Why Psychoanalysis?

Elisabeth Roudinesco teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of twelve other books, including Jacques Lacan (Columbia 1999) and Revolution and Madness: The Lives and Legends of Theroigne de Mericourt.Rachel Bowlby is a professor of English at the University of York. She has written Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping(Columbia 2001); Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf; Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreise, Gissing, and Zola; Still Crazy After All These Years: Woman, Writing, and Psychoanalysis; and Shopping with Freud.

Written in an accessible style and designed to persuade nonspecialists of the continuing validity of the Freudian field, Why Psychoanalysis merits attention by all those who have a personal or professional stake in mental health. American Imago A courageous book. -- Marc Auge Le Monde Bubbling with energy. Elle (Paris) Roudinesco foresees the establishment of a human science where the figure of the Socratic master is internalized, allowing for an ongoing and creative reworking of individual and social meaning. This vision emerges as the important and elegant outcome of Why Psychoanalysis? -- Stephen E. Sternbach Psychoanalytic Quarterly

• Part I. The Depressive Society 1. The Defeat of the Subject 2. The Medications of the Mind Part II. The Great Quarrel Over the Unconscious 3. The Soul Is Not a Thing 5. Frankenstein's Brain Part III. The Future of Psychoanalysis 4. Behavior-Modification Man 6. The "Equinox Letter" 7. Freud Is Dead in America 8. A French Scientism 9. Science and Psychoanalysis 10. Tragic Man 11. Universality, Difference, Exclusion 12. Critique of Psychoanalytic Institutions