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 rereading 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. (Kirkus Reviews)
Lying on the couch, the patient must tell all. And yet, as the
psychoanalyst well knows, the patient is endlessly
unable--unwilling--to speak the truth. This perversity at the heart
of psychoanalysis, a fine focus on intimate truths even as the
lines between truth and lies are being redrawn, is also at the
center of this book of essays by the renowned historian of
psychoanalysis John Forrester. Continuing the work begun in
"Dispatches from the Freud Wars," "Truth Games" offers a rich
philosophical and historical perspective on the mechanics, moral
dilemmas, and rippling implications of psychoanalysis.
Lacan observed that the psychoanalyst's patient is, even when
lying, operating in the dimension of truth. Beginning with Lacan's
reading of Freud's case history of the Rat Man, Forrester pursues
the logic and consequences of this assertion through Freud's
relationship with Lacan into the general realm of psychoanalysis
and out into the larger questions of anthropology, economics, and
metaphysics that underpin the practice. His search takes him into
the parallels between money and speech through an exploration of
the metaphors of circulation, exchange, indebtedness, and trust
that so easily glide from one domain to the other.
Original, witty, incisive, these essays provide a new
understanding of the uses and abuses and the ultimate significance
of truth telling and lying, trust and confidence as they operate in
psychoanalysis--and in the intimate world of the self and society
that it seeks to know.
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