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In Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis Thomas Svolos presents a collection of his work from the early 2000s, essays and lectures broadly covering issues of diagnosis, countertransference, medication, addiction, the body, psychosis, fantasy, and of course what brings us to treatment—the symptom. Svolos denies psychoanalysis as a system, and therefore the book is not systematic. He opens with the wager that if a form of psychoanalysis is to survive in the twenty-first century, it will be a Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Svolos examines how the encounter of psychoanalysis with postmodernity in the 1960s changed the relationship of theory to the symptom. Should the symptom be read? Perhaps celebrated and enjoyed, as Deleuze suggests? At this time the culture industry is diagnosed, labeled “late capitalism,” the term popularized by Marxist and activist Ernest Mandel, and picked up by twentieth-century critical theorists belonging to the Frankfurt school, Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson. Late capitalism, although like all broad labels varying in meaning and connotation, generally suggests a movement away from any possibility of socialism and a reinforcement of the domination of the economy over our bodies and minds. The phrase has seen renewed interest in the past decade, picked up more broadly outside of neo-Marxists and critical theorists.