Full Description
Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater examines the case of a scholar which was commented on by three leading psychoanalysts of the 20th century: Melitta Schmideberg, Ernst Kris, and Jacques Lacan.
Sergio Benvenuto unpicks the complex case history of the patient he calls "Professor Brain", a man who struggled to publish his research because of his fixation on plagiarism, and who has never been identified. Benvenuto reconstructs the case through the first-hand accounts of the patient's analysts and Lacan and sets it in the context of mid-century psychoanalytic debate. As we progress through the patient's story, Benvenuto explains Lacan's theories as they apply to the case: the "foreclosure" of orality; obsessional neurosis; mental anorexia; and, above all, the reasons for his opposition to Ego psychology, of which Kris was one of the most important representatives.
This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. It will also be of interest to academics and scholars of philosophy, the history of psychoanalysis, literature, and cultural studies.
Contents
1. Lacan and Kris's Plagiarist 2. The Plagiarised Plagiarist 3. The Parrying Ego 4. The Reclaiming of Death 5. Acting out and passage à l'acte 6. Foreclosed Orality 7. The Property of Ideas 8. The Freedom of the Slave 9. Statement and Enunciation 10. French Controversies 11. The Missing Name 12. ...perseverare diabolicum est 13. Understanding is Misunderstanding 14. The Party and the Pope... 15. Anti-Americanism 16. Eating Nothingness 17. The Raft of Skinny Virgins 18. "Annie Reich's" Countertransference 19. Anna Freud's Counter-Defence 20. The Freudian Legacy 21. Interpretation and Truth 22. Laughing Unconscious 23. Reformatory Analysis 24. Adaptive Analysis 25. Analytic Idealities 26. A non-psychological Psychoanalysis 27. Psychoanalytic Exhibit
