Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation (original) (raw)

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Authors:

  1. Daniel Tutt
    1. Philosophy, George Washington University, Washington, D.C, USA

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About this book

Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Family aims to raise a sophisticated and highly accessible debate around the family, self-making and the political and cultural implications of liberation. The text proposes a new way to read the Lacanian theory of Oedipus and through this reading resituate a series of important political and theoretical debates that have concerned intellectual life over the last forty years. It is written with an accessible style so that both specialists in Lacanian and Marxist theory and a broader cross-section of readers interested in understanding the implications of debates across populist and Marxist perspectives that have occupied the global left since the 2008 economic crash. The text aims to resituate the way theories of emancipation and liberation are theorized from a distinctive psychoanalytic and Lacanian point of view. In resituating the infamous “Oedipus complex” in a new light, the text re-opens a series of debates with important theoreticalinterlocutors, including the influential American historian and psychoanalytic thinker Christopher Lasch, whose thought has witnessed a significant renaissance of interest today, to the staunch critic of Freud and Lacan, René Girard, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their widely read Anti-Oedipus series that disputes the Freudian and Lacanian notions of Oedipus.

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Keywords

Table of contents (10 chapters)

Reviews

“Daniel Tutt masterfully demonstrates that the anti-Oedipal dissolution of the nuclear family was prematurely triumphant. His timely critique urges us to resume thinking about the potential of the family as a site of initiation, resistance and liberation. Essential reading.”-- Isabel Millar, author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

“Tutt enters in a critical dialogue not only with Freud and Lacan but also with Christopher Lasch, Pierre Bourdieu, Étienne Balibar, Kojin Karatani, René Girard, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Rawls. The main thesis of the author is that in late capitalism the super-ego is weakened. The author sees two kinds of forces at work: a Leninist super-ego that is militant and a cultural unconscious which is care-based. The author ends by discussing the idea of a commune as an alternative to the family. The book is very enlightening for understanding the changes in contemporary family structures.”

--Wilfried Ver Eecke, Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University and author of Breaking Through Schizophrenia: Hegel and Lacan for Talk Therapy

“Focusing on the debates around the Oedipus Complex and its social function, Tutt manages to pave the way for a new strategic view of the family, allowing us to both question the liberal establishment’s celebration of the restructuring of family life today as well as to include into Leftist political considerations the relevant aspects of Oedipal subjectivization to social life, aspects which whatever comes to substitute the nuclear family will also have to contend with.”

--Gabriel Tupinambá, author of The Desire of Psychoanalysis: Exercises in Lacanian Thinking

Authors and Affiliations

Daniel Tutt

About the author

Daniel Tutt, Ph.D. is Professorial Lecturer in Philosophy at George Washington University, a member of the Lacanian Forum of Washington, DC and an award-winning film producer. His writing has appeared in Historical Materialism, Philosophy Now, and multiple book collections on psychoanalysis and contemporary culture. His research is concerned with the intersection of contemporary politics, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

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