Overview

Lying on the couch, the patient must tell all. And yet, as the psychoanalyst well knows, the patient is endlessly unable and unwilling to speak the truth. This perversity at the heart of psychoanalysis, a focus on intimate truths even as the lines between truth and lies are being redrawn, is also at the centre of this book of essays by the historian of psychoanalysis John Forrester. Continuing the work begun in ""Dispatches from the Freud Wars"", this book offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the mechanics, moral dilemmas, and implications of psychoanalysis. Lacan observed that the psychoanalyst's patient is, even when lying, operating in the dimension of truth. Beginning with Lacan's reading of Freud's case history of the Rat Man, Forrester pursues the logic and consequences of this assertion through Freud's relationship with Lacan into the general realm of psychoanalysis and out into the larger questions of anthropology, economics, and metaphysics that underpin the practice. His search takes him into the parallels between money and speech through an exploration of the metaphors of circulation, exchange, indebtedness, and trust that glide from one domain to the other. These essays aim to provide an understanding of the uses and abuses and the significance of truth telling and lying, trust and confidence as they operate in psychoanalysis and in the world of the self and society that it seeks to know.

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9780674539624

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Historian and philosopher of psychoanalysis John Forrester is intent upon convincing us that truth, particularly in out present 'age of scientism' is overrated as a standard for scientific inquiry, as a goal of social relations, and thus, a fortiori , as a stick upon which to prop psychoanalysis or with which to beat it down. Such a proposition would be scandalous were Forrester not so clever, engaging and thorough in proving it...Against the implicit Western cultural bias for truth over falsehood, Forrester cunningly delights in drawing out the creative power of the lie. -- Renee Kingcaid Psychoanalytic Studies [UK]

Two long, very intricate essays: one on the implications of both the inescapability of lying in life and its centrality in psychoanalysis; the other on the nature of money - or, better, of obligation and indebtedness - particularly as seen in Freud's Rat Man case study. Forrester, a science historian (Cambridge Univ.; Dispatches from the Freud Wars, p. 192), is often masterful in the longer and more important piece, his philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration of lying, though at times he writes in a kind of hypercompressed intellectual shorthand. He analyzes first both those philosophers (St. Augustine and Kant, among others) who insist on absolute truthfulness and those (e.g., Nietzsche) who question the equation of the truthful with the moral. Forrester then proceeds to look at the psychoanalytic enterprise, where mental processes, particularly conflicts, are valued over veracity, so that psychoanalysis aims to be the science of lying inasmuch as it is the only science that does not find the prospect that the object of its inquiry may intentionally deceive the scientific investigator subversive of its pretensions to truth. The second piece is a close but abstruse look at Jacques Lacan's rereading of the Rat Man case in light of the belief that debt . . . becomes something magnificent, the emblem of individual destiny, and the signifier of the social order itself. Along his somewhat meandering, associative path, Forrester invokes Marcel Mauss's anthropological theory of gifts, Marx on the practical and political role of money in modern society, 19th-century theories of thermodynamics, Karl Polyani's political philosophy, and Keynes's economic theory. Forrester is scintillating for those who can follow him through what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (Terrors and Experts, 1996), in his foreword, calls two linked intellectual novellas, a Bildungsroman of ideas. But very few readers not well-versed in philosophy, Freud, and Lacan will be able to do so. (Kirkus Reviews)

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