Description
Book SynopsisThis book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the “new wounded” (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.
Trade Review"The first of the 'old wounded,' hysterics suffering from reminiscences, were Freud's co-conspirators in the invention of psychoanalysis. Not only were they its earliest patients and critics; their malady formed the very stuff of psychoanalysis. Malabou identifies a more recent class of 'new wounded'-Alzheimer's patient, autistic children, concentration camp survivors, victims of rape, bombing, natural disasters and brain tumors-who, radically severed from their own past, are devoid not only of reminiscences but of meaning itself. Their maladies, she claims, evacuate the core concepts of psychoanalysis, its original stuff. Friends and foes of Freud's science will be riveted by Malabou's intelligent argument whose destructive thrust produces not merely rubble and dust, more a foam of fascinating new concepts-including cerebrality and destructive plasticity-and strong readings of Freudian texts." -- -Joan Copjec University at Buffalo, SUNY "Malabou draws upon the most current neurological research and contemporary psychoanalytic works, and applies them to a careful, penetrating and convincing reading of Freud's primary texts, in order to fashion her original interpretation." -- -Clayton Crockett University of Central Arkansas What has happened when subjectivity is utterly changed by brain damage? What are the links of war, trauma, and loss of affect? In The New Wounded Catherine Malabou brilliantly shows how 'destructive plasticity' is the key concept for understanding our 'new economy of pain.' Highly recommended for everyone in the fields she so deftly examines: philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurology." -- -John Protevi Louisiana State University
Table of ContentsPreamble Introduction Part One: The Neurological Subordination of Sexuality Introduction: The "New Maps" of Causality 1. Cerebral Auto-Affection 2. Brain Wounds: From the Neurological Novel to the Theater of Absence 3. Identity Without Precedent 4. Psychoanalytic Objection: Can There Be Destruction Without a Drive of Destruction? Part Two: The Neutralization of Cerebrality Introduction: Freud and Preexisting Fault Lines 5. What Is a Psychic Event? 6. The "Libido Theory" and the Otherness of the Sexual to Itself: Traumatic Neurosis and War Neurosis in Question 7. Separation, Death, the Thing, Freud, Lacan, and the Missed Encounter 8. Neurological Objection: Rehabilitating the Event Part Three: On the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle--That it Exists Introduction: Remission at the Risk of Forgetting the Worst 9. The Equivocity of Reparation: From Elasticity to Resilience 10. Toward a Plasticity of the Compulsion to Repeat 11. The Subject of the Accident Conclusion Notes Bibliography
