دانلود کتاب روانکاوی و سیاست خانواده: بحران شروع

Tell me how you think about the family, and I will tell you about your politics. The family has been at the forefront of the Western tradition of social thought; limning the left and the right, liberals and conservatives, the fight against the bourgeois family and the struggle for new family forms, renewed forms of attachment, and postpatriarchal maps of belonging. Familism, or the centrality of the family form has a long history in social thought. Using it as a Foucauldian dispositif or apparatus, let’s examine some of the outlines of this construct—insights that can be considered precursors to psychoanalysis. The family was a kind of microcosm of the state in the Socratic/Platonic tradition. Aristotle attempted to outline a hierarchical model of natural dominance and power based on classical family roles. In the first century CE, Arius Didymus argued that the family is a prototype of the πολιτεία (politeia or association, constitution): Connected with the house is a pattern of monarchy, of aristocracy and of democracy. The relationship of parents to children is monarchic, of husbands to wives aristocratic, of children to one another democratic. Thomas Aquinas, who shaped Christian philosophy and ethics since the thirteenth century, updated Aristotle’s ζῷον πoλιτικόν (zoon politikon or political animal), to declare: Homo est animal magis familial quam politicum Man is an animal that is more familial than political. By the nineteenth century and the birth of the bourgeois family, Marx and notably Engels, concerned themselves with the predicament of the family. This concern with the family forms an early bridge between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is often understood as centering the experience of the family and this is of course accurate, but the way the family takes on significance for Freud is often surprising. Given the medical practice of his times and his own discoveries, Freud usually saw his adult patients alone, on the psychoanalytic couch. And yet there are some notable exceptions: the consultation with a musicologist and student of psychoanalysis, the father of Little Hans, a five-year-old who developed a phobia of horses. He also wrote a famous letter to an American mother concerned about her son’s homosexuality, which he described as “a variation of the sexual function” that Freud asserted was “produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.” Intriguingly, he was also consulted by the famous Viennese composer Gustav Mahler for his anguish over his lack of progress on his Fifth Symphony in the midst of a marital crisis with his wife, Alma.