Rethinking Freedom: Why Freedom Has Lost Its Meaning and What Can Be Done to Save It and Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society

Extract

Rethinking Freedom: Why Freedom Has Lost Its Meaning and What Can Be Done to Save It. By C. Fred Alford. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 192p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society. By Isaac D. Balbus. New York: Other Press, 2005. 264p. $25.00.

Psychoanalysis has suffered rough treatment in American mass media in recent decades. Dubious sweeping neurological claims have displaced what are regarded as dubious “talking cure” claims. This cultural trend is reflected in the reflex-like skepticism with which especially under-50 scholars behold the works of Sigmund Freud and his schismatic followers. Political scientists rarely bother with psychoanalysis or tend at best to exhibit a “Freud for Beginners' grasp of the enterprise, which is, after all, an exploration, and canny effort at explanation, of our “inner world” and of the rule of unconscious elements over our intentions and best-laid plans. Inasmuch as the study of the unwieldy “inner self” militates against rational modeling, it is little wonder that psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor since Harold Lasswell's heyday. Indeed, psychoanalysts offer some intriguing comments about underlying motives that drive those of us who pursue rationalist models as adequate depictions of reality, but we need not tarry there.