Freud's Paranoid Quest is an exceptionally broad-ranging and well-written book....Whether or not one agrees with certain of his arguments and assessments, one must acknowledge the remarkable intelligence that is displayed on nearly every page. --Louis Sassauthor of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion John Farrell's Freud's Paranoid Quest is the most trenchant, exhilarating and illuminating book I have encountered in many years. [The book] should be pondered not just by all students of Freud's thought but by everyone who senses that 'advanced modernity' has by now outstayed its welcome. --Frederick CrewsUniversity of California, Berkeley In Freud's Paranoid Quest, John Farrell analyzes the personality and thought of Sigmund Freud in order to give insight into modernity's paranoid character and into the true nature of Freudian psychoanalysis. John Farrell's Freud is not the path-breaking psychologist he claimed to be, but the fashioner and prisoner of a total system of suspicion. The most gifted of paranoids, Freud deployed this system as a self-heroizing myth and a compelling historical ideology.

"The Psychology and Sociology of Literature" is a collection of 25 chapters on literature by some of the leading psychologists, sociologists, and literary scholars in the field of the empirical study of literature. Contributors include Ziva Ben-Porat, Gerry Cupchik, Art Graesser, Rachel Giora, Norbert Groeben, Colin Martindale, David Miall, Willie van Peer, Kees van Rees, Siegfried Schmidt, Hugo Verdaasdonk, and Rolf Zwaan. Topics include literature and the reading process; the role of poetic language, metaphor, and irony; cathartic and Freudian effects; literature and creativity; the career of the literary author; literature and culture; literature and multicultural society, literature and the mass media; literature and the internet; and literature and history. An introduction by the editors situates the empirical study of literature within an academic context.The chapters are all invited and refereed contributions, collected to honor the scholarship and retirement of professor Elrud Ibsch, of the Free University of Amsterdam. Together they represent the state of the art in the empirical study of literature, a movement in literary studies which aims to produce reliable and valid scientific knowledge about literature as a means of verbal communication in its cultural context. Elrud Ibsch was one of the pioneers in Europe to promote this approach to literature some 25 years ago, and this volume takes stock of what has happened since."The Psychology and Sociology of Literature" presents an invaluable overview of the results, promises, gaps, and needs of the empirical study of literature. It addresses social scientists as well as scholars in the humanities who are interested in literature as discourse.

This book shows how persecution is a condition that binds each in an ethical obligation to the other. Persecution is functionally defined here as an impinging, affective relation that is not mediated by reason. It focuses on the works and personal lives of Emmanuel Lévinas—a phenomenological ethicist who understood persecution as an ontological condition for human existence—and Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis who proposed that a demanding superego is a persecuting psychological mechanism that enables one to sadistically enjoy moral injunctions. Scholarship on the work of Freud and Lévinas remains critical about their objectivity, but this book uses the phenomenological method to bracket this concern with objective truth and instead reconstruct their historical biographies to evaluate their hyperbolically opposing claims. By doing so, it is suggested that moral actions and relations of persecution in their personal lives illuminate the epistemic limits that they argued contribute to the psychological and ontological necessity of persecuting behaviors. Object relations and intersubjective approaches in psychoanalysis successfully incorporate meaningful elements from both of their theoretical works, which is used to develop an intentionality of search that is sensitive to an unknowable, relational, and existentially vulnerable ethical subjectivity. Details from Freud’s and Lévinas’ works and lives, on the proclivity to use persecution to achieve moral ends, provide significant ethical warnings, and the author uses them as a strategy for developing the reader’s intentionality of search, to reflect on when they may use persecuting means for moral ends. The interdisciplinary nature of this research monograph is intended for academics, scholars, and researchers who are interested in psychoanalysis, moral philosophy, and phenomenology. Comparisons between various psychoanalytic frameworks and Lévinas’ ethic will also interest scholars who work on the relation between psychoanalysis and The Other. Lévinas scholars will value the convergences between his ethics and Freud’s moral skepticism; likewise, readers will be interested in the extension of Lévinas’ intentionality of search. The book is useful for undergraduate or graduate courses on literary criticism and critical theories worldwide.

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.

Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory. Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.

The goal of this book is to recapture the diminished roles of affect, psychological needs, and the psychodynamic mechanisms that are crucial for understanding political behavior by explaining and extending the contributions of Harold D. Lasswell, the dominant figure in political psychology in the mid-twentieth-century. Although Lasswell was best known for applying psychodynamic theories to politics, this book also demonstrates how his framework accommodated for cognitive processes and social interactions ranging from communications to policy-making. The authors use Lasswell's contributions and the debates over his ideas as a springboard for examining current policy, political, and leadership issues. Revitalizing Political Psychology presents and extends four aspects of Lasswell's contributions to the field: the psychodynamic mechanisms drawn from psychoanalytic theory, the use of symbol associations to understand political propaganda, the analysis of "democratic character" for both the public and the elites, and the structure of belief systems. In so doing, the authors link personality and political communication theory to democratic practice. The authors also critique leadership studies using Lasswell's concerns over the risks to democratic accountability and the current preoccupation with strengthening the roles of charismatic and transformational leaders. Intended for researchers, practitioners, and students in the areas of political and historical psychology, political strategy, and political communication, the book's emphasis on psychodynamics also appeals to psychoanalysts and the material on leadership appeals to professionals in management and industrial/organizational psychology.

Using postmodern theory, The Practice of Quixotism explores eighteenth-century women's texts that use quixote narratives, which typically demand that individuals purge their minds of internalized fictions to insist instead that the reality we encounter is inevitably mediated by the texts we have read.

This book provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the interdisciplinary field of literature and economics.

The aphorism captures a huge amount of truth, meaning or wit in a very short statement. It has been used and studied from classical times to contemporary theory and takes on a new relevance when we look at today’s communication media such as text messages and twitter. This concise guide offers an overview of: The history of the aphorism to the present day Its relation to other short forms, including the fragment, the proverb, the maxim, the haiku, the epigram and the quotation The use of the aphorism by authors such as Heraclitus, Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Chuang Tzu, Blake, Schlegel, Emerson, Nietzsche, Wilde, Woolf and Barthes The interdisciplinary nature of the aphorism, bringing together science, philosophy, literature and religion Exploring all the key aspects of the form, Ben Grant guides readers through this large and lively area in a wide-ranging and critically informed study of the aphorism.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.