Includes an afterword by the author In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives--founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler--whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold. Janet Malcolm's fascinating book first appeared some twenty years ago, when it was immediately recognized as a rare and remarkable work of nonfiction. A story of infatuation and disappointment, betrayal and revenge, In the Freud Archives is essentially a comedy. But the powerful presence of Freud himself and the harsh bracing air of his ideas about unconscious life hover over the narrative and give it a tragic dimension.

A biography and study of the psychoanalyst's career, family, personal life, and professional struggles.

Fifteen years after his death, Jacques Lacan remains not only one of the foremost intellectuals of the century, but also one of the most controversial. As a young doctor he set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and ended up transforming fundamental notions of the self, sexuality and the culture that shapes it all. This first major biography of Lacan is a fascinating portrait of his life and a masterful explication of the unorthodox, often perplexing ideas that brought him renown. 22 photos.

"Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud-Freud up until the age of fifty-that incorporates all of Freud's many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls "Britain's foremost psychoanalytical writer," emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud's earliest years as the oldest-and favored-son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant-increasingly, of course, everybody's status in the modern world. Psychoanalysis was also Freud's way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside"--

Psychoanalytic Pioneers is a comprehensive history of psychoanalysis as seen through the lives and the works of its most eminent teachers, thinkers, and clinicians. It is also a definitive portrait of the atmosphere in which psychoanalytic creativity has emerged and flourished. Going beyond mere biographical description, the contributors elucidate the contributions of various psychoanalysts to the evolution of psychoanalytic thought, and evaluate their roles in the development of psychoanalysis as a science, as a method of investigation, as a treatment technique, and as an organization. The editors have assembled profiles of Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Ernest Jones, Paul Federn, Oskar Pfister, Harms Sachs, A.A. Brill, Sandor Rado, Theodor Reik, Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Karen Horney, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and twenty-four other pioneers, whose influence on psychoanalysis reverberates to this day. In a new introduction, Eisenstein maintains that while man and his unconscious have not changed much since Freud's time, today psychoanalysis is full of many different clinical and theoretical viewpoints. Among the ideas being debated are object theory, drive theory, the oedipal concept, intersubjectivity, and self-psychology. Eisenstein also discusses the contributions of psychohistory, a recent and significant development in psychoanalysis in which psychological study is applied to historical periods and personalities. Psychoanalytic Pioneers will be an important addition to the libraries of psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, historians, and anyone interested in the influence of psychoanalysis in our lives.

Élisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud's biography for the twenty-first century--a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours. Roudinesco traces Freuds life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis' annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siecle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire--an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire. Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity--the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved--Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture.

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"The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion." -- Amazon

In 'Dictations', Avital Ronell, one of literary criticism's most imaginative and inimitable mediums, channels Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).

Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical and scientific upheavals of the twentieth century. In these recollections Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of the "third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," known as Logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration camps during the War; and reflects on the celebrity brought by the publication of Man's Search for Meaning in 1945.

'My mother was the source of my brains and my father the mother of kindness,' said Sandor Rado, a Hungarian analyst whom Freud first embraced but with whom he was later displeased. In Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement, Paul Roazen and Bluma Swerdloff use interviews with Rado and his family to bring to life one of Freud's foremost followers, who later founded his own institute and psychodynamic orientation, one that focused on motivation rather than instinct. Based on interviews sponsored by the Columbia University Oral History Project, and including Freud's letters to Rado, this is a personal account of Rado and the life events that shaped him and his theories. Rado's life in late nineteenth-century Hungary, the enduring influence of his mother, his meetings with Freud (who made three slips of the tongue during their first encounter), his analysis with Karl Abraham, his affair with Helene Deutsch (she called it a 'companionship of suffering'), and Rank and Ferenczi's downfalls are vividly depicted. Rado's radical departure from Freudian theories of femininity, a reformulation daringly in keeping with today's gender debates, is also included. Rado freed himself from phallocentrism, abandoning the notions of universal castration fear and penis envy. He contended that men and woman are different, which does not mean that women are inferior. He saw women as having a greater emotional capacity based on their biological role as child bearers and nurturers. In 1963, as further evidence of his prescience, Rado prophesied the current crisis in psychotherapy, noting that 'the old-fashioned therapeutic practice will disappear for lack of money.' He anticipated that the influence of biochemical genetics was going to be 'so enormous that it would be bootless to try to outline it.' Dr. Swerdloff uses Rado's predictions and an analysis of the present debate to demonstrate the need to steer psychoanalysis toward a more scientific course.

The influential author of White Racism: A Psychohistory; The Age of Desire; History and Spirit; Red Hunting in the Promised Land; The Enemy of Natureand the controversial Overcoming Zionism, among others, offers a memoir of his first 80 years, from his early Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, his Yale and Columbia medical training, his years as a psychiatrist, Reichian psychoanalyst and subsequent academic career, to his embracing of Marxist political economy and commitment to radical ecosocialism. Highlights include his 1998 Green Party candidacy for the US Senate, his campaign in 2000 for the Green nomination for President of the United States, his work with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and his recent Christian spiritual conversion.

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