Search results for ""Author Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel""
Free Association Books Creativity and Perversion
What is the relationship between creativity and perversion? The boundary between the world of art and 'the artful universe of the pervert' is carefully explored in this study. Beyond the banal or picturesque variations in sexual behaviour, there lies an essential dimension of the human condition, a permanent temptation of the mind. It is the wish to escape our limitations, to replace our world with one where all things are possible. Led on by hubris, 'the artful universe' of perversion dethrones God-The-Father and rewrites the Bible. It aims to transmute reality, to revert to confusion and chaos. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel draws on a wide range of films, plays and writers - including de Sade, Oscar Wilde, and H.G. Wells. Examples from these sources are closely interwoven with clinical case material. Although the author does not conform to the classical analytic scheme, she reviews the psychoanalytic literature and remains faithful to Freud's thought. Emphasizing the relations between perversion, narcissism and idealization, she places the problem of perversion within the endless struggle of humanity against reality.
£27.56
Free Association Books The Body as Mirror of the World
Is today's thinking conditioned by body-mind dualism? A rebellion against the biological order seems to have silently infiltrated our world view. Suicide bombers appear to share the fascination with destruction, of writers such as Mishima, Pasolini and Foucault. A liberation from the body to reestablish a - possibly mystical - union of soul and cosmos and an assertion of the mind's omnipotence appear to be common features of forms of behaviour that seem to be taken for granted in contemporary thought. Is the new misogyny, which rejects motherhood in the name of feminism, contributing in any way to these trends? This review of our society by a woman psychoanalyst - a non-medic and graduate of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris - presents a sharp and rigorous analysis of the strange and violent mechanisms that are erupting in the world today.
£27.56
Free Association Books Ego Ideal: Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal
Once the ego-ideal is distinguished from the super-ego, it becomes possible to make sense of much that formerly remained obscure in psychoanalytic theory. Chasseguet-Smirgel illuminates not only the psychology of narcissism in individuals but many of the connections between psychic life and society.
£27.56
