Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch / Edition 1

by Stephanie Swales, Carol Owens

Overview

Taking a deep dive into contemporary Western culture, this book suggests we are all fundamentally ambivalent beings. A great deal has been written about how to love—to be kinder, more empathic, a better person, and so on. But trying to love without dealing with our ambivalence, with our hatred, is often a recipe for failure. Any attempt, therefore, to love our neighbour as ourselves—or even, for that matter, to love ourselves—must recognize that we love where we hate and we hate where we love.

Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has claimed that to be in two minds about something or someone is characteristic of human subjectivity. Owens and Swales trace the concept of ambivalence through its various iterations in Freud and Lacan in order to question how the contemporary subject deals with its ambivalence. They argue that experiences of ambivalence are, in present-day cultural life, increasingly excised or foreclosed, and that this foreclosure has symptomatic effects at the individual as well as social levels. Owens and Swales examine ambivalence as it is at work in mourning, in matters of sexuality, in our enjoyment under neo-liberalism and capitalism. Above all, the authors consider how today’s ambivalent subject relates to the racially, religiously, culturally, or sexually different neighbour as a result of the current societal dictate of complete tolerance of the other. In this vein, Swales and Owens argue that ambivalence about one’s own jouissance is at the very roots of xenophobia.

Peppered with relevant and stimulating examples from clinical work, film, television, politics and everyday life, Psychoanalysing Ambivalence breathes new life into an old concept and will appeal to any reader, academic or clinician with an interest in psychoanalytic ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138328440
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/03/2019
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic scholar in Dublin, Ireland. She edited The Letter: Perspectives in Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2003-2008), Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children and Adolescents: Further Notes on the Child (with Farrelly Quinn, Routledge, 2017) and Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V: From Lack to Desire (with Almqvist, Routledge, 2019). She is the series editor for the newly established Studying Lacan’s Seminars Routledge series.

Stephanie Swales, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, a practicing psychoanalyst, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a clinical supervisor located in Dallas, Texas. Her first book, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject, was published by Routledge in 2012.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Foreword

1. The tensions of ambivalence
2. Why the zombies ate my neighbours
3. Raising the dead: mourning and ambivalence
4. On letting the right one in: Heisenberg and vampires
5. Guilty secrets (Walter White, Walter Mitty, and the manosphere)
6. Guilt, shame, and jouissance (and by the way, why your superego is not really your amigo…)
7. Extimacy, ambivalence, xenophobia
8. The jouissance of ambivalence: we are not racists, but…

Afterword

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Covering everything from Aristotle to zombies to Breaking Bad, Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales have written a masterpiece unlocking the secrets of ambivalence. In Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan, they demonstrate that ambivalence is perhaps the central category in social relations. The need for this book is especially urgent today, in an era characterized by its various ways of refusing ambivalence, which are, Owens and Swales make clear, ways of refusing the price of interacting with others altogether. Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan speaks to the contemporary political catastrophe better than any book I’ve read." –Todd McGowan, Professor, University of Vermont, USA

From the Publisher