Esther Rashkin - Böcker

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The "haunted" individual to whom the "encrypted" secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation.In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, "authorship," and the formation and origins of narrative. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The "haunted" individual to whom the "encrypted" secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation.In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, "authorship," and the formation and origins of narrative. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Explores the radical political potential of close reading to make the case for a new and invigorated psychoanalytic cultural studies.Winner of the 2009 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Esther Rashkin argues that psychoanalysis galvanizes, as no other discipline can, an understanding of texts in their social, historical, and political contexts. Demonstrating that close reading can be a radical political practice, she exposes heretofore unseen ideologies concealed in works of film and literature, from Last Tango in Paris to The Picture of Dorian Gray, from Barthes's Mythologies and Balzac's Sarrasine to Babette's Feast. Psychoanalytic concepts such as identification with the aggressor, the crypt, cryptonymy, illness of mourning, and the phantom allow Rashkin to reveal how shameful and unspeakable secrets propel the narratives she examines. In the process, she convincingly makes the case for a new practice of psychoanalytic cultural studies, a practice that fully engages with the politicized discourses-anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, censorship-that mark a text's location in history.

Explores the radical political potential of close reading to make the case for a new and invigorated psychoanalytic cultural studies.Winner of the 2009 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Esther Rashkin argues that psychoanalysis galvanizes, as no other discipline can, an understanding of texts in their social, historical, and political contexts. Demonstrating that close reading can be a radical political practice, she exposes heretofore unseen ideologies concealed in works of film and literature, from Last Tango in Paris to The Picture of Dorian Gray, from Barthes's Mythologies and Balzac's Sarrasine to Babette's Feast. Psychoanalytic concepts such as identification with the aggressor, the crypt, cryptonymy, illness of mourning, and the phantom allow Rashkin to reveal how shameful and unspeakable secrets propel the narratives she examines. In the process, she convincingly makes the case for a new practice of psychoanalytic cultural studies, a practice that fully engages with the politicized discourses-anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, censorship-that mark a text's location in history.

Winner of the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award (established jointly by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research)In the final years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud began to construct evidence for the workings of an “unconscious.” On Dangerous Ground offers an innovative assessment of the complex role that his encounters with visual cultures—architecture, objects from earlier cultural epochs (“antiquities”), paintings, and illustrated books—played in that process. Diane O’Donoghue introduces, often using unpublished archival sources, the ways in which material phenomena profoundly informed Freud’s decisions about what would, and would not, constitute the workings of an inner life. By returning to view content that Freud treated as forgettable, as distinct from repressed, O’Donoghue shows us a realm of experiences that Freud wished to remove from psychical meaning. These erasures form an amnesic core within Freud’s psychoanalytic project, an absence that includes difficult aspects of his life narrative, beginning with the dislocations of his early childhood that he declared “not worth remembering.” What is made visible here is far from the inconsequential surface of experience; rather, we are shown a dangerous ground that exceeds the limits of what Freud wished to include within his early model of mind. In Freud’s relation to visual cultures we find clues to what he attempted, in crafting his unconscious, to remove from sight.

Mourning Freud analyses Freud’s experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century. The modernist Freud of the early 20th century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the 21st. Madelon Sprengnether examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud’s self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience concerning the unreliability of memory. She offers a significant interpretation of major biographical episodes in Freud’s life, arguing that Freud’s inability to mourn the losses of his early life shaped his theories of mourning, which in turn opened the field of pre-oedipal studies to his successors, enabling a host of new psychoanalytic theories such as object relations, intersubjective and countertransference theories, Lacanian analysis, and trauma theory. Many of these approaches converge on the formulation of mourning as critical to the process of ego development. Through this argument, Sprengnether traces the shift from modernism to postmodernism—from an emphasis on mastery to vulnerability, from vertical to horizontal systems of meaning-making, and from what is representable in words to the realm of the nonverbal. Mourning Freud, by exploring Freud’s own struggles with mourning, allows us, in turn, to mourn him—releasing him from frozen idealization while demonstrating the relevance of his work to the 21st century.

