Psychoanalysis And The Humanities

First published in 1996

Written by distinguished artists and scholars with psychoanalytic training, this seminal collection of essays spans the humanities—painting, sculpture, literature, history, anthropology, and philosophy—illustrating how psychoanalytic thinking can powerfully enhance these disciplines.

The essayists address a question first posed by Freud in his 1919 article, Should Psychoanalysis Be Taught at the University? With a resounding Yes, they underline the intellectual enrichment to be gained from the application of the psychoanalytic method to humanistic disciplines and, conversely, the need for contemporary psychoanalysts to acquire the kind of historical and classical education taken for granted by their counterparts earlier in this century.