The Last Resistance

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The Last Resistance
The Concept of Science as a Defense against Psychoanalysis

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Marcus Bowman - Author

SUNY series, Alternatives in Psychology

Price: $54.50
Hardcover - 191 pages

Release Date: August 2002

ISBN10: 0-7914-5451-7
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5451-0

Price: $26.95
Paperback - 191 pages

Release Date: August 2002

ISBN10: 0-7914-5452-5
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5452-7

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

A fundamentally new examination of the controversies raging around psychoanalysis.

Radical and uncompromising, The Last Resistance is a penetrating rediscovery of the essential nature of psychoanalysis. Looking behind the masks of reason adopted by Freud’s chief critics, Bowman shows how those who claim most insistently to speak for science and who claim to know what science should be, are actually the most dogmatic and the most fearful of extending science to apply to their own minds. Their arguments can be seen as irrational defenses against genuine psychological analysis and are similar to those of the hermeneutic critics who take psychoanalysis out of science.

“I like the author’s impressive conceptual mastery of the recent criticisms of psychoanalysis and the philosophical power and nuance of his response to those criticisms. The book contains the most intelligent philosophical discussion of the writings on psychoanalysis by Popper, Grünbaum, Webster, Sulloway, and Masson. Bowman also offers a brilliant analysis of Freud’s supposed hermeneutic friends, Ricoeur and Lacan. Almost as a bonus, he gives an insightful treatment of Nietzsche’s ideal of intention (as it relates to psychoanalysis). The book packs a terrific intellectual punch.” - Paul Robinson, Stanford University

“In a sort of tour de force, essay-like, accessible style, Bowman presents his views on the recent and ongoing debate on the ‘scientific status’ of psychoanalysis. He competently and persuasively takes on the critics of Freud-be they of the positivist camp, Popper, Grünbaum, Webster, or of the more challenging authors, Lacan or Ricoeur-unearthing some of the underlying motives at work in ‘downgrading’ psychoanalysis to a ‘pseudo-science’ (or simply hermeneutics). Flowing from his central and very cogent counter-arguments against Freud’s detractors, Bowman moves on to an impassioned plea for ‘mental health’ as being the task of enhancing a genuine sense of autonomous selfhood, which is being undermined by the anti-Freudians.” - Leo Goldberger, coeditor of Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson

Marcus Bowman is a practicing psychotherapist living in Cork, Ireland.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. INTRODUCTION: DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF SCIENCE

Science and the Corrosion of Tradition
Science and the Self
The Metaphors of Science
Science and Consensus
The Distortion of Defense

2. PLACING PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A SCIENCE

The Cartesian Separation of Mind from Science
Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics
Freud's Own Remarks on the Classification of Psychoanalysis

3. NIETZSCHE AND THE CRITIQUE OF INTENTION

The Challenge to Dualism from Pragmatism
Nietzsche's Critique of Intention
Applications to Psychopathology

4. ISSUES FROM STUDIES ON HYSTERIA

Individuation and Neurosis
Breuer's Case of Anna O.
The Case of Elisabeth von R.
Catharsis and Psychoanalysis

5. DEFENSE AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY

Defense and the Conflict between Hunger and Overabundance
Exception and Rule in Freudian Metapsychology
General Summary and Conclusion

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Related Subjects

Philosophy of Science
Psychoanalysis
Psychotherapy

40831/40832(JFB/MS/FK)

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