Introduction

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has never had more to say about contemporary culture than it has now. On the whole, however, it is not psychoanalysts who are saying it. The tradition of Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents has been taken up more by literary and cultural critics, by feminists and political theorists, than it has by psychoanalysts or psychologists. That tradition, of sweeping, poetic cultural criticism and analysis, thrives mainly on the fringes of psychoanalytic theory — amongst those who are not primarily clinicians, but who are concerned with making sense of the modern world and who feel the need for a compelling theory of subjectivity to help them on their way.