Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic

Book excerpt: More than a hundred years after its founding, psychoanalysis remains influential and controversial far outside its core sphere of activity in the 'clinic'. In a wide range of cultural and social disciplines, psychoanalytic ideas are drawn on to explain human subjectivity and its relationship with the social world. This lucid and engaging book explores these interventions through detailed examination of how psychoanalytic ideas apply in literature, politics, social psychology, philosophy and psychosocial studies. The highly-regarded and influential author, Stephen Frosh, shows how psychoanalysis can at times greatly illuminate these fields of study, and how at other times it might misread them. He also asks what psychoanalysis can learn from the disciplines with which it is in dialogue, and particularly how it can retain its own capacity for critical thought. Sophisticated and stimulating, yet accessible and approachable, this important book: - Provides a critical exploration that will stimulate further debate about the place of psychoanalysis in intellectual life - Develops the newly emerging psychosocial perspective as one that links psychological and social theories in novel ways. Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic will be of profound interest to students and academics across a wide range of disciplines, particularly those taking courses in social, cultural or political theory at undergraduate or postgraduate level or studying on programmes in Psychoanalytic or Psychosocial Studies.