Overview

Freud's thinking about the unconscious has always been seen to be more about representations than affects. When it came to the passions of the transference and the demands of his hysterical patients, Freud was always more interested, wanted to move the focus away from the transference, and onto dreams. Hidden wishes more than manifest ones were what captured his imagination and style. This book returns to the repressed theory of passions in Freud's own thinking, arguing that the repression, fixation and rhythmic movement of affects make up the roots and branches of psychoanalytic thinking. We can think of Freud's unconscious affects as a tree, with the most passionate and primitive affects that make up the core of our psychic life, moving and branching out into more elaborated emotions and representations. So what moves this tree: the house of our first passions? How we move the tree of our affects, or leave it, is integral to Freud's understanding of sexuality and the Oedipal Complex.

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9780367106126

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Psychoanalytic theory since Lacan has centered on the dynamics of desire and castration, as governed by the law of the father. Challenging this Lacanian orthodoxy, Jan Campbell shifts our attention to the passions, which connote passivity and receptivity in contrast to the active force associated with desire. We suffer our passions, which can overwhelm us unless they are contained within a form. It is our pre-Oedipal intimacy with the mother, Campbell claims, that provides a genre with which to articulate the passions, a genre rooted in the rhythms and gestures of the body, prior to language and the symbolic order. Like a literary genre, the mother shapes her child's passions into communicable form without impeding their experimental energy. Campbell, who is both a literary scholar and a psychoanalyst, argues that mother and child read each other in a dialectic of immersion and separation that revives in the experience of reading literary works. In her inventive interpretations of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, together with her skilful navigation of psychoanalytic theory, Campbell demonstrates how forms of literature hark back to those preverbal forms in which the nascent self learns how to hold its passions. --Maud Ellmann, Berlin Professor of English In Freudian Passions, Jan Campbell offers less a psychoanalytic theory of reading than the far more original, risky and adventurous project of reconceiving psychoanalysis as reading. In prose at once lyrical and precise, exuberant and controlled, Campbell not only describes but performs a practice of reading premised not on interpretive mastery, but on the telepathic relay between the excessive passions of the infant and the form-giving receptivity of the mother. What emerges is a seamless and exhilarating weave of the clinical and the theoretical, the literary and the personal. To those who insist psychoanalysis can't approach literature without reducing or trivializing it, this singular and fascinating book offers a timely riposte. --Josh Cohen, Psychoanalyst (British Psychoanalytical Society) and Professor of Modern Literary Theory

"""Psychoanalytic theory since Lacan has centered on the dynamics of desire and castration, as governed by the law of the father. Challenging this Lacanian orthodoxy, Jan Campbell shifts our attention to the passions, which connote passivity and receptivity in contrast to the active force associated with desire. ""We suffer our passions,"" which can overwhelm us unless they are contained within a form. It is our pre-Oedipal intimacy with the mother, Campbell claims, that provides a ""genre"" with which to articulate the passions, a genre rooted in the rhythms and gestures of the body, prior to language and the symbolic order. Like a literary genre, the mother shapes her child's passions into communicable form without impeding their experimental energy. Campbell, who is both a literary scholar and a psychoanalyst, argues that mother and child ""read"" each other in a dialectic of immersion and separation that revives in the experience of reading literary works. In her inventive interpretations of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, together with her skilful navigation of psychoanalytic theory, Campbell demonstrates how forms of literature hark back to those preverbal forms in which the nascent self learns how to hold its passions.""--Maud Ellmann, Berlin Professor of English ""In Freudian Passions, Jan Campbell offers less a psychoanalytic theory of reading than the far more original, risky and adventurous project of reconceiving psychoanalysis as reading. In prose at once lyrical and precise, exuberant and controlled, Campbell not only describes but performs a practice of reading premised not on interpretive mastery, but on the telepathic relay between the excessive passions of the infant and the form-giving receptivity of the mother. What emerges is a seamless and exhilarating weave of the clinical and the theoretical, the literary and the personal. To those who insist psychoanalysis can't approach literature without reducing or trivializing it, this singular and fascinating book offers a timely riposte.""--Josh Cohen, Psychoanalyst (British Psychoanalytical Society) and Professor of Modern Literary Theory"

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