Why Psychoanalysis?

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by Elisabeth Roudinesco,

Translated by Rachel Bowlby

Columbia University Press

Due/Published June 2003, 184 pages, paper

ISBN 0231122039

New in paper (S03)

Why do some people still choose psychoanalysis--Freud's so-called talking cure--when numerous medications are available that treat the symptoms of psychic distress so much faster? Elisabeth Roudinesco tackles this difficult question, exploring what she sees as a "depressive society": an epidemic of distress being addressed only by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs. 

Far from contesting the efficacy of new medications like Prozac, Zoloft, and Viagra in alleviating the symptoms of any number of mental or nervous conditions, Roudinesco argues that the use of such drugs fails to solve patients' real problems. From the man who takes Viagra without ever wondering why he is suffering from impotence, to the woman who is given antidepressants to deal with the loss of a loved one, to the adolescent experiencing a variety of mental disorders, who is simply prescribed Ritalin, Roudinesco sees a society that is obsessed with efficiency and desperate for the quick fix.

She argues that "the talking cure" and pharmacology represent not just different approaches to psychiatry but different worldviews. The rush to treat symptoms is itself symptomatic of an antiseptic and depressive culture in which thought is reduced to the firing of neurons and desire is just a chemical secretion. In contrast, psychoanalysis testifies to human freedom and the power of language.

Contents


• Translator's Note
• Preface
• Notes
• Index
• Part I. The Depressive Society
• 1. The Defeat of the Subject
• 2. The Medications of the Mind
• Part II. The Great Quarrel Over the Unconscious
• 3. The Soul Is Not a Thing
• 5. Frankenstein's Brain
• Part III. The Future of Psychoanalysis
• 4. Behavior-Modification Man
• 6. The ''Equinox Letter''
• 7. Freud Is Dead in America
• 8. A French Scientism
• 9. Science and Psychoanalysis
• 10. Tragic Man
• 11. Universality, Difference, Exclusion
• 12. Critique of Psychoanalytic Institutions