Being fair to psychoanalysis

From the award-winning author of The Subject in Contemporary Times, in Being Fair to Psychoanalysis, Joel Birman presents essential essays and concepts to explain how Freud's psychoanalysis and his ideas changed the history of philosophy.

Inspired by Michel Foucault's thoughts on Sigmund Freud, acclaimed psychoanalyst Joel Birman mediates a fascinating dialogue between the discourses of psychoanalysis and philosophy. The author takes readers on a journey that begins with the beginnings of psychoanalytic theoretical construction, a period when the advent of Freud's ideas on the unconscious encountered resistance to scientific validation. Birman explains how, since psychoanalysis is an experiment in the interpretation of subjectivity, its premises were viewed more as fictional speculations than a Cartesian exercise of reason.

While some sciences rejected psychoanalytic discourse as meaningless, French intellectuals such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan repositioned psychoanalysis as a knowledge of interpretation. This understanding, which recognizes the subject as instituted in the register of desire, was fundamental to the development of deconstructive revisions of philosophy. Birman recalls, for example, how psychoanalysis provided the Frankfurt School with important tools for conceptualizing social processes such as alienation and reification, both systematically produced by the capitalist mode of production.

In this endeavor, the author presents, through essays, fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, alongside some of the key readings on Freud undertaken in the 20th century, led by intellectuals such as Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, among others. Furthermore, the author skillfully weaves his explanations into the key events shaping the current political climate, such as the rise of the Islamic State, the refugee crisis, and the strengthening of nationalism in the West, thus affirming a possible political place for psychoanalysis in today's world.

Being fair to psychoanalysis positions psychoanalytic discourse within its own adventure of unveiling the subject throughout its history, in addition to assessing the impacts psychoanalysis has had on philosophy—and how the latter, in turn, developed around Freud's ideas. The consequences of this approach show us how crucial the understanding of the subject and its complexities has been to the recent history of philosophy, especially when we focus on philosophers who endeavored to consider the diversity of ways of life and the full expression of desire and will.