Rob Weatherill is the author of two books on the Death Drive. His website is
www.criticalpsychoanalysis.com.

Divine violence

If the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ has been spread, like an infection belonging and intrinsic to Modernity, to all values; if all values are now questionable, relative, contingent and unreliable; if any ideological power is fatally undermined by its secret obscene supplement, then the West has become openly and fatally violent to itself, through its devastating self-deconstruction.

Pink kindness

The authors favour open kindness, freely given, which includes a rough erotic generosity over and against free-market individualism that creates hate and division and debases affection. The kindness they hope for is haunted by its opposite: kindness as veiled egoism; as disguised sexual seduction; as a cover for aggression, or all three together.

From subjectivity to neuronal connectivity

Neuroscience is part and parcel of the post-human world that Greenfield is describing without herself using this term. In fact, neuroscience is at the heart of just this deconstruction, or the merging of the brain-mind (the supercomputer), with integrated technologies devoid of transcendence, devoid of mystery.

Confined woman

The character of Roseanne is based tangentially on one of Barry’s great aunts, who similarly disappeared into an institution, having somehow transgressed the rigid codes of Catholic Ireland.

Crazy women?

A second line of argument implied in this work is the shift away from the notion of human responsibility. With the rise of secularism that parallels the rise of the mind doctors, bad or criminal behaviour is increasingly ‘explained’ in diagnostic, morally neutral terms. Covertly, science is made to do the work of social control and perfectibility.

Reasoning out suicidal mass murder

Martin Amis is one of an increasing number of intelligent independent minds who identify the paralysing malaise at the heart of Western liberalism brought sharply into focus by the paradigm shift created by the Islamist attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. In his introduction to the current work Amis says that if this had to happen - the wake-up calls to the West - ‘then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime’.

The Pathology of Democracy: A Letter to Bernard Accoyer and to Enlightened Opinion

The pathology in question, it seems, is the desire of the state to regulate psychotherapy - to intervene in that intimate relationship between therapist and what is called, for want of a better word, ‘client’. Here is Miller’s reply on behalf of all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in France.

The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred

Ferguson gives much analytical weight to the concept of ‘hatred’, yet never really tells us what it is. Instead, he relies on the vague idea that hatred is one of humanity`s innate instincts.

Going Sane

Phillips avoids discussing florid insanity as such, rather like Foucault said psychiatry would always be bound to do. Unkindly, one suspects that real madness would freak Phillips, with his measured tones and carefully constructed paradoxes and reversals.