Cultural Collapse - Softcover

Weatherill, Rob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853433209 ISBN 13: 9781853433207

Publisher: Free Association Books, 1994

Synopsis

What we have lost, writes Rob Weatherill in this wide-ranging meditation on contemporary culture, 'is our sense of, and a necessary respect for, the unconscious, for otherness, for mystery, for death'. We are preoccupied with survival and gratification at the expense of human suffering and concern. This is the denial of the psyche: a levelling-out of meanings and values.
The central paradox explored in Cultural Collapse is that while we enjoy greater freedom and abundance than ever before, at least in the rich parts of the world, we can't help noticing a corresponding inner weakness and loss of control. We are also alarmed by the prevalence of sex abuse, rape, hard porn, and violence. There is nothing new in these concerns; they have been voiced throughout the modern period. But psychoanalysis can and must make some comment on this severance of meanings, and this Weatherill sets out to do.
Cultural Collapse is not an academic study of psychoanalytic thought about culture. It proceeds from direct experience of a schizoid culture. The analytic space, from which Weatherill writes, gives people the freedom to be listened to properly, and because of this it has learnt something about the human condition and contemporary culture. Weatherill looks with an analytically informed eye at the loss of a religious dimension and the rise of new forms of utopianism; racism; addiction; the crisis in parenting and education; feminism and the collapse of male narcissism; and the loss of private space under capitalism.
At a time when the relations between morality, the social fabric and the inner world are causing distress throughout the world, Rob Weatherill provides a searching study of the growing impoverishment of life in Western society.

About this title

From the Author

Psychoanalysis and postmodernity.
The concern of this book is the levelling out of meanings and values in contemporary culture. We seem preoccupied with survival at the expense of human suffering. The central paradox running through this work is that increasing riches and abundance creates inner weakness, impoverishment and loss of control. Our internal reserves are being depleted at the same rate as external ones. Alarm is expressed about relationship breakdown, sex abuse, hard porn, addiction and violence. There is

nothing new in that, except that this work attempts to create a psychoanalytic commentary on these critical issues. The loss of a religious dimension and the rise of the new therapies, the crisis in parenting and education, feminism and the collapse of male narcissism, the loss of privacy under capitalism are all explored in the context of the breaking of social bonds which is loosening the social fabric worldwide and creating dislocation and fragmentation. Psychoanalysis, outside the clinic, has much to contribute here, turning, as it does, around the themes of transgression, repression and liberation and so on.

Rob Weatherill lives and works in Dublin. He was been a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice since 1978 and more recently a supervisiory analyst. He teaches psychoanalysis on a number of graduate and post-graduate courses in Dublin. He has written widely. He is also the author, The Sovereignty of Death (1998), the editor of The Death Drive (1999), he is at present editing a collection of articles on affects: On Being Moved: Affects, Feelings and Emotions in Psychoanalysis

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Association Books
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853433209
• ISBN 13: 9781853433207
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250