Description
Book SynopsisTaking a deep dive into contemporary Western culture, this book suggests we are all fundamentally ambivalent beings. A great deal has been written about how to love to be kinder, more empathic, a better person, and so on. But trying to love without dealing with our ambivalence, with our hatred, is often a recipe for failure. Any attempt, therefore, to love our neighbour as ourselves or even, for that matter, to love ourselves must recognise that we love where we hate and we hate where we love.
Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has claimed that to be in two minds about something or someone is characteristic of human subjectivity. Owens and Swales trace the concept of ambivalence through its various iterations in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to question how the contemporary subject deals with its ambivalence. They argue that experiences of ambivalence are, in present-day cultural life, increasingly excised or foreclose
Trade Review
"Covering everything from Aristotle to zombies to Breaking Bad, Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales have written a masterpiece unlocking the secrets of ambivalence. In Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan, they demonstrate that ambivalence is perhaps the central category in social relations. The need for this book is especially urgent today, in an era characterised by its various ways of refusing ambivalence, which are, Owens and Swales make clear, ways of refusing the price of interacting with others altogether. Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan speaks to the contemporary political catastrophe better than any book I’ve read." –Todd McGowan, Professor, University of Vermont, USA
"Exceptionally wide-ranging, deeply learned and laugh-out-loud funny, this book demonstrates how much psychoanalysis still has to offer when it comes to destabilising our contemporary glorification of strong, stable, and unequivocal rationalities. Yet for all its insistence on the inexorability of ambivalence, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to feel ambivalent about what Swales and Owens have done. Feel confident, stand firm and commit yourself wholeheartedly to this book. You shall be rewarded with countless redemptive questions about all that is dear to you." --Dany Nobus, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Brunel University London
In 1958, Lacan claimed hat many of us "have in our presence someone who […] is truly dead, and has been for some time, dead and mummified […]. Being half-dead is perhaps far more prevalent than we think […]. Isn’t it true that the part of every living being that is half-dead does not leave us a perfectly clear conscience? […] [We defend against] what is half-dead in us, too." Was he, in fact, already talking about the ever-more-ubiquitous zombies that Owens and Swales convincingly associate with our own increasingly unrecognized ambivalence? Reader beware: the dead, the un-dead, vampires, and myriad other uncanny creatures of the contemporary silver screen and television crawl out of the pages of this book, reminding us of those things we’d rather not know about ourselves. Things—including hatred of our neighbour, prejudice, and jealousy—that, as the authors persuasively argue, we are no longer supposed to feel, much less express! Why should we be surprised when they reappear in other forms and contexts? —Bruce Fink, Lacanian psychoanalyst
"Covering everything from Aristotle to zombies to Breaking Bad, Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales have written a masterpiece unlocking the secrets of ambivalence. In Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan, they demonstrate that ambivalence is perhaps the central category in social relations. The need for this book is especially urgent today, in an era characterized by its various ways of refusing ambivalence, which are, Owens and Swales make clear, ways of refusing the price of interacting with others altogether. Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan speaks to the contemporary political catastrophe better than any book I’ve read." –Todd McGowan, Professor, University of Vermont, USA
"Exceptionally wide-ranging, deeply learned and laugh-out-loud funny, this book demonstrates how much psychoanalysis still has to offer when it comes to destabilizing our contemporary glorification of strong, stable and unequivocal rationalities. Yet for all its insistence on the inexorability of ambivalence, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to feel ambivalent about what Swales and Owens have done. Feel confident, stand firm and commit yourself wholeheartedly to this book. You shall be rewarded with countless redemptive questions about all that is dear to you." --Dany Nobus, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Brunel University London
In 1958, Lacan claimed that many of us "have in our presence someone who […] is truly dead, and has been for some time, dead and mummified […]. Being half-dead is perhaps far more prevalent than we think […]. Isn’t it true that the part of every living being that is half-dead does not leave us a perfectly clear conscience? […] [We defend against] what is half-dead in us, too." Was he, in fact, already talking about the ever-more-ubiquitous zombies that Owens and Swales convincingly associate with our own increasingly unrecognized ambivalence? Reader beware: the dead, the un-dead, vampires, and myriad other uncanny creatures of the contemporary silver screen and television crawl out of the pages of this book, reminding us of those things we’d rather not know about ourselves. Things—including hatred of our neighbour, prejudice, and jealousy—that, as the authors persuasively argue, we are no longer supposed to feel, much less express! Why should we be surprised when they reappear in other forms and contexts? —Bruce Fink, Lacanian psychoanalyst
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
About the authors
Foreword
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- The tensions of ambivalence
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- Why the zombies ate my neighbours
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- Raising the dead: mourning and ambivalence
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- On letting the right one in: Heisenberg and vampires
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- Guilty secrets (Walter White, Walter Mitty, and the manosphere)
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- Guilt, shame, and jouissance (and by the way, why your superego is not really your amigo…)
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- Extimacy, ambivalence, xenophobia
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- The jouissance of ambivalence: we are not racists, but…
Afterword
Index
