Description:
Stewart-Steinberg investigates the legacy of Anna Freud at the intersection between psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking and theorizing and its existence as a political entity.
Brief description: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at Brown University.
Review Quotes:
Anna Freud--criticized by Lacanians and Kleinians for mitigating the importance of the unconscious in human life--gets her due in this brilliant work.... For Stewart-Steinberg, her central insight is 'altruistic surrender, ' in which ambition is experienced magnanimously rather than aggressively, displaced onto an other who stands as a proxy for the self. By making the other a representative of the self, psychoanalysis informs a democratic politics. A significant work of scholarship, this book is required reading for anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis and its relationship to theories of gender and politics. Summing Up: Essential.
-- "Choice"