Abstract

Freud, the Contemporary Super ego and the West traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the twenty first century. Giosue Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as the return of the religious, presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud. Ghisalberti argues that the West has regressed to an infantile and primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, the obsessional neuroses. The book reexamines Freuds early psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and returns to his grounding ideals and a comprehensive defense of the coming to be human in modernity. Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego and the West will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, political theory and the humanities.