Travels with the Self

Interpreting Psychology as Cultural History

Philip Cushman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429886447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Travels with the Self uses a hermeneutic perspective to critique psychology and demonstrate why the concept of the self and the modality of cultural historyare so vitally important to the profession of psychology. Each chapter focuses on a theory, concept, sociopolitical or professional issue, philosophical problem, or professional activity that has rarely been critiqued from a historical, sociopolitical vantage point.

Philip Cushman explores psychology's involvement in consumerism, racism, shallow understandings of being human, military torture, political resistance, and digital living. In each case, theories and practices are treated as historical artifacts, rather than expressions of a putatively progressive, modern-era science that is uncovering the one, universal truth about human being. In this way, psychological theories and practices, especially pertaining to the concept of the self, are shown to be reflections of the larger moral understandings and political arrangements of their time and place, with implications for how we understand the self in theory and clinical practice.

Drawing on the philosophies of critical theory and hermeneutics, Cushman insists on understanding the self, one of the most studied and cherished of psychological concepts, and its ills, practitioners, and healing technologies, as historical/cultural artifacts — surprising, almost sacrilegious, concepts. To this end, each chapter begins with a historical introduction that locates it in the historical time and moral/political space of the nation's, the profession's, and the author's personal context.

Travels with the Self brings together highly unusual and controversial writings on contemporary psychology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists of all stripes, as well as scholars of philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 (2017) Introduction: strange and unexpected travels with the self
• 2 (1990) Why the self is empty: toward a historically situated psychology
• 3 (1995) What we hold in our hand
• 4 (2000) White guilt, political activity, and the analyst
• 5 (2000) Will managed care change our way of being?
• 6 (2003) Welcome to the 21st century, where character was erased: the William James lecture in psychotherapy and ethics
• 7 (2005) Between arrogance and a dead-end: psychoanalysis and the Heidegger-Foucault dilemma
• 8 (2005) The case of the hidden subway station and other Gadamerian mysteries
• 9 (2013) Flattened selves, shallow solutions: a commentary on “The McDonaldization of Psychotherapy”
• 10 (2013) Because the rock will not read the article: a discussion of Jeremy D. Safran’s critique of Irwin Z. Hoffman’s “Doublethinking our way to scientific legitimacy”
• 11 (2013) Your cheatin’ heart: from scientism to medicalization to an unethical psychotherapy
• 12 (2015) Horror, escape, and the struggle with Jewish identity: a review of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich
• 13 (2015) Relational psychoanalysis as political resistance
• 14 (2015) The Golem must live, the Golem must die
• 15 (2016) The earthquake that is the Hoffman Report on torture: toward a re-moralization of psychology
• 16 (2017) Living in the politics of uncertainty: cultural history as generative hermeneutics
• References
• Index