Social amnesia a critique of contemporary psychology

Social amnesia: A critique of contemporary psychology from Adler to Laing. Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as societys repression of remembrance - societys own past. In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. A critique of counselling and psychotherapy is followed by the suggestion. Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. traditional Marxism lacked a psychological dimension to explain the dominance of the capitalist. ''what Marx said of Bentham, that he was a genius of bourgeois stupidity, could also be said of Maslow, except that Maslow was no genius.'' One has the sense that it was crafted by a mind on fire. Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as societys repression of remembrance - societys own past. Social Amnesia: a Critique of Contemporary. It has a great many very wonderful lines, e.g. His is a liberationist Freud, and his account of American conformists (largely the humanistic psychologists) is very telling in regard to their internal contradictions and their loss of the deeply critical, restless dimension which makes Freud's thinking so alive.This book is extremely crisply written. Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology (Beacon Press, 1975 Transaction, 1997)(25 at amazon) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the. When Russell Jacoby wrote a new introduction in 1997 to his classic work from 1975, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology, and. Jacoby's work shows the way conformism creeps not only into American pop psychology, but also into American psychoanalysis. This book is a masterpiece in its appreciation of a strand of Freud's writing which is truly radical, and which is ignored both by Freud's critics and by his American clinical exponents. Jacoby presents a critique of responses to Freudian psychoanalytic theory that depend on incomplete/revisionist readings of Freud and dull the political.

Social amnesia a critique of contemporary psychology