Shows how literature can aid psychoanalysts in the understanding of psychological conflicts.
For more than a hundred years, psychoanalysts have applied their theories of neurosis to objects of culture, including literature. In this book, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and scholar of religion Volney P. Gay reverses field and uses literature to reevaluate psychoanalysis. Arguing that neurosis occurs when we cannot recollect joy, Gay focuses upon the nature of joy as articulated in drama and literature. It is the absence of joy, he suggests, that evokes in children a lifelong quest for repair and restitution, usually through the stories they tell themselves. Therefore, Gay argues, literary accounts of joy are essential to contemporary psychoanalysts because they illuminate the nature of an "object" that, when absent, produces the form of human suffering that Freud named "neurosis." Throughout the book, case studies are juxtaposed with analyses of works by Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Wharton, and others in order to explore the notion that the objects of psychoanalysis (and similar psychotherapies) are structured like narratives rather than organisms or other natural objects.
| ISBN: | 9780791451007 |
| Publication date: | 6th September 2001 |
| Author: | Volney P Gay |
| Publisher: | SUNY Press an imprint of State University of New York Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 288 pages |
| Series: | SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture |
| Genres: |
Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology Abnormal psychology Cognition and cognitive psychology |
Shows how literature can aid psychoanalysts in the understanding of psychological conflicts.
For more than a hundred years, psychoanalysts have applied their theories of neurosis to objects of culture, including literature. In this book, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and scholar of religion Volney P. Gay reverses field and uses literature to reevaluate psychoanalysis. Arguing that neurosis occurs when we cannot recollect joy, Gay focuses upon the nature of joy as articulated in drama and literature. It is the absence of joy, he suggests, that evokes in children a lifelong quest for repair and restitution, usually through the stories they tell themselves. Therefore, Gay argues, literary accounts of joy are essential to contemporary psychoanalysts because they illuminate the nature of an "object" that, when absent, produces the form of human suffering that Freud named "neurosis." Throughout the book, case studies are juxtaposed with analyses of works by Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Wharton, and others in order to explore the notion that the objects of psychoanalysis (and similar psychotherapies) are structured like narratives rather than organisms or other natural objects.
Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis features in the following genres: Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology, Abnormal psychology, Cognition and cognitive psychology
Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis is available in Paperback, Hardback
Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis was written by Volney P Gay and published by SUNY Press an imprint of State University of New York Press
Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis has 288 pages
Yes it is part of SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture series