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Psychoanalytic Culture gives an impressively comprehensive survey of figures who have used psychoanalytic concepts to explore contemporary cultural phenomena. Part One discusses some of Freud's writings on culture, Group Psychology and Totem and Taboo, and his theory of drive, primarily as Freud set it out in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” and how these writings got taken up by a tradition of object relations psychoanalysis, including such analysts as Bion, Wolfenstein, Winnicott, and Klein. Part Two discusses the Frankfurt School's reliance on Freud's writings on culture to develop Marxist critiques of ideology. This section focuses on figures from the Frankfurt School including Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Reich, and Habermas. This part ends with a chapter that proposes the French postmodernist Baudrillard to be “part of this tradition as exemplar and symptom of its decay and excess” who “both celebrates and sabotages the attempt by the Frankfurt School to go beyond action to praxis” (109, emphasis Parker's). Part Three focuses on Lacanian psychoanalysis, its relations to linguistics, and how Lacan's concepts develop in the work of figures such as Althusser, Kristeva, Laplanche, and Žižek.
Throughout, Parker brings up what he himself terms a “myriad