Two long, very intricate essays: one on the implications of both the inescapability of lying in life and its centrality in psychoanalysis; the other on the nature of money—or, better, of obligation and indebtedness—particularly as seen in Freud's Rat Man case study. Forrester, a science historian (Cambridge Univ.; Dispatches from the Freud Wars, p. 192), is often masterful in the longer and more important piece, his philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration of lying, though at times he writes in a kind of hypercompressed intellectual shorthand. He analyzes first both those philosophers (St. Augustine and Kant, among others) who insist on absolute truthfulness and those (e.g., Nietzsche) who question the equation of the truthful with the moral. Forrester then proceeds to look at the psychoanalytic enterprise, where mental processes, particularly conflicts, are valued over veracity, so that ``psychoanalysis aims to be the science of lying inasmuch as it is the only science that does not find the prospect that the object of its inquiry may intentionally deceive the scientific investigator subversive of its pretensions to truth.'' The second piece is a close but abstruse look at Jacques Lacan's re-reading of the Rat Man case in light of the belief that ``debt . . . becomes something magnificent, the emblem of individual destiny, and the signifier of the social order itself.''Along his somewhat meandering, associative path, Forrester invokes Marcel Mauss's anthropological theory of gifts, Marx on the practical and political role of money in modern society, 19th-century theories of thermodynamics, Karl Polyani's political philosophy, and Keynes's economic theory. Forrester is scintillating for those who can follow him through what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (Terrors and Experts, 1996), in his foreword, calls ``two linked intellectual novellas, a Bildungsroman of ideas.'' But very few readers not well-versed in philosophy, Freud, and Lacan will be able to do so.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-674-53962-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
An East German psychotherapist explores, in an occasionally affecting way, the experience of living within a totalitarian system. It was a system in which a citizen had to guard his utterances not only outside but inside the home, because parents could not speak too freely in front of children, who might themselves be indiscreet or inadvertently betray them. The individual was required not merely to conform but to show enthusiasm for the system. It was not possible, Maaz writes, ``to escape this personality deformation.'' The East German system used overt force, including torture and arrest, as well as the indirect force of legal insecurity, reprisals, intimidation, indoctrination, and fear. It required one to ``sacrifice emotional spontaneity, all frankness and honesty, as well as [one's] critical faculty,'' even to preserve a ``relatively safe life of subservience.'' Few were able to resist the pressure. Millions participated regularly in huge ``jubilation marches,'' and an estimated half a million citizens were informants of the Stasi, the secret police. It was little wonder that the capacity for independent thought and action became increasingly rare. In describing this process, Maaz is persuasive and, in a book published originally in 1990 in Germany, prescient regarding the difficulties that East Germans would face in adjusting to democracy. When dealing with the more theoretical foundations of a controlled psychological environment he is less convincing, as when he complains about the authoritarian technique of ``forcing children to sit on the potty''; he is even self- contradictory when, discussing his therapeutic work with patients, he describes the act of emigration from East Germany as a ``sadomasochistic defense of their dammed-up aggression.'' And when he fears for a new economic expansion that will ``exacerbate the ecological crisis'' and ``step up the armaments business,'' he is venturing beyond his area of expertise. Like the curate's egg, good in parts.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03364-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
A courageous, often profound, and extraordinary attempt by one of England's best historians to cut through the pessimism and parochialism of the profession and to find the bonds of humanity underlying its conventional divisions. Zeldin (History/Oxford Univ.; The French, 1983, etc.) ranges with prodigious learning over different civilizations and epochs, dealing with subjects as disparate as why men and women find it difficult to talk to one another and why political scientists have misunderstood the animal kingdom. His method is anything but academic: He starts most chapters with an interview or description of a person, usually French and usually a woman (``because many women seem to me to be looking at life with fresh eyes'') before broadening the discussion to analyze the nature of the concerns expressed, their historical origins, and the ways in which different civilizations have dealt with them. In doing so, he raises some questions shunned by the academic world and asks others more likely to be raised in magazines and self-help books: ``Is it inevitable,'' he asks, ``that as women become increasingly adventurous and have ever higher expectations of life, they will find men less and less adequate?'' Why are humans ``still so awkward...with even 40 per cent of Americans...complaining that they are too shy to speak freely?'' In answering questions like this, he repeatedly produces the unusual fact or the revisionist view: Writing of Islamic societies, for instance, he notes that sociability, not war, is considered the defining element of the good life. Ultimately, this is a call for a sense of the richness of life and for optimism, which he defines as ``awareness that despite nastiness and stupidity, there is something else too. Pessimism is resignation, an inability to find a way out.'' Not always as skeptical as he might be (Stalin and Hitler, he says, ``remained desperately hungry for respect''), but no short review can do justice to the richness, humor, humanity, and range of this important book.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017160-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
