Product Description: In this fascinating excursion into medical and psychoanalytic history, Paul E. Stepansky charts the rise and fall of the "surgical metaphor" - Freud's view of psychoanalysis as analogous to a surgical procedure. Approaching Freud's understanding of surgery and surgeons historically and biographically, Stepansky draws the reader into the world of late nineteenth-century "heroic surgery," a world into which Sigmund Freud himself was drawn...read more

Examines the psychoanalytic view of the self and discusses the impact of analysis on a patient's psychological life

Product Description: A brilliant and influential figure among contemporary psychoanalysis, Margaret Mahler revolutionized our understanding of the first years of life.  In her classic study, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, Mahler, drawing on several decades of research, expounded the separation-individuation process through which the child separates from its mother and comes to experience a sense of individuality and autonomy...read more

Product Description: One of the classic self psychology compilations, Kohut's Legacy, first published in 1984, contains influential papers that broadened the purview of self psychology in the aftermath of Kohut's death.  Contributions include three essays by Michael Basch on the selfobject concept, "Notes Toward a Psychology of the Feminine Self" by Joan Lang, and "Shame and the Psychology of the Self" by Andrew Morrison...read more

Volume 2 of the Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals series bears out the promise of the acclaimed premier volume, a volume whose essays "breathe new life into the study of Freud," embodying research that "appears to be impeccable in every case" (International Review of Psychoanalysis).  It begins with Peter Homan's detailed reeexamination of the period 1906-1914 in Freud's life.  Looking to Freud's relationahips with Jung as the central event of the period, he finds in Freud's idealization and subsequent de-idealization of Jung a psychological motif that gains recurrent expression in Freud's later writings and personal relationships.  Richard Geha offers a provocative protrait of Freud as a "fictionalist."  Anchoring his exegesis in Freud's famous case of the Wolf Man, he argues that the yield of Freud's clinical inquiries, epistemologically, is a species of the fictionalism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hans Vaihinger.  But, pursuing the argument, Geha goes on to advance little-noted biographical evidence that Freud understood himself to be an artist whose clinical productions were ultimately artistic.  Finally, Patricia Herzog organizes and interprets Freud's seemingly conflicting remarks about philosophy and philosophers en route to the claim that the long-held belief that Freud was an "anti-philosopher" is a myth.  In fact, she claims, "Freud was in no doubt as to the philosophical nature of his goal."  In an introductory essay titled "Pathways to Freud's Identity," editor Paul E. Stepansky brings together the essays of Homans, Geha, and Herzog as complementary inquiries into Freud's putative self-understanding and, to that extent, as reconstructive, historical continuations of the self-analysis methodically begun by Freud in the late 1890s.  "Each contributor," writes Stepansky, "in his or her own way, seeks to understand Freud better in the spirit in which Freud might have better understood himself.  Together, the contributors offer vistas to an enlarged self-analytic sensibility."