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The Topological Transformation of Freud's Theory

Jean-Gerard Bursztein author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:3rd Dec '15

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The Topological Transformation of Freud's Theory cover

In this book Jean-Gerard Bursztein presents his reading of psychoanalysis in the spirit of its founder Sigmund Freud, and explores the transformations of Freud's work by his followers. The author notes that some of these followers trimmed it down even to exclude the death drive, which was one of Freud's fundamental principles. Freud's theory has also been transformed by Lacan, who, in the mid-1950s embarked on a lifelong enterprise to recast it in a fruitful debate with the sciences and the humanities. Such a transformation brought by Lacan was (somewhat paradoxically) necessary to show the importance of Freud's findings for the understanding of subjectivity.

'The unconscious, according to Freud, has a structure. One can conjecture as to the relation between this structure and the structure found in mathematics. One of the strongest hypotheses that one can make is that the two structures are homological - they say the same thing. How to give sense to this hypothesis then becomes a problem in the field of the formalisation of psychoanalysis - a field that Jean-Gerard Bursztein opens up in his work. Philosophical and scientific problems of the structure of mathematics had already been raised in the French tradition by Jean Cavailles and Albert Lautman, and subsequently by Jean Toussaint Desanti. Bursztein draws on these French programmes for the foundations of mathematics, as he formulates his constructions within this important and developing field.'- Bernard Burgoyne, author of Drawing the Soul: Schemas and Models in Psychoanalysis, and co-editor of The Klein-Lacan Dialogues

ISBN: 9781782202578

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

138 pages