Paul Verhaeghe Book order

'We live in an extremely controlling society in which authority has disappeared ... traditional authority is lapsing into brute force ... and we ourselves must take the first steps towards creating a new social order.' This was the trenchant diagnosis by Paul Verhaeghe at the end of his acclaimed book about identity, What About Me?Now he returns to investigate another aspect of our lives under threat: authority. In Says Who?, Verhaeghe examines how authority functions and why we need it in order to develop healthy psyches and strong societies. Going against the laissez-faire ethics of a free-market age, he argues that rather than seeing authority as a source of oppression we should invest in developing it in the places that matter. Only by strengthening the power of horizontal groups within existing social structures, such as in education, the economy, and the political system, can we restore authority to its rightful place. Whether you are a parent or child, teacher or student, employer or employee, Says Who?provides the answers you need.

One way to understand a concept is to contrast it with its opposite. For the psychoanalyst Verhaeghe, narcissism is the counterpart of melancholia. Narcissism implies completeness and omnipotence. It harks back to the identification with the almighty mother. She is almighty because she can give what the child lacks. During the oedipal period, this identification disappears. Melancholia implies loss and helplessness. The failure of the original fantasy of omnipotence is the inevitable failure of the father and the safety that he was meant to guarantee; there is in fact no final phallic guarantee whatever. Consequently, a typically neurotic reaction is the endless search for a substitute, creating a series of imaginary fathers. This leads to secondary narcissism and stays within the realm of phallic thinking. We are accustomed to interpreting these ideas at the level of the individual – the child with his parents, the oedipus complex and so on. When Freud was writing his essays ‘On Narcissism’ and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, the very same clash was happening on a global scale. Phallic narcissism was brutally shattered by the First World War, and a period of universal mourning followed – the mourning of the father, of »The« Father. In Verhaeghe’s view, this mourning announced the end of patriarchy, in other words, the end of traditional authority. This compels us to rethink the concept of authority as such.

In What about Me? , Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health, even affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer.

The book offers a critical evaluation of the DSM diagnostic system, highlighting how the absence of an updated metapsychology affects its therapeutic efficacy. It proposes a new foundation for metapsychology by integrating Freudo-Lacanian concepts with contemporary empirical research, aiming to enhance the understanding and application of DSM categories in therapy.

This book describes how Freud attempted to chart hysteria, yet came to a standstill at the problem of woman and her desire, and of how Lacan continued along this road by creating new conceptual tools. The difficulties and upsets encountered by both men are examined. This lucid presentation of the dialectical process that carries Lacan through the evolution of Freud's thought offers profound insights into the place of the "feminine mystique" in our social fabric. Patiently and carefully, Verhaeghe applies the Lacanian grid to Freud's text and succeeds in explaining Lacan's formulations without merely recapitulating his theories. The reader is informed, along the way, not only of Lacan's take on Freudian ideas, but also of the array of interpretations emerging from other trends in post-Freudian literature, including feminist revisionism.