Pills replaced the couch; neuroscience took the place of talk therapy; and as psychoanalysis faded from the scene, so did the castrating mothers and hysteric spinsters of Freudian theory. Or so the story goes. In Prozac on the Couch , psychiatrist Jonathan Michel Metzl boldly challenges recent psychiatric history, showing that there’s a lot of Dr. Freud encapsulated in late-twentieth-century psychotropic medications. Providing a cultural history of treatments for depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses through a look at the professional and popular reception of three “wonder drugs”—Miltown, Valium, and Prozac—Metzl explains the surprising ways Freudian gender categories and popular gender roles have shaped understandings of these drugs. Prozac on the Couch traces the notion of “pills for everyday worries” from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, through psychiatric and medical journals, popular magazine articles, pharmaceutical advertisements, and popular autobiographical "Prozac narratives.” Metzl shows how clinical and popular talk about these medications often reproduces all the cultural and social baggage associated with psychoanalytic paradigms—whether in a 1956 Cosmopolitan article about research into tranquilizers to “cure” frigid women; a 1970s American Journal of Psychiatry ad introducing Jan, a lesbian who “needs” Valium to find a man; or Peter Kramer’s description of how his patient “Mrs. Prozac” meets her husband after beginning treatment. Prozac on the Couch locates the origins of psychiatry’s “biological revolution” not in the Valiumania of the 1970s but in American popular culture of the 1950s. It was in the 1950s, Metzl points out, that traditional psychoanalysis had the most sway over the American imagination. As the number of Miltown prescriptions soared (reaching 35 million, or nearly one per second, in 1957), advertisements featuring uncertain brides and unfaithful wives miraculously cured by the “new” psychiatric medicines filled popular magazines. Metzl writes without nostalgia for the bygone days of Freudian psychoanalysis and without contempt for psychotropic drugs, which he himself regularly prescribes to his patients. What he urges is an increased self-awareness within the psychiatric community of the ways that Freudian ideas about gender are entangled in Prozac and each new generation of wonder drugs. He encourages, too, an understanding of how ideas about psychotropic medications have suffused popular culture and profoundly altered the relationship between doctors and patients.

The theme of this book is that of a rescue operation. The victim is psychoanalysis, in danger of potential demise as a result of its flirtation with the neurosciences, the relationists, and the numerous other efforts to improve upon or recast the fundamental thesis of psychoanalysis, which is the effort of one person, the analyst, to understand another person, the patient. Not surprisingly, the threat to understanding is misunderstanding: this threat begins with all who have misunderstood Freud and includes those who insist that psychoanalysis is something other than this major effort of understanding. Goldberg's approach to the elaboration of this theme is to undo the dualisms that infect all of psychoanalysis: explanation vs. understanding, mind vs. brain, subject vs. object, form vs. content, etc. The author takes on each of these supposed points of opposition and demonstrates how they act as a conceptual straitjacket, forcing us to conform to what they propose. whatever works best on any given occasion. alongside philosophy in order to help psychoanalysis embark upon a newer and freer adventure, one that releases it from various efforts to either reduce psychoanalysis to a stepchild of the neurosciences or to a cousin of social psychology. Bringing together the contributions of Heinz Kohut and Martin Heidegger may seem like an impossible feat, but the author carefully points out how Kohut's concept of the selfobject is in fact the crucial theoretical underpinning to properly position today's psychoanalysis alongside of the philosophy of Heidegger. In his Appendix, Goldberg shows the interdigitation of the ideas of these two great thinkers.

Freud's Legacy in the Global Era presents a radically new perspective on Freud's relevance today as a forerunner of the contemporary evolutionary neurosciences also steeped in the tradition of humanistic thought. Carlo Strenger shows how globalisation has produced new theoretical, practical and clinical issues for psychoanalysis, which can best be understood by drawing on influences from economics, sociology and philosophy. Strenger's lively case histories demonstrate a new psychoanalytic viewpoint engaged with surrounding scientific disciplines in an enriching interchange, and open to the fascinating cultural and social developments that shape patients' reality, lives and concerns in a global era. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic and psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists and to all mental health professionals interested in the interaction of psychoanalysis and other disciplines from a global viewpoint as well as to lay readers keen to understand the complexity of globalized life.