Description
Book SynopsisFreud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super-ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the 21st century.
Giosuè Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as the return of the religious, presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud in the writings of the 1920s and the analysis of a contemporary theological-political unconscious. Ghisalberti argues that the psyche of the liberal West has regressed to an infantile and primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, to Western civilization as a whole. The book re-examines Freud's psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted first from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and turns to his grounding ideals of intelligen
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. The Regressive Psychology of Groups 2. The Powers of the Super-ego and the Death Drive 3. The Present of Our Illusions 4. The Moral Coercions of Liberalism
