Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism

Camden, Vera J., Intertexts

Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller. New York: SUNY P, 2008. 258 pp.

This collection takes up the uses of psychoanalysis for cultural studies in the new millennium. Its editors and contributors ask, "Where is psychoanalysis in contemporary thought?" At a time when the empirically based psychologies have long repudiated the "talking cure" to the extent that the unconscious is not visible or easily measured, and when, on the other hand, psychoanalysis has been associated in the humanities with a radical political and social agenda, disappointed hopes for change have led many to throw the baby of psychoanalysis out with the bathwater of a Utopian vision of transformation. The question now remains: "Whither psychoanalysis?" To answer this question (which is also a demand), the editors first acknowledge that the critique and curtailing of psychoanalytic thought in the cultural studies programs across the country in the last decade or so has been influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, his disciples, and the New Historicism. At the same time, they believe that the political, psychological, and moral dangers of embracing a knowing and cynical postmodernism that fosters hollow consumerism premised on modes of subjectivity that "neither 'express' interiority nor bear any relation to a lived past" are a real and present danger in contemporary life. "That the triumph of such a view has coincided with intellectuals' renewed suspicion …

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Publication information: Article title: Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism. Contributors: Camden, Vera J. - Author. Journal title: Intertexts. Volume: 13. Issue: 1-2 Publication date: Spring-Fall 2009. Page number: 153+. © 2007 Texas Tech University Press. COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale Group.

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