An intellectual biography aiming to demonstrate, despite his denials, that Freud was a "biologist of the mind". The author analyzes the political aspects of the complex myth of Freud as "psychoanalytic hero" as it served to consolidate the analytic movement.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Combining approaches from literary studies and historical sociology, this book provides a groundbreaking cultural history of the strategies Freud employed in his writings and career to orchestrate public recognition of psychoanalysis and to shape its institutional identity.

Evidence of a nineteenth-century tradition of theoretical discussion about the relationship between chronic pain and pathological lesion, trauma, mood, memory and personality is brought together here for the first time. A wide range of medical texts is surveyed, including pathology, surgery, physiology, neurology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. We see the medical gaze first penetrate the tissues of the body then extend to examine the language and mental state of the pain patient.

Sigmund Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis explores links between Freud’s development of his thinking and theory and his personal emotional journey. It follows his early career as a medical student, researcher and neurologist, and then as a psychotherapist, to focus on the critical period 1895-1900. During these years Freud submitted himself to the process that has become known as his ‘self-analysis’, and developed the core of his psychoanalytic theory. Drawing on Freud’s letters to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, and on selected psychoanalytic writings in particular his ‘dream of Irma’s injection’, Paul Schimmel formulates psychoanalytic dimensions to the biographical ‘facts’ of Freud’s life. In 1900 Freud wrote that he was ‘not a thinker’ but ‘a conquistador’. In reality he was both, and was engaged in a lifelong emotional struggle to bring these contradictory sides of his personality into relationship. His psychoanalytic discoveries are conceptualized in the context of his need to achieve integration within his psyche, and in particular to forge a more creative collaboration between ‘conquistador’ and ‘thinker’. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, academics and teachers of psychoanalysis, and to all serious students of the mind.

Freud: From Individual Psychology to Group Psychology, by M. Andrew Holowchak, explores Freudian psychoanalysis as a full-fledged science, as it relates psychoanalytically to issues of individual psychology (Individualpsychologie) and group psychology (Massenpsychologie). Holowchak analyzes Freud's shift in focus in his mature years away from psychoanalysis as a "curative" method for treating individual neurosis, to psychoanalysis as a full-fledged science of the human psyche that essays to shed light on group issues, such as religiosity and war.

Freud's Foes, the latest title in the Polemics series, addresses Freud's fiercest contemporary critics. Kurt Jacobsen defends psychoanalysis, while accepting that it has inherent flaws. He argues that although today's 'foes' pose as daring savants, they are only the latest wave of critics that psychoanalysis has encountered since its controversial birth, and he easily debunks their arguments.

A brilliant and original reimagining of sexuality, this book examines how concepts lend themselves to power/knowledge formations, and offers a robust synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros. Many contemporary French philosophers make incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: 'duplicity,' 'concealment,' 'forgetting,' and 'subterfuge,' among others. This book employs Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual ruses, or sleights, that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept of sex. These are the sleights associated with the concepts of norm, bisexuality and development. Mary Beth Mader argues that concepts can trick us, and shows how they can effect conceptual sleights, or what she calls sleights of reason.

Freud’s Legacy in the Global Era presents a radically new perspective on Freud’s relevance today as a forerunner of the contemporary evolutionary neurosciences also steeped in the tradition of humanistic thought. Carlo Strenger shows how globalisation has produced new theoretical, practical and clinical issues for psychoanalysis, which can best be understood by drawing on influences from economics, sociology and philosophy. Strenger’s lively case histories demonstrate a new psychoanalytic viewpoint engaged with surrounding scientific disciplines in an enriching interchange, and open to the fascinating cultural and social developments that shape patients’ reality, lives and concerns in a global era. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic and psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists and to all mental health professionals interested in the interaction of psychoanalysis and other disciplines from a global viewpoint as well as to lay readers keen to understand the complexity of globalized life.

Freud's Philosophy of the Unconscious is the only comprehensive, systematic study of Sigmund Freud's philosophy of mind. Freud emerges as a sophisticated philosopher who addresses many of the central questions that concern contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists while anticipating many of their views. While still a student in Vienna, Freud was initiated into philosophy by Franz Brentano. The book charts Freud's intellectual development as he deals with the mind-body problem, the nature of consciousness, folk psychology versus scientific psychology, the relationship between language and thought, realism and antirealism in psychology, and the nature of unconscious mental events. The book also critically examines writings on Freud by Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Searle, demonstrating their weakness as interpretations and criticisms of Freud's position. Readership: Philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists.