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Writing
Click on the appropriate link to view that section of abstracts.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis as Spirituality:
This paper begins with a critique of Charles Taylor's denial that psychoanalysis is a moral and spiritual source for modernity. In order to vindicate it as such a source, this paper develops the connections between emotion and meaning defended by recent cognitive understandings of emotion gaining acceptance in American philosophy. Using these understandings, it argues that the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis is the substitution of love for resentment by a disciplined pursuit of self-knowledge that enriches one's emotional world, one's transference, by opening it to the world's otherness. This conception of psychoanalysis makes it a moral and spiritual source for modernity, much as Stoicism and the aphorisms of Heraclitus offered a moral and spiritual source to antiquity. These comparisons are examined in detail, and from them are drawn conclusions about the prospect of a similar modern spirituality that foregoes transcendence in favor of immanence, recognizing the prerequisite of meaning: death.
Psychoanalysis as Spirituality:
This is a short review article of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, focusing on his denial that psychoanalysis is a moral and spiritual source for modernity. Rather than ignoring human freedom and dignity, as Taylor claims, psychoanalysis works to augment both in those who practice it. It is also the first section of the long paper with the same name, but appeared first on The Immanent Frame.
Oedipus Rex Revisited:
A comparison of recent psychoanalytic and philological interpretations of Sophocles' play, arguing that each field helps supplement the shortcomings of the other. A synthetic interpretation is offered according to which the tragedy depicts not so much "oedipal" problems as "pre-oedipal" trauma. Oedipus re-enacts this trauma-of betrayal, abandonment, and expulsion-and Sophocles thereby issues prophetic warnings not only to the Athenians of the Greek enlightenment, but also to psychoanalysis.("Oedipus Rex Revisited," in Modern Psychoanalysis v.21, n.2 (Summer, 2007), 229-50.)
Happiness and Desire in Aquinas and Lacan:
A defense of Aquinas's account of happiness, as the satisfaction of natural desire, against a critique, modeled upon the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, that the satisfaction of desire, and thereby happiness, is impossible.
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