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.

Rather the processes of interpretation begun by Freud are turned on Freud himself, thus eventually displacing and questioning his theoretical mastery."

This essay collection discusses the role of emotion in ethics, the relationship between emotions and authenticity and freedom, the role of emotions in the law, and includes discussions of Freud and his critics.

Passion! The word brims with and exudes power, movement, intensity, vitality, desire, and fulfillment. Its multifaceted meanings include eroticism, rage, sex, suffering, drive, commitment, dedication, and love. On the one hand, it embodies a quality to be embraced and lived fully, to make life meaningful and worthwhile. On the other, it is sometimes to be treated with suspicion, reined in, subjected to the dictates of reason. While it brightens existence and its departure makes life dull, many passions may prove unbearable. The manifold connotations of passion make it highly relevant to psychoanalysis, yet, so far, no book has explored the many facets of this pervasive theme. This book provides a comprehensive guide that will sensitize readers to the omnipresent importance of passionate emotion in the clinical setting, and throughout all areas and times of life. It bursts with thought-provoking ideas. Challenging cases are illuminated by penetrating reflections and novel applications and combinations of theoretical perspectives. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Passion explores the many ways in which very strong emotions – passions – can be understood and worked with in clinical contexts. The contributions cover such key topics as psychosis and violence, emotions in childhood, sexuality, secure and insecure attachments, the role of passion in seeking meaning, passion and transition space, and transference and countertransference. This book will be of great help to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists struggling to assist patients (and perhaps themselves) in locating their passions, channeling and expressing them in meaningful ways, and overcoming obstacles to their fulfillment.

Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice. Intense grief at the death of someone in our life discloses the contours of that life to us. Wonder spurs scientific inquiry. The strong current of Western thought that idealizes a dispassionate world has ostracized the passions as quaint, even dangerous. Intense states have come to be seen as symptoms of pathology. A fondness for irony along with our civic ideal of tolerance lead us to prefer the diluted emotional life of feelings and moods. Demonstrating enormous intellectual originality and generosity, Philip Fisher meditates on whether this victory is permanent-and how it might diminish us. From Aristotle to Hume to contemporary biology, Fisher finds evidence that the passions have defined a core of human nature no less important than reason or desire. Traversing the Iliad, King Lear, Moby Dick, and other great works, he discerns the properties of the high-spirited states we call the passions. Are vehement states compatible with a culture that values private, selectively shared experiences? How do passions differ from emotions? Does anger have an opposite? Do the passions give scale, shape, and significance to our experience of time? Is a person incapable of anger more dangerous than someone who is irascible? In reintroducing us to our own vehemence, Fisher reminds us that it is only through our strongest passions that we feel the contours of injustice, mortality, loss, and knowledge. It is only through our personal worlds that we can know the world.

Frieden explores methods of dream interpretation in the Bible, the Talmud, and in the writings of Sigmund Freud, and brings to light Freud's troubled relationship to his Judaic forerunners. This book reveals unfamiliar associations in intellectual history and challenges received ideas in biblical, Talmudic, and Freudian scholarship. Freud distanced himself from dream interpreters such as Joseph and Daniel by rejecting their intuitive methods and their claims to predict the future. While biblical and Talmudic dream interpretation generally involve prophecy, Freud sought to limit himself to the determination of prior causes in the dreamer's life. Nevertheless, Frieden demonstrates that Freud's strategies of interpretation, and especially his use of "free association," inevitably guide the dreamer toward a future. This resonance between ancient prophecy and modern psychology is merely one example of the concealed relationship between Judaic and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. Frieden shows the role both of actual influences and influences denied by Freud.

This original study investigates the role played by literature in Sigmund Freud's creation and development of psychoanalysis. Graham Frankland analyses the whole range of Freud's own texts from a literary-critical perspective, providing a comprehensive reappraisal of his life's work. Freud was steeped in classical European literature but seems initially to have repressed all literary influences on his scientific work. Frankland traces their re-emergence, examining in detail Freud's many literary allusions and quotations as well as the rhetoric and imagery of his writing. He explores Freud's own attempts at analysing literature, the influence of literary criticism on his approach to analysing patients and his creation of psychoanalytical 'novels', quasi-literary fictions fraught with profoundly personal subtexts. Freud's Literary Culture sheds new light on a multi-faceted, contradictory writer who continues to have an unparalleled impact on our postmodern culture precisely because he was so deeply rooted in European literary tradition.

This book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as nature and society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity. It examines how works of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immune with their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure of contamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated ́82 what has only been implied ́82 within postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive theory. Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects of 'the novels of Henry James, Herman Melville and H. G. Wells question notions of natural order as well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classic films and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoretical insights in close analysis.

In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain's empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire's many layers of conflict and ambivalence. Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others--and deft use of psychoanalytic theory--The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.