Böcker av Jeffrey Berman

Sigmund Freud can be a polarizing figure, beloved by many and despised by some. Focusing on ten key writers and scholars who either passionately loved or gleefully loathed Freud, this book represents Freud's wide legacy, the reach of his ideas, their controversies, and their ability still to provoke, inspire, confound, outrage, and compel.The book begins by focusing on five highly prolific authors whose admiration for Freud is boundless: Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Kurt R. Eissler, Peter Gay, and Deborah P. Britzman. Berman then explores five more writers whose aim was not simply to debunk Freud and destroy his monstrous creation but to cast both into hell: D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Szasz, Peter J. Swales, and Frederick Crews. Each chapter discusses the author's involvement with Freud, showing the continuities and discontinuities of his or her writings, as well as offering snapshots of the writers, suggesting how their personal and professional lives were inextricably related. In conclusion, the book draws out some suprising commonalities between the Freudolaters and Schadenfreudians, going on to discuss the current state of psychoanalysis, the "psychoanalytic credos" by which contemporary analysts live.

Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His many books include Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning; Writing the Talking Cure: Irvin D. Yalom and the Literature of Psychotherapy; and Writing Widowhood: The Landscapes of Bereavement, all published by SUNY Press.

Assesses the contributions of six major psychoanalytic thinkers in the light of current academic and clinical trends in psychoanalysis.

Explores Yalom's profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature.

The first book-length study of the psychoanalytic memoir, this book examines key examples of the genre, including Sigmund Freud's mistitled An Autobiographical Study, Helene Deutsch's Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue, Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919, Masud Khan's The Long Wait, Sophie Freud's Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom's A Matter of Death and Life. Offering in each chapter a brief character sketch of the memoirist, the book shows how personal writing fits into their other work, often demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities in an author's life as well as discussing each author's contributions to psychoanalysis, whether positive or negative.