Description
Book SynopsisIn Impious Fidelity, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg investigates the legacy of Anna Freud at the intersection between psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking and theorizing and its existence as a political entity. Stewart-Steinberg argues that because Anna Freud inherited and guided her father''s psychoanalytic project as an institution, analysis of her thought is critical to our understanding of the relationship between the psychoanalytic and the political. This is particularly the case given that many psychoanalysts and historians of psychiatry charge that Anna Freud's emphasis on defending the supremacy of the ego against unconscious drives betrayed her father's work.
Are the unconscious and the psychoanalytic project itself at odds with the stable ego deemed necessary to a democratic politics? Hannah Arendt famously (and influentially) argued that they are. But Stewart-Steinberg maintains that Anna Freud's critics (particularly disciples of Melanie Klein) have simplified her thou
Trade Review
Anna Freud—criticized by Lacanians and Kleinians for mitigating the importance of the unconscious in human life—gets her due in this brilliant work.... For Stewart-Steinberg, her central insight is 'altruistic surrender,' in which ambition is experienced magnanimously rather than aggressively, displaced onto an other who stands as a proxy for the self. By making the other a representative of the self, psychoanalysis informs a democratic politics. A significant work of scholarship, this book is required reading for anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis and its relationship to theories of gender and politics. Summing Up: Essential.
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Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. A Wider Social Stage
2. Girls Will Be Boys: Gender, Envy, and the Freudian Social Contract
3. Anna-Antigone: Experiments in Group Upbringing
4. The Defense of Psychoanalysis/The Anxiety of Politics
Conclusion: Ego PoliticsBibliography
Index
