political psychoanalysis

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Fri Mar 8 08:27:24 PST 2002


Alec asked --

"What do you have in mind by political interpretation? Something like Butler in _The Psychic Life of Power_, or much of Zizek's work, where Freudian/Lacanian analytics of the subject are elaborated in, or at least towards contexts of social, political, and cultural life? "

I have to admit that, despite all the talk of Zizek on this list, I haven't read him. Some of Ted Winslow's thinking seems to derive from Melanie Klein, though, and she is one of the originators of object-relations theory, of which the theory of borderilnes is an important component.

As for DSM IV, though Dr. Melfi was quoting from it, though the theory of borderlines does appear in it in an empiricized form, the theory itself is unimpeachably psychoanalytic. Try reading Otto Kernberg, Edith Jacobson, and others who have worked to develop it. Jacobson, interestingly, was actually a political Freudian, and appears as a key figure in Russell Jacobi's THE REPRESSION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS as a member of Otto Fenichel's marxist-freudian RUNDBRIEF circle. In the US, like most of them, she was a conventional analyst, at least outwardly.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema



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