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 is a very important book for all those who are interested in Freud as a social theorist, but also for all those who wish to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the complex ideas of the founder of psychoanalysis. Gabriel has examined psychoanalysis in a way which is very rare among commentators of Freud: he was able to look at it from different viewpoints without confusing them. He succeeded in presenting psychoanalysis in its epistemological autonomy as a theory and in its clinical specificity as a technique (ascribing to the unconscious a central position in social theory), but he was also able to look at psychoanalysis from the outside, and describe some of its inherent moral values, and its important place as a 'cultural product' in contemporary society.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, six inter-related organizing themes or problems are presented and discussed: body and mind; individual and society; potential and limitations of psychoanalytic cures; the moral implications of psychoanalysis and Freud's ideal of the good life; the nature of psychoanalytic theory and its relation to empirical considerations; and the question of Freud's position as mankind's conservative disillusionist or its speculative utopian. The second part of the book is very interesting because in it the author presents a new way of approaching and interpreting some very important and recent cultural and political phenomena like fascism, the rapid growth of bureaucracy, and the popular appeal of psychoanalysis and other therapies.
One of the most important contributions of this book for a better understanding of the (often baffling) complexities of the psychoanalytic field lies, hoever, in its specific interpretive approach to Freud's work. This approach comprises two intellectual procedures which I think can be distinguished: the conceptual mapping of Freud's work, and the sytstematic grounding or contextualizing of different interpretations of Freud in