You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book has an entrancing quality for the analyst or psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In this book Barry Richards writes less as a practitioner and more as a social scientist who is happily frank about the limited authority that this gives him to write about Freud. His interest is in the fate that Freud has met in our society.
He is not primarily concerned to expound what Freud really said, more what various people have said he said. And why Freud has been taken up in particular ways by particular people, in our particular world, at this particular moment in history. His thesis is that Freud's theories tend to be reconstructed to suit a particular outlook; as a generalised overview of his argument he states:
Market society has generated various forms of psychology which unwittingly and uncritically reflect both its utilitarian workings and its omnipotent phantasies about itself. It has also given rise to psychoanalysis as a contrary and reparative project, an attempt to renew our personal matrices of meaning amidst the amoral disorder of the market. At the same time psychoanalysis offers us ways of theorizing both the general psychic damage done by market relations and the specific illusions expressed in other psychological theories. (p. 146)
Firstly, he is interested in the historical variation in the popularity of Freud; for instance, psycho-analysis grew popular between the wars but fell back especially amongst professional psychologists and psychiatrists during the 1950's and 1960's due, he says, to the vogue for behaviourist psychology which described the external manifestations of the human being only. A turning point in cultural attitudes occurred in the 1960's from which psycho-analysis has fundamentally benefited. The political upheavals of 1968 were nothing short of a watershed in the political history of the twentieth century. Since then there has been an increasingly popular and intellectual demand for greater understanding of the interiority of human bein