Todd McGowan | |
---|---|
Born | 1967 (age 56–57) |
Education | Ohio State University (PhD) |
Era | 21st-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Continental, Psychoanalytic, Hegelianism, Existentialism |
Institutions | University of Vermont |
Thesis | The Empty Subject: The New Canon and the Politics of Existence (1996) |
Doctoral advisor | Walter A. Davis |
Main interests | Psychoanalytic film theory, Continental philosophy |
Website | https://www.uvm.edu/cas/english/profiles/todd-mcgowan |
Todd McGowan (born 1967) is an American professor of English at the University of Vermont where he teaches film and cultural theory. He works on Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, and the intersection of these lines of thought with the cinema. [1] McGowan is the author of more than 15 books, editor of Film Theory in Practice series from Bloomsbury [2] and co-editor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. [3] McGowan's work has been described as "A Politics of Death Drive". [4] McGowan cohosts the podcast Why Theory with Ryan Engley. [5]
In Emancipation After Hegel (2019), Todd McGowan presents ‘a new radical Hegel’, dispensing with the infamous formula of the dialectic as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’, McGowan maintains that contradiction is not the opposition of an antithesis to a thesis, but occurs when a position follows its own internal logic and exposes its inner division. According to McGowan, Freud's psychoanalytic theory ‘provides a theoretical supplement for Hegel’. By conceptualizing the unconscious, Freud sees subjectivity through a contradiction that it cannot eliminate. [6]
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Sándor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.
Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separated into two waves. The first wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia describes the sexual pleasure that a person derives from looking at prurient objects of eroticism, such as pornography, the nude body, and fetishes, as a substitute for actual participation in a sexual relationship.
Screen theory is a Marxist–psychoanalytic film theory associated with the British journal Screen in the early 1970s. It considers filmic images as signifiers that do not only encode meanings but also mirrors in which viewers accede to subjectivity. The theory attempts to discover a way of theorizing a politics of freedom through cinema that focuses on diversity instead of unity. Here, the Marxist emphasis on universal consciousness as a basis for defining emancipation shifted to the articulation of diversities and multiplicities of individual and collective experience due to the psychoanalytic elaboration of the unconscious.
Identification refers to the automatic, subconscious psychological process in which an individual becomes like or closely associates themselves with another person by adopting one or more of the others' perceived personality traits, physical attributes, or some other aspect of their identity. The concept of identification was founded by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the 1920’s, and has since been expanded on and applied in psychology, social studies, media studies, and literary and film criticism. In literature, identification most often refers to the audience identifying with a fictional character, however it can also be employed as a narrative device whereby one character identifies with another character within the text itself.
Ian Parker is a British psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Emeritus Professor of Management in the School of Business at the University of Leicester.
Néstor Alberto Braunstein was an Argentine-Mexican physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Bruno Bosteels is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his work on Latin American literature and culture and his translations of the work of Alain Badiou. Theory of the Subject appeared in 2009, Bosteels' translation of Badiou's Théorie du sujet.
Metapsychology is that aspect of any psychological theory which refers to the structure of the theory itself rather than to the entity it describes. The psychology is about the psyche; the metapsychology is about the psychology. The term is used mostly in discourse about psychoanalysis, the psychology developed by Sigmund Freud, which was at its time regarded as a branch of science, or, more recently, as a hermeneutics of understanding. Interest on the possible scientific status of psychoanalysis has been renewed in the emerging discipline of neuropsychoanalysis, whose major exemplar is Mark Solms. The hermeneutic vision of psychoanalysis is the focus of influential works by Donna Orange.
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation is a 1965 book about Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, written by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur. In Freud and Philosophy, Ricœur interprets Freudian work in terms of hermeneutics, a theory that governs the interpretation of a particular text, and phenomenology, a school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl. Ricœur addresses questions such as the nature of interpretation in psychoanalysis, the understanding of human nature and the relationship between Freud's interpretation of culture amongst other interpretations. The book was first published in France by Éditions du Seuil, and in the United States by Yale University Press.
A. Kiarina Kordela (; is a Greek-American philosopher and critical theorist. She is a professor of German Studies and founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lacanian perspectives contend that the world of language, the Symbolic, structures the human mind, and stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate between Lacanians.
Adrian Johnston is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta.
Mari Ruti was a Finnish-Canadian philosopher. She had served as Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies on the graduate faculty at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, and as an Undergraduate Instructor at their Mississauga campus. She was an interdisciplinary scholar within the theoretical humanities working at the intersection of contemporary theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, trauma theory, posthumanist ethics, gender, and sexuality studies.