The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism
, by Stonebridge,LyndseyNote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9780415921619 | 0415921619
- Cover: Nonspecific Binding
- Copyright: 10/20/1998
Freud's account of the sublimated drives at work beneath the surfaces of "advanced" societies, alongside the modernist fictions of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Woolf and others, both reflected and inaugurated a strain of modernism preoccupied with the darkest elements of the human psyche. InThe Destructive ElementLyndsey Stonebridge examines the career and legacy of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as a lens through which to examine the 20th century's fascination with death drives, the sublimation of civilization's "discontents" and the socialization of children--fascinations that would surface throughout the cultural production of the West. At once cultural history and psychoanalytic theory, and a bold reformulation of the legacies of modernism,The Destructive Elementis an essential contribution to our understanding of the Western tradition.