Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire 1st Edition

by Jill Gentile (Author)

1 customer review

ISBN-13: 978-1782202776

ISBN-10: 1782202773

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Buy new

$42.95

Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

This item ships to France. Want it Monday, July 2? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

12 New from $37.09

Select delivery location

Turn on 1-Click ordering

More Buying Choices

12 New from $37.09 10 Used from $45.51

22 used & new from $37.09

See All Buying Options

Free%20Two-Day%20Shipping%20for%20College%20Students%20with%20Amazon%20Student

Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire explores the conjunction between psychoanalysis and democracy, in particular their shared commitments to free speech. In the process, it demonstrates how lawful constraints enable an embodied space or "gap" for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols. This space, intuited by the First Amendment as it is by Freud's free association, enables personal and collective sovereignty. By naming a "feminine law," we mark the primacy a space between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between knowledge and mystery.

What do political free speech and psychoanalytic free association have in common, besides the word "free"? And what do Sigmund Freud and Justice Louis Brandeis share besides a world between two great wars? How is the female body a neglected key to understanding the conditions and contradictions of free discourse? Jill Gentile takes up these questions, and more, in her wide-ranging, often passionate exploration of the hidden legacy of Freud and the Founding Fathers. These pioneers, through their imprecise instructions to fight repression, set in motion incessant processes by which we claim power and agency. These processes come into sharp focus in the analytic clinic. The author shows that psychoanalysis is not just a method of treatment, but also a practice of "transitional democracy," in which doctor and patient together discover the very basis of equality, as they learn how to navigate its essential flux, both in relationships and in public action.

Feminine Law illustrates these ideas through portraits of political and clinical struggle―in Constitutional battles and dynamic case studies. It tells stories of victory and setback, advance and retreat. And it tells the larger story of a dialectical process that is necessary to freedom itself. This story is peopled by characters such as Freud and the post-Freudians Lacan, Bion, and Winnicott; feminist theorists such as Benjamin, Gilligan, and Kristeva; the Constitution's framers and jurists such as Holmes and Brandeis; and modern legal scholars and contemporary critical theorists. Its thesis is illuminated by ideas from a broad range of disciplines and literatures, ranging from Athenian politics to the modern semiotics of C. S. Peirce and Walker Percy. The tale ultimately reaches a simple but rich conclusion: that both the talking cure and political free speech reveal the power of a Feminine Law: a law of spaces and dimensions that preconditions our (necessarily imperfect) pursuit of desire, subjective freedom, and collective agency. Feminine law opens a democratic space for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols.

Frequently bought together

Total price: $89.81

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Show details

Buy the selected items together

This item:Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire by Jill Gentile Paperback $42.95
Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping. Details
Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis (Relational Perspectives Book… by Adrienne Harris Paperback $46.86
Only 4 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by ayvax and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
FREE Shipping. Details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Jessica Benjamin

3

Paperback
$38.35
Jill Stauffer

1

Paperback
$27.00
Todd McGowan

4

Hardcover
$27.65
John Forrester
Paperback
$20.71
Elizabeth Howell

9

Paperback
$38.28
Galit Atlas

2

Paperback
$37.96

Editorial Reviews

Review

Creatively bringing together the Founding Fathers and the father of psychoanalysis, Jill Gentile begins with the foundational ideas of free speech in democracy and free association on the couch, opening up a fascinating unexplored space that illuminates the magic of language and the paradoxes, limits, and complexities at the heart of desire. This is an erudite, bravura performance that makes good on a long deferred hope that psychoanalysis can bring deeper understanding to our political confusions. --George Makari, MD, author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

Jill Gentile has written a passionate love letter to psychoanalysis and democracy, to free association and free speech. Reaching beyond the phallocentrism of earlier psychoanalytic thought, Gentile reconfigures feminine 'lack' as a generative space of potentiality. Gentile revolutionizes Freudian theory while deftly paying homage to what was revolutionary about it in the first place. The effect of her stunningly erudite and original interpretation is akin to what Alain Badiou calls a 'truth-event': it shatters conventional mythologies regarding femininity and its (lack of) social status, and reveals a whole new universe of (feminine) possibility. --Mari Ruti, PhD, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Toronto, and author of Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics

