Subtitle: Contemporary States of Mind
Author: Rosalind Minsky
Subject: Cultural Studies/Psychology
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2585-3
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2586-1
Pages: 256 pp.
Description: An introduction to the major traditions of psychoanalytic theory and their application to culture.

"[This book] is intelligent, knowledgeable, creative, and remarkably accessible. It lives up to its goal, which is to speculate as to how psychoanalytic theories enable us to see cultural problems more insightfully. . ."

-Suzanne Juhasz, University of Colorado

"In Psychoanalysis and Culture Rosalind Minsky provides an engaging version of the theories of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan in making a passionate plea for their relevance to understanding the otherwise often overwhelming-seeming alienation, chaos, or complexity of thought and feeling involved in sex, gender, violence, and consumerism in Europe and America at the millennium."

-Janet Sayers, University of Kent

"Rosalind Minsky has produced a comprehensive guide to some of the major traditions of psychoanalytic theory, and impressively develops an instructive and engaging dialogue between psychoanalysis and social cultural critique."

-Anthony Elliott, University of Melbourne

Written in a readable, accessible style, with plenty of up-to-date examples Psychoanalysis and Culture provides a brilliant introduction to key issues in the area of application of psychoanalytic theories to culture. Rosalind Minsky argues that we cannot grasp the complexity of contemporary global issues without understanding some of the unconscious processes which underlie them. After introducing some major modern and postmodern psychoanalytic approaches, Minsky offers a broad-ranging critique of Lacan's theory of culture and the unconscious. She explores a range of crucial and topical questions: how should we explain women's historical subordination and what is now often seen as a crisis in male identity? What constitutes 'masculinity' apart from power and control? How important is the father, actually and symbolically in children's development in the context of lone-parent families? Why is contemporary culture still often so violent and destructive? Why is consumer culture so attractive to so many and why is it so difficult to put limits on economic growth in the interests of preventing environmental disaster? Minsky explicates and synthesizes complex and diverse theories of psychoanalysis so that a layperson can understand and utilize them in an analytic way to examine some of the contemporary cultural crises that affect us all.

Rosalind Minsky is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arts and Letters, Anglia Polytechnic University.