to the history of psychoanalysis and will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, trainee psychoanalysts and lay readers with an interest in the work of Klein and Spira. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabaté subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred (...) action, fantasy, hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabaté demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at a time when it faced certain intellectual decline. Focusing on key terms in Lacan's often difficult, idiosyncratic development of psychoanalysis, this volume brings new perspectives to the work of an intimidating influential thinker.