Review
In his thought-provoking
Presenting the Past, Jeffrey Prager examines the phenomena of recovered memory and the influences of therapy. Interweaving his theoretical stance with a single case study, he describes his work as 'a psychoanalytic treatment to explore the complicated relation between the individual and the collective, and the ways in which the cultural interpenetrates the most individual of pursuits, memory and self-constitution'...Prager skilfully moves the reader from the therapeutic setting to the wider social context and back again, allowing us insight into [his patient's] experience from two perspectives, her relationships with family and her therapist, and the influence of the culture in which she was living. (Janet Feigenbaum
Times Literary Supplement )
It is often referred to as the Tolstoy question. Do great men help to create
zeitgeist, or are they simply its pawns?...Prager has written an engaging contribution to the vast literature on this topic which is particularly valuable because it focuses on memory. People often forget that memory, too, is part of the self and therefore one of the proper subjects for 'Tolstoy' debate. (Chris Nunn
Journal of Consciousness Studies )
Prager's
Presenting the Past is an extraordinarily ambitious project, one that is constructed and checked by the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and sociology. Confronting head-on the recent culture wars, and in particular debates about the veracity of traumatic memories,
Presenting the Past is at the same time personal and philosophical, intersubjective and cultural, psychodynamic and sociological. Prager displays a formidable command of recent research in sociology, social theory, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and a powerful vision of how such discourses can be synthesized to place the constitution of memory in relation to the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural worlds in which it occurs. To sustain the vision, while emphasizing throughout the dialectical relationship between the psyche and society, is an impressive achievement...Prager's analytical narrative is captivating throughout. This is advanced psychoanalytic social theory at its finest, capturing--through a detailed case study--the complex relation between psyche and society, memory and history, the personal and the political, intersubjectivity and culture. Prager's
Presenting the Past offers a first-rate social theory of memory. (Anthony Elliot
Psychoanalytic Studies )
Review
In this compelling book, Jeffrey Prager has created a sociology of memory, showing how memory is situated in interpersonal contexts, and draws from cultural tropes. At the same time, he challenges the social sciences to open their epistemological and methodological doors to case studies of individuals and to recognize that subjectivity is personally created rather than socially or culturally determined. Psychoanalysis, he documents, takes us well beyond the experientially and interpretively thin sociological subject. (Nancy J. Chodorow, Member and Faculty, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley )
