Robert M. Young Online Writings
Whatever Happened to Human Nature?
Most of the reasons for believing in a clear and coherent idea of human nature are in doubt and under fire. In this collection I attempt to bring together urgent current issues in a number of fields which bear on the understanding of human nature: psychoanalysis, Darwinism, ideology and postmodernism. I was invited to the University of Manitoba as a 'Distinguished Visitor' to give public lectures across the whole range of my scholarship and clinical work. I have brought these wide-ranging talks together with others originally presented as seminar papers in specialist academic settings. The result is a combination of general and scholarly explorations in a number of disciplines which are relevant to how we think about human nature in a time of deep uncertainty: psychoanalysis, history of ideas, sociology of knowledge, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy of science and cultural studies. My approach is to combat disappointment, despair and pessimism with stoical reasons for hope drawn from the deepest levels of scientific thinking and the understanding of unconscious processes in object relations terms.
You can order this book from Process Press
Contents.
1. Whatever Happened to Human Nature?
2. Postmodernism and the Subject: Pessimism of the Will
3. Second Nature: The Historicity of the Unconscious
5. New Ideas about Oedipus Complex
6. The Cussedness of Psychoanalysis