Plurality and Perspective in Psychoanalysis [Hardcover]

With this book, Adam Rosen-Carole establishes himself as one of our most important scholars of psychoanalysis. The breadth and depth of his knowledge of the field is extraordinary, and the philosophical arguments he brings to bear on its most difficult issues essential.This work is remarkable for the amplitude of its knowledge concerning Freudian theory and its development in Europe and the United States as well as for its epistemological study. Added to this is the originality of Rosen-Carole's thought which is striking for both its rigor and its audacity.The book provides a defense of the rational authority of psychoanalytic knowledge that does justice to the plurality of psychoanalytic perspectives and resolves central impasses in the psychoanalytic literature and in the literature concerning psychoanalysis and science. It also provides a systematic, comparative, and critical introduction to the main schools of psychoanalysis useful for clinicians, academics, and those exploring psychoanalysis for the first time.Psychoanalysis is a historical discourse of suffering and healing under conditions of modernity rather than a metaphysical discourse of universal truth, and must be so due to the ontological indeterminacy of psychic life. Demonstrating this proceeds through the substantiation of two primary theses. First, pluralism in psychoanalysis, thus the perspectival character of psychoanalytic knowing, is irreducible. Second, psychic life is partially pliable to interpretive constitution rather than a self-subsistent object domain fully available to third-personal, objective description. Together, these theses provide the framework for a radical rethinking of the authority of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice and of the nature of psychoanalytic claims to objectivity. Psychoanalytic interpretations are best understood as existentially interrogative  they test who and how one might be  and if successful, to some extent identity formative. The validity conditionslCÔ