The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex. So stated Freud. Jill Gentile takes this assumption as an invitation to go beyond, in this rich and expansive exploration of the possibility of naming the feminine. Ranging across semiotics, political theory, and the panoply of contemporary psychoanalysis, Gentile renews both clinical theory and democratic philosophy. Playful and incisive, this work opens new spaces for contemplation. --David Lichtenstein, PhD, editor of DIVISION/Review

About the Author

Jill Gentile is a faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, a training and supervising analyst at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity in New York, and affiliated with several other psychoanalytic institutes. She is a corresponding editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Her clinical and theoretical essays, describing a trajectory of agency, desire, and emergent personal and symbolic life, have been published in many psychoanalytic journals. Founding member of the DreamTank collective, dedicated to the application of psychoanalysis to democracy and to public life, she is a practicing psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in Highland Park, New Jersey and in Manhattan, New York.

Paperback: 330 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (March 21, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1782202773
ISBN-13: 978-1782202776
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 8.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 1 customer review
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,045,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1231 in Books > Textbooks > Social Sciences > Political Science > Political Ideologies
- #1396 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Movements > Psychoanalysis
- #1664 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Democracy

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars

5 star

4 star (0%)

3 star (0%)

2 star (0%)

1 star (0%)

Write a customer review

See all 1 customer reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Michael Guy

The Role of the Feminine Principle in Everyone!

June 29, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Jill Gentile and Michael Macrone have done a remarkable job in crafting a brilliantly written tome on a much-neglected perspective on the nature of freedom in therapy and the political process. What excited me most about this extraordinary book was the authors’ painstaking and original exploration of the role of ‘freedom’ in the therapeutic process, and the way they play with the psychoanalytic conception of free association by asking what, precisely, do we mean by a relationship that furthers freedom via a conversation that is in itself a freely engaging discourse? Jill Gentile asks, what does it mean to be free, as an individual, as a pair, as two people seeking the optimal degree of freedom possible in the context of the language they employ with each other? I love the way she takes her study outside of the clinical context and explores the political aspects of freedom and free speech, from a feminist perspective, in order to take this discussion into the context where we all live and love together, in the very society that we inhabit. I also loved how she frames the feminine principle that has been marginalized in psychoanalysis, especially in Freud. I found this book exciting to read and even breathtaking in parts. It helped me to think about this important topic with fresh eyes, a freshness that also epitomized a ‘free’ take on the matter, if by free we mean spontaneous, creative, and loving.

Some of the highlights of my reading this book:

1. The author has a lot to say about the relation between free speech and the body. I found this section especially illuminating. Here she deftly explores why the body is a crucial point of departure in our understanding about the nature of free association and its implication for the therapeutic process.

2. The author observes that Freud was ambivalent about just how free a given society is capable of being. But she also cites him suggesting that a post-analytic individual who has become a freer person may in turn further a freer society, if sufficient numbers of people seek to further such freedom via therapy. This raises important questions about the efficacy of the analytic process, rendering the current obsession with “empirical outcomes” of therapy limited and banal.

3. The author says that free speech is necessarily constrained in the political arena, or we would have anarchy, so it isn’t totally free. And the same for free association, because the patient is always holding something back. Here the author raises a number of pithy questions about the nature of freedom and what a very subtle a concept this is.

4. Freud was puzzled about what woman wants, and his pathologizing of the vagina (e.g. penis envy) has been rejected by just about every school of psychoanalysis except for the few die-hard Freudians that remain. I love what she says about the vagina representing the space where everyone’s – men’s AND women’s – desire, creativity, meaning, discourse, and free speech are born, the feminine principle in us all.

This is an amazing book that I could not recommend more highly!

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire

Set up a giveaway

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Katie Gentile
Paperback
$45.46
Roger Frie
Paperback
$7.57