Mourning Freud analyses Freud’s experiences and theories of mourning as the basis for exploring changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century. The modernist Freud of the early 20th century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the 21st. Madelon Sprengnether examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud’s self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience concerning the unreliability of memory. She offers a significant interpretation of major biographical episodes in Freud’s life, arguing that Freud’s inability to mourn the losses of his early life shaped his theories of mourning, which in turn opened the field of pre-oedipal studies to his successors, enabling a host of new psychoanalytic theories such as object relations, intersubjective and countertransference theories, Lacanian analysis, and trauma theory. Many of these approaches converge on the formulation of mourning as critical to the process of ego development. Through this argument, Sprengnether traces the shift from modernism to postmodernism—from an emphasis on mastery to vulnerability, from vertical to horizontal systems of meaning-making, and from what is representable in words to the realm of the nonverbal. Mourning Freud, by exploring Freud’s own struggles with mourning, allows us, in turn, to mourn him—releasing him from frozen idealization while demonstrating the relevance of his work to the 21st century.

Mitchell Wilson explores the fundamental role that lack and desire play in psychoanalytic interpretation by using a comparative method that engages different psychoanalytic traditions: Lacanian, Bionian, Kleinian, Contemporary Freudian. Investigating crucial questions Wilson asks: What is the nature of the psychoanalytic process? How are desire and counter-transference linked? What is the relationship between desire, analytic action, and psychoanalytic ethics?

A 2020 Prose Award FinalistWhat do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? A major and original contribution to thinking about and grappling with the legacies of German and Nazi history, this book reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt usare shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a powerful meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar. Inflecting questions about history with questions about ethics, her book speaks to all those concerned with historical pasts that remain unreconciled.

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Žižek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present.Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Žižek’s thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Žižekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of ‘comedy studies’ that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the ‘history of laughter,’ discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.

Nominated for the 2019 Gradiva® Award for Best Book by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP)For Want of Ambiguity investigates how the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience can shed light on the transformational capacity of contemporary art. Through neuroscienfitic and psychoanalytic exploration of the work of Diamante Faraldo, Ai Weiwei, Ida Barbarigo, Xavier Le Roy, Bill T. Jones, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin, and others, For Want of Ambiguity offers a new perspective on how insight is achieved and on how art opens us up to new ways of being.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearErich Fromm (1900-1980) is known to most readers as the author of the international bestseller The Art of Loving (1956). What may be less widely known is that Fromm was a social psychoanalyst whose psychoanalytic theories, developed around a humanistic concept of man and society, have had a profound impact on many fields and disciplines: on social life and societal organization, on politics, on religion, on psychotherapy and, last but not least, on the practice of mindfulness. Rainer Funk was Erich Fromm’s last assistant. He wrote his dissertation about Fromm, was designated by Fromm's last will to be his sole literary executor, and is the editor of Fromm's writings. From his very intimate knowledge of Fromm's life and ideas, and his access to an archive that includes 6,000 letters, Funk introduces Fromm's central concepts and examines them in relation to Fromm's lived experiences and to his idea that life itself is an art. The question of "the art of living" runs through all of the chapters, from the Introduction, in which Funk describes meeting Fromm for the first time in 1972, to the last chapter, in which Funk reflects on the impact of Fromm's social-psychoanalytic writings and his efforts to live well.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearErich Fromm (1900-1980) is known to most readers as the author of the international bestseller The Art of Loving (1956). What may be less widely known is that Fromm was a social psychoanalyst whose psychoanalytic theories, developed around a humanistic concept of man and society, have had a profound impact on many fields and disciplines: on social life and societal organization, on politics, on religion, on psychotherapy and, last but not least, on the practice of mindfulness. Rainer Funk was Erich Fromm’s last assistant. He wrote his dissertation about Fromm, was designated by Fromm's last will to be his sole literary executor, and is the editor of Fromm's writings. From his very intimate knowledge of Fromm's life and ideas, and his access to an archive that includes 6,000 letters, Funk introduces Fromm's central concepts and examines them in relation to Fromm's lived experiences and to his idea that life itself is an art. The question of "the art of living" runs through all of the chapters, from the Introduction, in which Funk describes meeting Fromm for the first time in 1972, to the last chapter, in which Funk reflects on the impact of Fromm's social-psychoanalytic writings and his efforts to live well.

Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan explores convergences and divergences in the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, with a special focus on the implications of their work for critical theory, broadly construed. The book is co-authored in the form of a dialogue between Amy Allen, a prominent representative of Frankfurt School critical theory with expertise on Klein, and Mari Ruti, a leading Lacanian critical theorist. Klein and Lacan are among the two most important and influential psychoanalytic theorists after Freud. Their work has profound implications for how we understand subjectivity, intersubjectivity, autonomy, agency, desire, affect, trauma, history, and the potential for individual and social change. Allen and Ruti offer distinctive interpretations of Klein and Lacan that not only bring out their complexities but also highlight productive points of convergence where most psychoanalytic and critical theorists see irreconcilable differences. The book is organized around key themes that cut across and through the work of Klein and Lacan, culminating in an assessment of the implications of their theories for thinking about politics.

Why are psychoanalysts fascinated with literature and other arts? And why do so many novels, plays, films, and television series feature therapy sessions? Transferences investigates the interdisciplinary attraction between psychoanalysis and the arts by exploring the therapeutic relationship as a recurring figure in psychoanalytic discourse, literature, theater, and television. In addition to close readings of psychoanalytic and critical texts, the book presents a new approach to examining psychoanalytic themes and formal devices in texts like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, and the HBO series In Treatment.Transferences argues that psychoanalysts as well as writers and other artists are fascinated by the therapeutic relationship because it provides a unique site to negotiate the narrative and artistic underpinnings of psychoanalysis and reflect and reinvent the aesthetic and poetic potentiality of art.

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Žižek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present.Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Žižek’s thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Žižekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

In The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber tells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a psychoanalyst, by tracing dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerged from her analysis while also undertaking critical explorations of works of psychoanalytic theory and literary texts. The Writing Cure thus articulates what psychoanalysis does for its patients by writing the moment of its termination in real time, performing the convergence of theory and life on which psychoanalysis itself balances. Throughout, Lieber considers what psychoanalysis--"the talking cure"--has to do with writing: the foundation of psychoanalysis on Freud’s distinctive writing practice; what it means to write oneself as a psychoanalyst; the extent to which the cure involves a new kind of self-writing. Most broadly, The Writing Cure asks: What would it look like to write your way to the end of an analysis? Is it possible to write yourself into the position of psychoanalyst? Is it possible to write your cure?

Winner of the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award (established jointly by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research)In the final years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud began to construct evidence for the workings of an “unconscious.” On Dangerous Ground offers an innovative assessment of the complex role that his encounters with visual cultures—architecture, objects from earlier cultural epochs (“antiquities”), paintings, and illustrated books—played in that process. Diane O’Donoghue introduces, often using unpublished archival sources, the ways in which material phenomena profoundly informed Freud’s decisions about what would, and would not, constitute the workings of an inner life. By returning to view content that Freud treated as forgettable, as distinct from repressed, O’Donoghue shows us a realm of experiences that Freud wished to remove from psychical meaning. These erasures form an amnesic core within Freud’s psychoanalytic project, an absence that includes difficult aspects of his life narrative, beginning with the dislocations of his early childhood that he declared “not worth remembering.” What is made visible here is far from the inconsequential surface of experience; rather, we are shown a dangerous ground that exceeds the limits of what Freud wished to include within his early model of mind. In Freud’s relation to visual cultures we find clues to what he attempted, in crafting his unconscious, to remove from sight.

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of ‘comedy studies’ that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the ‘history of laughter,’ discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.

