Rethinking Capitalism: Class 4
Clinical Psychology, Psychological Science, and Neo-liberal Times
Clinical psychology first emerged as a formal subdiscipline within psychology in the aftermath of World War II. During the war, psychologists were initially hired by the military to play a role assessing recruits for psychological stability, combat readiness, and potential for officer training. They were also charged with the task ...
Alan Baas | Philosophy Talk Series | @NSSR
A reading of On the Cult of Fetish Gods
Since Marx' and Freud's influential usage of the term, we became accustomed to talk about fetishism as a topic for psychology and social theory. It is rarely remembered that the topic was originally a topic in theology and ethnology. Why has fetishism assumed such a wide meaning? Why do theorists ...
Critical Theory After the Anthropocene
McMindfulness
The marketing of well-being
“McMindfulness.” I came across this term for the first time today. I wish I had coined it. It would be nice to be able to make a claim to originality. But coming across the term is almost good enough. It provides a name for a phenomenon that I didn’t even ...
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Extreme Silencing
The Black Notebooks (Die Schwarzen Hefte), containing Martin Heidegger’s assorted thoughts from the 1930s and 40s, throw new light on the self-aggrandizement into totalitarianism of the most German of all philosophers.
The Freiburg professor of philosophy was not yet 50 years old when, in 1937 and 1938, he retraced ...
Don’t Worry… Be Happy!
The dark underside of positive psychology
Over the last decade the field of positive psychology has become a burgeoning area of research within academic psychology. Well known figures in positive psychology include Martin Seligman (developer of the well known learned helplessness model of depression and past president of the American Psychological Association), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (creator of ...
Film and Myth
Analyzing Gravity and All is Lost with some Captain Phillips
Two films frequently cited together on the best films lists for 2013 were Gravity and All is Lost. As many reviewers noted, the films featured isolated individuals up against the cold, impersonal forces of the universe -- the dark void of outer space for Sandra Bullock in Gravity and the ...
Eli Zaretsky Interviewed on Jewish Thought and Psychoanalysis
Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud?
The rise, fall, and possible resurrection of psychoanalysis in the United States
For decades psychoanalysis dominated professional approaches to mental health in the United States and had an influential impact on our culture. Starting in the late 1960s, however, psychoanalysis has become increasingly marginalized. Here, I will argue that psychoanalysis has always contained both subversive and conservative threads. As the historian Nathan ...
What’s Left After Penis Envy?
I am teaching a course called “Feminism and Literature” at the New School that explores how literature can articulate feminist claims in the public sphere. One of the problems we discussed is whether the language we are currently using, as well as the imaginary that sustains it, are actually adapted ...