ABSTRACT

In this brilliant and revolutionary collection of 14 major essays that draw from more than 25 years of painstaking research, M. Guy Thompson regales us with a stunning revisioning of conventional psychoanalysis that deepens our understanding of the human condition.

Integrating the most seminal existentialist philosophers, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, with the most forward-thinking psychoanalysts over the past century, including Freud, Laing, Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan, Thompson offers a profound yet deeply personal vision of what psychoanalysis can be in the 21st century. In this fascinating volume, Thompson explores such concepts as experience, authenticity, will, happiness, and agency by utilizing a wide range of thinkers, including the ancient Greeks, but always in his singular voice. Exquisitely lucid and engaging to read, Thompson deftly lures us into thoughtful and enlightening territory typically inaccessible to the general reader.

This compelling integration of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis will be of interest not only to psychoanalytic practitioners of all persuasions, but to psychotherapists generally and their patients, as well as philosophers, social scientists, and any student of the human condition.

chapter Chapter 1|14 pages

Sartre and Psychoanalysis

The Role of Freedom in the Clinical Encounter

chapter Chapter 2|16 pages

Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis

The Fate of Authenticity in a Postmodernist World

chapter Chapter 3|12 pages

Logos and Psychoanalysis

The Role of Truth and Creativity in Heidegger's Conception of Language

chapter Chapter 4|8 pages

What Is the Will?

On the Role of Desire in Psychoanalysis

chapter Chapter 7|26 pages

The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis

chapter Chapter 8|28 pages

Happiness and Chance

chapter Chapter 9|34 pages

Is the Unconscious Really All that Unconscious? 1

chapter Chapter 10|18 pages

The Demise of the Person in the Psychoanalytic Situation

chapter Chapter 11|19 pages

Deception, Mystification, Trauma

Laing and Freud

chapter Chapter 12|13 pages

Free Association

A Technical Principle or Model for Psychoanalytic Education?

chapter Chapter 13|22 pages

The Rule of Neutrality

chapter Chapter 14|26 pages

The Existential Dimension to Working Through