Genius After Psychoanalysis : Freud and Lacan

Develops a new psychoanalytic theory of genius, a concept that is often invoked and pervasive in popular culture but which is rarely scrutinized in depth. In the absence of this scrutiny, genius has come to be understood as exceptional talent or intelligence—an elitist notion. Genius After Psychoanalysis intervenes in this debate by offering a new account of genius. Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, K. Daniel Cho argues that genius is not exceptional talent or intelligence but is related to and illuminated by the psychological concept of sublimation, where the unpleasures that arise when our intellectual products fail become themselves pleasurable. Beginning with a close examination of Freud’s work on Leonardo da Vinci, Cho analyzes film, art, our relationship to nature, politics, group psychology, love, and philosophy to demonstrate that genius, far from an elitist notion, is universally available through a different approach to ideas of imperfection, disappointment, and failure. Genius After Psychoanalysis is a bold new intervention on a culturally central but understudied topic.

K. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University in Columbus, USA. He works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. He is the author of Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education and coeditor of Marcuse's Challenge to Education.

Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida as well as Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs and Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the editor of American Imago. A coeditor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series and editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge, Rudnytsky is the author of books from Freud and Oedipus (1987) to Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002), for which he received the Gradiva Award, and Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (2022). He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Gainesville.

Hilary Neroni is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, USA. She is the author of Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Bloomsbury, 2016), The Subject of Torture (2015), and The Violent Woman (2005) and has also published numerous essays on film and theory.