Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology by Russell Jacoby (English

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Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. It is simultaneously a critique of present practices and theories in psychology. Jacoby's new self-evaluation has the same sharp edge as the book itself, offering special insights into the evolution of psychological theory during the past two decades.In his probing, self-critical new introduction, Jacoby maintains that any serious appraisal of psychology or sociology, or any discipline, must seek to separate the political from the theoretical. He discusses how in the years since Social Amnesia was first published society has oscillated from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, which feed off each other and constitute two forms of social amnesia: a forgetting of the past and a pseudo-historical consciousness. Social Amnesia contains a forceful argument for "thinking against the grain - an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever." It is an important work for sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.

Author Biography

Russell Jacoby is adjunct professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Dogmatic Wisdom, The Last Intellectuals, and The Repression of Psychoanalysis, and co-editor, with Naomi Glauberman, of The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions.

Table of Contents

The Nation We Are; I: The Diversity of America; II: T wo Interpretations of American History; III: Social Science Discovers Regionalism; IV: Regionalism in the Arts; V: Federation or Disunion : The Political Economy of Regionalism; Immovable Bodies and Irresistible Forces; VI: Still Rebels , S till Yankees; VII: New York and the Hinterland; VIII: The Two Old Wests; IX: The Great Plains; X: American Heroes; XI: Regionalism and Nationalism in American Literature; XII: Regionalism and Education 1; Southern Essays; XIII: The Dilemma of the Southern Liberals 1; XIV: Howard Odum and the Sociological Proteus; XV: Expedients vs . Principles –C ross -Purposes in the South; XVI: The Southern Poet and His Tradition 1; The World State; XVII: The Shape of Things and Men : H. G. W ells and Æ on the World State

Review

-Penetrating, provocative and just possibly a landmark argument-starter.- --Publishers Weekly -I know of no other analysis which succeeds as well in discussing the internal links between psychology and society in the contemporary period.- --Herbert Marcuse -Jacoby is appropriately critical of traditional Marxism, as the Frankfurt school has been, and he has been particularly careful to keep his concept of consciousness dialectical. Crucial to his book, and in many ways its best part, is his assessment of the role of therapy in the psychoanalytic movement.- --The New York Review of Books"Penetrating, provocative and just possibly a landmark argument-starter." --Publishers Weekly "I know of no other analysis which succeeds as well in discussing the internal links between psychology and society in the contemporary period." --Herbert Marcuse "Jacoby is appropriately critical of traditional Marxism, as the Frankfurt school has been, and he has been particularly careful to keep his concept of consciousness dialectical. Crucial to his book, and in many ways its best part, is his assessment of the role of therapy in the psychoanalytic movement." --The New York Review of Books"Penetrating, provocative and just possibly a landmark argument-starter." --Publishers "Weekly" "I know of no other analysis which succeeds as well in discussing the internal links between psychology and society in the contemporary period." --Herbert Marcuse "Jacoby is appropriately critical of traditional Marxism, as the Frankfurt school has been, and he has been particularly careful to keep his concept of consciousness dialectical. Crucial to his book, and in many ways its best part, is his assessment of the role of therapy in the psychoanalytic movement." --"The New York Review of Books"

Kirkus US Review

Reviewing post-Freudian thought from the standpoint of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, Jacoby attacks the "pop existentialism and mysticism" of modern psychology. All of it is tainted by a hatred of theory, expressed in the slogans "end of ideology," "future shock" and "counterculture." This goes for David Cooper and R.D. Laing as well, "whose work dribbles into blind therapy and positivism." The book is focused not around Laing, but around more Freudian psychologists. Adler's nominally socialist banalities are rebutted with Freud's epithets; Jacoby marks Adler as the beginning of the Freudian epigones' apologies for an era of "synchronized capitalism." For the American motivational engineers like Gordon Allport and Abraham Maslow, Jacoby has boundless disgust: Maslow is "a genius of bourgeois stupidity - except that Maslow is no genius." The book rejects not only capitalism but the idea of progress itself, reviving Marcuse's attack on Fromm for the latter's belief that it is possible to love. Jacoby's treatment of H.S. Sullivan, Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno is a rambling, wholly unsatisfying account of human subjectivity and Marx' view of private property. "Today human relations are irregulars and seconds at the closing days of the warehouse sale of life." For all his scorn of anti-theoretical theorists, Jacoby hasn't exactly brought great conceptual weight to bear on the problems of psychology: in the last resort, he doesn't seem to believe in the science of psychology at all, and we are left with "the potency of bourgeois society" from which "there is no escape, not even for those who resist." (Kirkus Reviews)

Review Text

"Penetrating, provocative and just possibly a landmark argument-starter." --Publishers Weekly "I know of no other analysis which succeeds as well in discussing the internal links between psychology and society in the contemporary period." --Herbert Marcuse "Jacoby is appropriately critical of traditional Marxism, as the Frankfurt school has been, and he has been particularly careful to keep his concept of consciousness dialectical. Crucial to his book, and in many ways its best part, is his assessment of the role of therapy in the psychoanalytic movement." -- The New York Review of Books

Details ISBN156000892X Author Russell Jacoby Year 1996 ISBN-10 156000892X ISBN-13 9781560008927 Format Paperback Publication Date 1996-06-30 Subtitle A Critique of Contemporary Psychology DEWEY 150.904 Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc Pages 224 Short Title Social Amnesia Language English Media Book DOI 10.1604/9781560008927 UK Release Date 1996-06-30 AU Release Date 1996-06-30 NZ Release Date 1996-06-30 Alternative 9781138532663 Audience Undergraduate Imprint Routledge Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States US Release Date 1996-06-30 We've got this

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