Joy and the objects of psychoanalysis : literature, belief, and neurosis / Volney P. Gay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gay, Volney P. (Volney Patrick), 1948-

Series:

SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychoanalysis.

Joy.

Neuroses.

Parent and child.

Object relations (Psychoanalysis).

Psychoanalysis and literature.

Physical Description:

xiii, 243 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2001]

Summary:

For more than a hundred years, psychoanalysts have applied their theories of neurosis to objects of culture, including literature. In this book, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and scholar of religion Volney P. Gay reverses field and uses literature to reevaluate psychoanalysis. Arguing that neurosis occurs when we cannot recollect joy, Gay focuses upon the nature of joy as articulated in drama and literature. It is the absence of joy, he suggests, that evokes in children a lifelong quest for repair and restitution, usually through the stories they tell themselves. Therefore, Gay argues, literary accounts of joy are essential to contemporary psychoanalysts because they illuminate the nature of an "object" that, when absent, produces the form of human suffering that Freud named "neurosis." Throughout the book, case studies are juxtaposed with analyses of works by Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Wharton, and others in order to explore the notion that the objects of psychoanalysis (and similar psychotherapies) are structured like narratives rather than organisms or other natural objects.

Contents:

1. Neurotic Suffering as the Absence of Joy 19

2. Medicine and Psychoanalysis: Models of Psychological Disease 55

3. Pathogenic Beliefs, Personal and Public Specimens 95

4. Pathogenic Beliefs, Perfectionism, and the Production of Psychopathology 129

5. Affects: Darwinian, Cultural, and Blitzkrieg 153

6. The Objects of Psychoanalysis 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-237) and index.

ISBN:

0791451003

OCLC:

45315491