Freud the Contemporary Super-ego and Western Morality

<p><em>Freud the Contemporary Super-ego and Western Morality</em> traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super-ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the 21st century.</p><p>Giosuè Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as the return of the religious presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud in the writings of the 1920s and the analysis of a contemporary theological-political unconscious. Ghisalberti argues that the psyche of the liberal West has regressed to an infantile and primitive present driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and more comprehensively to Western civilization as a whole. The book re-examines Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions interpreted first from the murder of the primal father in <i>Totem and Taboo</i> and turns to his grounding ideals of intelligence creativity and freedom as the affirmation of the coming-to-be-human in modernity. </p><p>Freud the Contemporary Super-ego and Western Morality will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies philosophy political theory and the humanities.</p>