Summary
Contents
Subject index
Ian Craib is one of the best informed and most penetrating commentators on theory and identity working today. Over many years, he has made notalbe contributions to the study of classical social theory, modern social theory, and psychoanalysis. This volume reflects the full range of his interests. The book is organized around the themes of experience and identity. It begins with a critique of existing sociological accounts of identity, arguing that these are incurably cognitive, treating the people that they study as incapable of experiencing and internal life of internal space. The book moves on to consider the implications of this in social theory and human practice. The argument in divided into three parts. Part 1 traces a Utopian notion of experience developed in Western Marxism, through its steady decline over the first half of the 20th century to the understanding of ambivalence emphasized by modern psychoanalysis. Part 2 offers criticisms of ôgrand theoryö in sociology and of less grand forms of sociology, showing how their lack of concern with lived experience creates unrecognized theoretical and empirical problems. In Part 3, these issues are situated in the context of psychoanalysis, suggesting that psychoanalysis can add to our understanding of experience, but shares the dangers of the other approaches. The book closes with a plea for developing the concept of internal psychic space as a sensitizing concept for sociologists and as a source of personal and political freedom, which has to be protected against theories and practices that would neutralize it. Incisive, compelling, and timely, CraibÆs book will be of interest to students of sociology, social theory, and psychoanalysis.
Freud and Philosophy
Freud and Philosophy
Psychoanalysis has always been sort of happy hunting ground for philosophers, more often than not hostile and frequently, I suspect, trying to cut their teeth on an easy target. When philosophers seem to offer psychoanalysis an admission to respectability it seems to have a price. The so-called ‘underlabourer’ conception of philosophy for which science delivers the goods (knowledge) while philosophy carries out repair jobs on the tools (concepts) has a sinister aspect. It carries a sense of philosophical superiority, the schoolteacher philosopher examining the schoolboy Freud for inky fingers and dirt behind the ears. At its worst, the philosopher becomes the chief witness and judge for what Irving Thalberg (1982) unselfconsciously calls the ‘philosophical prosecution’, checking conceptual credentials and banishing ideas ...
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