Lyat Friedman

This book takes an innovative approach to psychoanalysis. Instead of following well known and predictable Oedipal themes, it offers to investigate the practice used by psychoanalysts in therapy. According to Lyat Friedman, what one learns from a close reading of Freud’s texts is that Oedipal interpretations serve as a mere construct for treatment. Their importance is derived from the responses triggered in treatment. That is, Oedipal explanations are designed to produce a resisting effect in the patient, allowing the therapist the know-how of one’s defense mechanisms. It is by the use of resistance to Oedipal rationalizations that Freud identifies the means by which the psychic apparatus confines the unconscious. By preventing the patient from utilizing her or his defenses, Friedman argues, the unconscious is compelled to rearrange its methods, practices and chains of signifiers, signifieds and psychic associations. In order to examine reactions to the practice of psychoanalysis and its method of producing transformations in the unconscious, Friedman discusses feminists’ responses to Freud’s Oedipal teachings. An analysis of the performative employment practiced by Simone de Beauvoir, Carol Gilligan, Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler and Jessica Benjamin is proposed. This book, written from a phenomenological, postmodern and feminist tradition, presents an original reading of Freud’s teachings. An analysis of psychoanalysis and reactions to its methods leads to the radical understanding that Oedipal interpretations do not reflect anything about the psyche.