The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason: What Makes Us Human? - Paperback

by Robert Samuels (Author)

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason examines the ways in which we can use psychoanalysis in order to better understand humanity and explores the question of what makes us human.

For thousands of years, thinkers have been trying to define what makes us human. Some of the main questions they have asked is: What is consciousness? Do we have free will? Do animals use language? And what does reason mean? Samuels argues that we need to better understand the psychoanalytic approach to human nature in order to answer these questions, as well as using it to provide a new way of understanding issues such as addiction, political conflict, ideology, and destructive personal relationship.

This book will be of vital interest to psychotherapists, as well as students and researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and psychology.

Author Biography

Robert Samuels, PhD, holds doctorates in psychology and English, and teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Freud for the Twenty-First Century, Psychoanalyzing the Left and Right after Donald Trump, Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan's Reconstruction of Freud, Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality, and The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies.