Genius After Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan

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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 intelligencean 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 Freuds 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.

Author Bio

K. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University in Columbus, OH. Professor Cho works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. He is the author of Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education (2009) and co-editor of Marcuse's Challenge to Education (2008).