Two long, very intricate essays: one on the implications of both the inescapability of lying in life and its centrality in psychoanalysis; the other on the nature of money--or, better, of obligation and indebtedness--particularly as seen in Freud's Rat Man case study. Forrester, a science historian (Cambridge Univ.; Dispatches from the Freud Wars, p. 192), is often masterful in the longer and more important piece, his philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration of lying, though at times he writes in a kind of hypercompressed intellectual shorthand. He analyzes first both those philosophers (St. Augustine and Kant, among others) who insist on absolute truthfulness and those (e.g., Nietzsche) who question the equation of the truthful with the moral. Forrester then proceeds to look at the psychoanalytic enterprise, where mental processes, particularly conflicts, are valued over veracity, so that ``psychoanalysis aims to be the science of lying inasmuch as it is the only science that does not find the prospect that the object of its inquiry may intentionally deceive the scientific investigator subversive of its pretensions to truth.'' The second piece is a close but abstruse look at Jacques Lacan's re-reading of the Rat Man case in light of the belief that ``debt . . . becomes something magnificent, the emblem of individual destiny, and the signifier of the social order itself.''Along his somewhat meandering, associative path, Forrester invokes Marcel Mauss's anthropological theory of gifts, Marx on the practical and political role of money in modern society, 19th-century theories of thermodynamics, Karl Polyani's political philosophy, and Keynes's economic theory. Forrester is scintillating for those who can follow him through what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (Terrors and Experts, 1996), in his foreword, calls ``two linked intellectual novellas, a Bildungsroman of ideas.'' But very few readers not well-versed in philosophy, Freud, and Lacan will be able to do so. --
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--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
[Forrester] combines the stance of the Lacanian professional with that of the professional historian and leavens them both with the relaxed prose of the English man of letters...
Truth Games is the odd but largely happy result of 20 years' research designed to produce an inquiry into two questions: whether psychoanalysis can really uncover a truth about the self; and whether one can speak with any imagination about the currency that secures the bond between analyst and patient, the bond--let us be frank about it, Forrester says--of money.
--Perry Meisel (
New York Times Book Review )
[This book along with
Dispatches from the Freud Wars ]…present[s] a series of eight wide-ranging but interconnected essays. Taken as an ensemble, they deal with the history of psychoanalysis, redefinitions of psychoanalysis and what it means to be a Freudian, psychoanalytic readings of contemporary cultural issues, discussions of the scientific status of psychoanalysis and an impassioned defence of psychoanalysis…The essays are elegantly written, and open up a number of new perspectives on these issues, as well as putting forward new formulations of more familiar ones…Anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis and the cultural location of psychoanalysis today is likely to find these essays stimulating, engaging and inviting of dialogue.
--Sonu Shamdasani (
Medical History )
Forrester is a Cambridge historian of science who specialises in the post-Freudian phenomenon of professional psychoanalysis...From [his] sub-title, 'Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis' you might guess that he brings a sceptical mind to the phenomenon. The basis of Freud's method was to put the 'patient' on a couch and get that individual talking so freely that his or her subconscious rose to the surface. The subconscious was the residence of true personality, of truth itself. But what if the person on the couch starts telling lies?...Forrester's exploration of this delicate game is not for beginners, but that is not to say that it is unduly abstruse. Just his brief section on our facility for fibbing is enlightening ('I was brought up in a clergyman's household', he quotes Sybil Throndike,' so I am a first-class liar'). Wide-ranging in reference, and elegantly turned, his book refrains from outright polemic.
--Nigel Spivey (
Business Weekly )
The importance of lying and the need for us all to lie lies, so to speak, at the very heart of psychoanalysis. John Forrester addresses this issue in
Truth Games, which is as much about philosophy and sociology as it is about psychiatry. (
New Scientist )
The first section of this elegant book examines the relation of truth-telling to lying, moving from Augustine to Proust, from Nietzsche to Ibsen, from the placebo effect in medicine to theories of truth in formal logic...The second part of the book contains a detailed study of Freud's case history of the Ratman, and Lacan's commentary on that case, focusing on the theme of debt...John Forrester's subtle and thought-provoking book opens up the space for thinking about [many] questions
--Darian Leader (
The Guardian [UK] )
Nuanced in its handling of the ambiguities and tensions in Freud's work...
Truth Games beings with an erudite and wide-ranging essay on the social and moral place of lying in Western philosophy...[Forrester] makes numerous insightful comments regarding the subtle lies required of behavioral research, the placebo effect and suggestion, twentieth-century scientism, the impossibility of a normative science of the subject, and the approach of some contemporary psychoanalysts to patients who consciously lie.
--George J. Makari (
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences )
Historian and philosopher of psychoanalysis John Forrester is intent upon convincing us that truth, particularly in out present 'age of scientism' is overrated as a standard for scientific inquiry, as a goal of social relations, and thus, a
fortiori, as a stick upon which to prop psychoanalysis or with which to beat it down. Such a proposition would be scandalous were Forrester not so clever, engaging and thorough in proving it...Against the implicit Western cultural bias for truth over falsehood, Forrester cunningly delights in drawing out the creative power of the lie.
--Renée Kingcaid (
Psychoanalytic Studies [UK] )
Forrester mounts an exuberant and provocative defense of lying...[This] exploration of lying and deception in disciplines ranging from anthropology and psychological experiments to medicine is stimulating and suggestive.
--Margret Schaefer, Ph.D. (
Psychoanalytic Books )
[Forrester's] scholarly approach directs attention to the subtle consensi which generate the ambitions of the psychoanalytic enterprise in its bid for accountability...This work is both historically precise and far-reaching in moral disposition, since in challenging a notional 'exchange of truth' Forrester raises larger issues than those commonly exercised in relation to analysts' discussion of codes of practice.
--Tessa Adams (
British Journal of Psychotherapy )
A linguistic and philosophical tour de force through recent (and some ancient) history, ending with an analysis of Lacan and Freud through the latter's 'Rat Man' case, this intellectually demanding work will reward readers who want to understand, for example, why penis is to phallus as gold is to money.
--E. James Lieberman, (
Library Journal )
Two long, very intricate essays: one on the implications of both the inescapability of lying in life and its centrality in psychoanalysis; the other on the nature of money--or better, of obligation and indebtedness. Forrester...is often masterful in...his philosophical and psychoanalytic exploration of lying...[He] is scintillating for those who can follow him through what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, in his foreword, calls 'two linked intellectual novellas, a Bildungsroman of ideas. (
Kirkus Reviews )
