Regent's University London Library
& Media Services Catalogue

0887382959

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In this book, the author examines different national responses to Freud and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. He examines Freud's work in the contexts of law, society, and class, as well as other forms of psychology. The book includes a brilliant essay on Freud and the question of psychoanalysis' contribution to radical thought, in contrast to the conservative tradition. The author takes up the extravagant claims of Marcuse and Reich, and sees the risks of then overglamorization of the beginnings of psychoanalysis as a profession. Roazen views the legacies of Harry Stack Sullivan, Helene Deutsch, and Erik H. Erikson as less rich because their work conformed to the social status quo. He sees Freud's inability to avoid an ambiguous outcome as a lack of concern with normality and a refusal to own up to the wide variety of psychological solutions he found both therapeutically tolerable and humanly desirable. The author concludes with a series of explorations on the dichotomies Freud left behind: clinical discoveries versus philosophical standpoints; the relationship of normality to nihilism; and a defense of a therapeutic setting based on trained specialists versus a therapeutic approach encouraging self-expression. This is a volume of mature analysis on the social, political, and philosophical implications of psychoanalysis.