Our Last Great Illusion: A Radical Psychoanalytic Critique of Therapy Culture

· Societas Book 35 · Andrews UK Limited
Ebook
156
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About this ebook

Therapy may be mad,' declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but should be also taken to signify the universal logic of the post-modern therapeutic culture of well-being, happiness and enjoyment. More and more people want to believe in therapy who have lost belief in anything else. Counselling and therapy increasingly inform all human interaction. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and key theorists like Baudrillard, Levinas, Lyotard, Paz, Steiner, Reiff as well as Žižek, the fashion for a return to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. On the contrary, there is something monstrous, something excessive, that Freud termed the death drive, at the heart of the Real upon which ordinary reality, so to speak, rests. Enlightenment thought, in which we in the West in particular are caught, is entirely incapable of going beyond the ideal humanist version of man - our last great illusion.

About the author

Rob Weatherill has been in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for over three decades. He lectures in psychoanalysis in St. Vincent's University College Hospital and Trinity College Dublin. He is author of over thirty papers and articles on psychoanalysis and has published four books.

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