Truth Games

Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis

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by John Forrester,

Foreword by Adam Phillips

Harvard University Press

Due/Published April 2000, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0674001796

New in paper (S00)

Continuing the work begun in Dispatches from the Freud Wars, Forrester offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the mechanics, moral dilemmas, and implications of psychoanalysis. The focus here is on the line between truth and the lie that is at the heart of the experience of analysis.
Lacan observed that the pschoanalyst's patient is, even when lying, operating in the dimension of truth. Beginning with Lacan's reading of Freud's case history of the Rat Man, Forrester pursues the logic and consequences of this assertion through Freud's relationship with Lacan into the general realm of psychoanalysis and out into the larger questions of anthropology, economics, and tetaphysics that underpin the practice. His search takes him into the parallels between money and speech through an exploration of the metaphors of circulation, exchange, indebtedness, and trust that so easily move from one domain to the other. It's Forrester on the uses and abuses and the ultimate significance of truth telling and lying, trust and confidence as they operate in psychoanalysis.

"[Forrester] combines the stance of the Lacanian professional with that of the professional historian and leavens them both with the relaxed prose of the English man of letters...Truth Games is the odd but largely happy result of 20 years' research designed to produce an inquiry into two questions: whether psychoanalysis can really uncover a truth about the self; and whether one can speak with any imagination about the currency that secures the bond between analyst and patient, the bond--let us be frank about it, Forrester says--of money."--Perry Meisel, New York Times Book Review