Nominated for the 2019 Gradiva® Award for Best Book by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP)For Want of Ambiguity investigates how the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience can shed light on the transformational capacity of contemporary art. Through neuroscienfitic and psychoanalytic exploration of the work of Diamante Faraldo, Ai Weiwei, Ida Barbarigo, Xavier Le Roy, Bill T. Jones, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin, and others, For Want of Ambiguity offers a new perspective on how insight is achieved and on how art opens us up to new ways of being.

A 2020 Prose Award FinalistWhat do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? A major and original contribution to thinking about and grappling with the legacies of German and Nazi history, this book reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt usare shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a powerful meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar. Inflecting questions about history with questions about ethics, her book speaks to all those concerned with historical pasts that remain unreconciled.

An Independent Book of the MonthPenises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. This book examines how one thing that some people do to penises—remove the foreskin—has become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. While most contemporary work on the subject is concerned with whether circumcision is right or wrong, safe or harmful, Circumcision on the Couch takes as its starting point that the significance of male circumcision exceeds anatomical and juridical considerations.Deploying a feminist Lacanian framework, while drawing from a wide range of archival sources and critical thought, Jordan Osserman asks: How can psychoanalysis help us shed light on the ideologies, discourses, and fantasies surrounding circumcision and the impassioned stances for and against it? And how might the history of circumcision, in turn, allow us to re-assess and clarify how we understand the split (or “snipped”) subject of psychoanalysis?

While many of Freud’s original formulations have required either revision or rejection and replacement with newer models, his cultural books, such as Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, though extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, have more recently been either neglected or else dismissed as long-outdated fantasies. Robert A. Paul shows that Freud's ideas in these books, and his thinking on how human society is possible, given the unpromising materials out of which it is constructed (i.e. human beings), can appear in a different and more favorable light when viewed through the lens of contemporary anthropology, cultural studies, and evolutionary theory.

While many of Freud’s original formulations have required either revision or rejection and replacement with newer models, his cultural books, such as Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, though extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, have more recently been either neglected or else dismissed as long-outdated fantasies. Robert A. Paul shows that Freud's ideas in these books, and his thinking on how human society is possible, given the unpromising materials out of which it is constructed (i.e. human beings), can appear in a different and more favorable light when viewed through the lens of contemporary anthropology, cultural studies, and evolutionary theory.

In The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber tells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a psychoanalyst, by tracing dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerged from her analysis while also undertaking critical explorations of works of psychoanalytic theory and literary texts. The Writing Cure thus articulates what psychoanalysis does for its patients by writing the moment of its termination in real time, performing the convergence of theory and life on which psychoanalysis itself balances. Throughout, Lieber considers what psychoanalysis--"the talking cure"--has to do with writing: the foundation of psychoanalysis on Freud’s distinctive writing practice; what it means to write oneself as a psychoanalyst; the extent to which the cure involves a new kind of self-writing. Most broadly, The Writing Cure asks: What would it look like to write your way to the end of an analysis? Is it possible to write yourself into the position of psychoanalyst? Is it possible to write your cure?

Mitchell Wilson explores the fundamental role that lack and desire play in psychoanalytic interpretation by using a comparative method that engages different psychoanalytic traditions: Lacanian, Bionian, Kleinian, Contemporary Freudian. Investigating crucial questions Wilson asks: What is the nature of the psychoanalytic process? How are desire and counter-transference linked? What is the relationship between desire, analytic action, and psychoanalytic ethics?

Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also in ourselves.Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion’s share and that they can ‘rearrange’ reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements.While this book's subject is grim, its tone is reflective, ironic, light and at times humorous. It is free of jargon, and full of examples from history, culture, literature, poetry, everyday life and the author’s experience as a psychoanalyst, and a professional life that has been dedicated to helping people to face difficult truths.

Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also in ourselves.Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion’s share and that they can ‘rearrange’ reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements.While this book's subject is grim, its tone is reflective, ironic, light and at times humorous. It is free of jargon, and full of examples from history, culture, literature, poetry, everyday life and the author’s experience as a psychoanalyst, and a professional life that has been dedicated to helping people to face difficult truths.