Sex, Death, and the Superego: Experiences in Psychoanalysis

by Ronald Britton

This book is a personal reappraisal of psychoanalytic theories in the light of clinical experience. The first part is about sexuality and begins where psychoanalysis began, with hysteria. The second part is about the ego and the super-ego, the relationship of which dominated Freud's writing from his middle period onwards. The last part is on narcissism and the narcissistic disorders, a major preoccupation of psychoanalysis in the second half of the twentieth century.

Genres: Psychology

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 2003

Reviews

[Yasemin]

Ronald Britton is a postkleinian psychoanalyst; he interpreted Klein with much similarities with Bion. In this book of him he started with a review of the two famous analysands of psychoanalytic history:Anna O. and Sabine Spielrein. Sabine Spielrein is also pioneer of psychoanalysis, she has a very colourful and tragic bio.
In the “Female Castration Complex” chapter, he limited this description with a group of women on the contrary of generalization of Freud. He named this complex’s two presentation with Athene and Antigone.
In his ego, superego chapter he referred The Book of Job(and also the William Blake’s illustration with that name is on the cover of book.) to describe the superego’s depersonification process.
The chapters about narcissism, narcissistix disorder are telling useful thoughts to the clinicians. From Montaigne, Edward Hopper and Rilke he used lots of quotes to exemlplify his thoughts about Narcisistic problems in sharing space.

[Ilaria Bagalini · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'll need some clinical psychology knowledge before embarking yourself in this reading.
Psychoanalysis cases are presented as they are, get ready to find some crude reality of how the human brain can work.
It can scare but at the same time is a mind openner.