Books & ideas

The Social Key to Dreams

Claire Pagès — 2024-02-01T08:00:00Z

The unconscious, according to Bernard Lahire, is “socially structured.” This principle makes possible an individual sociology of dreams that requires—like all psychoanalytic interpretation—the presence of a third party to grasp the forces bearing down on the dreaming subject.

Being and Choice

Michel Kail — 2020-02-20T08:00:00Z

Sartre promoted a new form of psychoanalysis that refused to relegate impulses to the unconscious and the infantile past. Neither deterministic nor arbitrary, human freedom is a “fundamental choice” that according to Raoul Moati must be thought in the light of realism.

Caught in a Bad Romance: What America Means to Russia

Eliot Borenstein — 2015-10-15T06:50:20Z

As pundits in the West comment on the rise of “anti-Americanism” in Russia, Americans wonder about the origins of this anti- US sentiment. In this essay, Eliot Borenstein explains that, against all odds, the hostility towards America comes from a place of love.

Thinking Between Shores: Georges Devereux

François Laplantine — 2014-10-27T09:00:00Z

From the margins to which he was confined, Georges Devereux (1908-1985) formulated some of the most original scientific work of his century. In the wake of Freud, whose legacy he firmly defended, Devereux initiated the transcultural practice of psychiatry. François Laplantine, one of his former disciples, reconsiders the legacy of ethnopsychoanalysis' founder.

The unconscious and its images

Alexandre Abensour — 2008-07-17T07:55:13Z

The first volume of Writings and Conferences from Paul Ricœur brings together the texts that he devoted to psychoanalysis. In these articles, Ricœur strives to understand the limits of psychoanalytic discourse, while still emphasizing the depth and complexity of Freud's work—the comprehension of which presupposes less a linguistic than a semiotic notion of images.