Bøker av Susan Sugarman

Freud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams, and in particular its thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, as his landmark contribution and the scaffolding of his subsequent work. Susan Sugarman, after carefully examining the text and scrutinizing a range of Freud's other works, shows that the dreams book is not and cannot be that scaffolding. For, not only does his argument on dreams falter, but his reasoning elsewhere - in his case histories, his accounts of phenomena of ordinary waking life, and even his avowedly speculative writing - displays a strength and precision his account of dreams lacks. She concludes by exploring what is then left of the dreams theory and Freud's overall vision of the mind.

Freud, although best known for his elucidation of the unusual in human mental life, also attempted to illuminate ordinary human experience, such as peopleOs appreciation of humor, their capacity to become engrossed in fiction, and their disposition to a variety of emotional experiences, including the uncanny, the stirrings prompted by beauty, and their disposition to mourn. His insights into the everyday and his sense of where within it the productive questions lie reveal an incisiveness that defies both earlier and subsequent thought on his topics. This book works to expose that vision and to demonstrate its fertility for further inquiry. It reconstructs several of FreudOs works on ordinary mental life, tracking his method of inquiry, in particular his search for the child within the adult, and culminating in a deployment of his tools independently of his analyses. It shows how to read Freud for his insight and generativity and how to push beyond the confines of his analyses in pursuit of new lines of exploration.

Susan Sugarman discovers that, whilst acquiring language, children move quickly beyond the ability to relate one thing to to another, to an ability to conceptualize the interrelationships; a major step in the development of reasoning that was overlooked by theorists of cognitive development prior to the publication of this 1983 book.

This book, first published in 1988, provides a conceptual critique of six of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget's central, earlier works, including his account of the child's conception of the world, the development of morality, and the origins of intelligence in infancy.