Bøger af Sonu Shamdasani

We may ask why Jung biographies are so filled with shortcomings? How did Jung become a fiction? This book addresses these issues. It demonstrates the pitfalls and fallacies of such works, and sets out how his life and work should be approached on a historical basis, drawing on decades of archival investigation and new documentation.

Claims that Jung was a would-be prophet around whom followers gathered in a hero cult have been revived in more extreme terminology, generating a great deal of attendant publicity, by Richard Noll. In this book, the author looks into the documentary evidence for Noll's claims.

How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud 'triumph' to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history. This legend-making was not an incidental addition to psychoanalytic theory but formed its core. Letting the primary material speak for itself, this history demonstrates the extraordinary apparatus by which this would-be science of psychoanalysis installed itself in contemporary societies. Beyond psychoanalysis, it opens up the history of the constitution of the modern psychological sciences and psychotherapies, how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves and how these became solidified into indisputable 'facts'.