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Questioning Authority: Essays in Psychoanalysis

by Stanley A. Leavy

223 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-2741; ISBN 1-4120-4933-4; US$20.00, C$25.00, EUR17.00, £12.00

Psychoanalysis understood as the criticism of the mind and of the authorities that govern the mind.

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About the Book

About the Author

Excerpts

Catalogue Information

About the Book

These selected essays from over a period of nearly 30 years, while published separately, all undertake the study of psychoanalysis as a work of criticism. Three of them contain expositions of the earlier, largely linguistic writings of Jacques Lacan, as they relate to theory and practice, but all the essays are concerned with the development and primacy of the self. Their approach is humanistic and personalistic, two of them calling on the experience of great writers, John Keats and Alain-Fournier, by way of intensive illustration. Some traditional concepts of psychoanalysis come into serious questioning, especially that of narcissism. Just as the man or woman in psychoanalytic treatment makes an honest attempt at disclosing the inner constraints on his or her life so far, so the author tries to show the restrictions, often unavowed, that any system of psychology may impose on our grasp of the life lived. In particular, this is worked out with regard to male homosexuality, in a study that helped to redefine present-day attitudes, both professional and public. Religion, in the essay that gives the book its title, comes into question in its relations with traditional authority on the one hand, and personal experience on the other. In brief, the book calls for the "examined life" to which Socrates alluded.

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About the Author

Dr.Leavy is a graduate of Yale College, and of the School of Medicine of the University of Rochester, and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, with psychiatric training also at Yale. He was appointed Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale (now retired) and also Training and Supervising analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (also retired). He is the author of many articles and reviews in professional journals, and of the books "The Psychoanalytic Dialogue' (Yale) and "In the Inage of God, a psychoanalyst's view'(Yale).

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Excerpts

The individual papers here reprinted reveal varying aspects of what my overall title means by this arresting phrase, that I first spotted as the imperative "Question Authority" on a bumper sticker during the turbulent "60's and "70's. It probably had more of an anarchistic intent than I could have subscribed to, then or ever, but in that era it was a bold challenge to the traditional values that had supported racism and militarism. The extension of a skeptical attitude toward received opinion seems to me now, as it did then, always in season. My application of it in a psychoanalytic reference has a special bearing: it means the release of the self from the grip of repetition. The "authority" that needs to be questioned is within. But other meanings are not lost, because persons, selves, exist in networks of relatedness. Dominating values that oppress individual lives need to undergo scrutiny, whether they are external or internal, and schools of analytic thought too ought not be followed without criticism.

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Catalogue Information

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