Cultural Analysis Now! Alfred Lorenzer and the In-Depth Hermeneutics of Culture and Society

"This book introduces North American, English-speaking readers to a profoundly interdisciplinary thinker – Alfred Lorenzer – who positions psychoanalysis between the body and the social and between neuropsychology and sociology. An exciting and important new voice enters and expands the dialogue between relational and ego psychological perspectives with implications for the clinic and applied analytic ventures. Alfred Lorenzer is one of the best-known German psychoanalysts. With the dyadic “scene” and the “form of interaction,” he introduced new relational concepts into psychoanalysis. His in-depth hermeneutical method bridges the gap between cultural and psychoanalytic theory, allowing the unconscious sensual-symbolic forms of interaction of cultural phenomena and the socially oppressed schemas of life represented therein to be uncovered. Now, with this book, his landmark essay on the method of critical-hermeneutical cultural analysis is available in English for the first time. International authors provide in their own contributions new insights into his innovative theory." – Werner Bohleber, Ph.D., psychoanalyst, former editor-in-chief of the German psychoanalytic journal “Psyche”.