Resistances of Psychoanalysis

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects French Stuff Literary Studies Literary Studies MOSTLY Theory

by Jacques Derrida,

Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

Stanford University Press

Due/Published June 1998, 200 pages, paper

ISBN 0804730199

In the three essays that make up this book, Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis--conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today as he revisits and reassesses a subject he first wrote about in a 1966 essay on Freud. These essays also clarify Derrida's thinking bout the subjects of the essays--Freud, Lacan, and Foucault--a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.
The first essay is a close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. Looking particularly at The Interpretation of Dreams, he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms. In the essay on Lacan, he, in effect, asks, "What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.?" The third essay is not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work, one that restores a complexity a subtlety to Foucault that has often been lost in what has become a reductionistic and formulaic packaging of his ideas.

Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics