Books by John Forrester
Freud and Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures
John Forrester’s passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud’s thinking and the nature of Freud’s discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian’s eye for context, Forrester explores Freud’s biography, the scientific moment, the radical subject matter of the field itself – sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language – as well as Freud’s development of a new clinical practice.
Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking – not only Freud’s, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished.
Freud and Psychoanalysis takes us from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch, to the campus, to film and to literature. This is a slim book that packs a big punch. It invites any curious reader into a field and a way of thinking that shaped the twentieth century.
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$19.95
Freud's Women
by John Forrester, Lisa Appignanesi
Freud's Women examines biography, case history, dreams, correspondence, journals, and theory to chart Freud's views on femininity. It also tells the many stories of Freud's women and explores their influence on him and his on them: dutiful daughter Anna, who carried on his work; the novelist and turn-of-the-century femme fatale, Lou Salome; Marie Bonaparte, who mixed royalty and perversity with effortless ease and became the head of the French psychoanalytic movement; the early hysterics who were the cornerstone of psychoanalysisall these and more emerge vividly from the pages of this important study as it assesses Freud's contemporary legacy.
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Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions
In this challenging collection of essays, the noted historian and philosopher of science John Forrester delves into the disputes over Freud's dead body. With wit and erudition, he tackles questions central to our psychoanalytic century's ways of thinking and living, including the following: Can one speak of a morality of the psychoanalytic life? Are the lives of both analysts and patients doomed to repeat the incestuous patterns they uncover? What and why did Freud collect? Is a history of psychoanalysis possible?
By taking nothing for granted and leaving no cliché of psychobabble--theoretical or popular--unturned, Forrester gives us a sense of the ethical surprises and epistemological riddles that a century of tumultuous psychoanalytical debate has often obscured. In these pages, we explore dreams, history, ethics, political theory, and the motor of psychoanalysis as a scientific movement.
Forrester makes us feel that the Freud Wars are not merely a vicious quarrel or a fashionable journalistic talking point for the late twentieth century. This hundred years' war is an index of the cultural and scientific climate of modern times. Freud is indeed a barometer for understanding how we conduct our different lives.
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