Eli Zaretsky

Biographic Data

ID3774601
NAMEEli Zaretsky
GIVEN NAMESEli
FAMILY NAMEZaretsky
SIGNATUREZARETSKY E
AFFILIATIONSNew School
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS46
TOTAL CITATIONS96
AUTHOR COUNT46
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1976
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX4

  • Psychoanalysis, the Family and Personal Life: Narcissism and the “Relational Revolution” of the 1960

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEEIAL - Estudios Interdisciplinarios…2024

    A life lived in public, it has been said, is a superficial one. If so, then the psychoanalytic claim to depth is well founded. Not only was psychoanalysis a theory of the private world - that is of personal life - it also took place in private. Psychoanalysis revolved around secrets, not exploits, confidentiality was its highest professional value, and one could give no higher testimony to the success of a psychoanalysis than to say that it had b…

  • Psychoanalysis and politics

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEThe International Journal of…2024References: 1

    Psychoanalysis and Politics argue that psychoanalysis is at its root a social or group theory, to which a theory of individual psychology is integral. This formulation follows from Freud's Group Psychology, which defines individual psychology as a derivative of group psychology, "still incomplete." The article historicizes the analytic conception of the individual in terms of the authors' conception of personalize, spelled out in Secrets of the S…

  • George Makari, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEPsychoanalysis and History2023

  • Donald Trump and the Paranoid Position

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLECritical Historical Studies2022References: 1

    This article situates Trump in the context of what Daniel Bell called the New American Right and analyzes the mass or group psychological basis of his charisma. Originating with McCarthyism, the New American Right was a reaction to the New Deal—a defense of the “real,” that is, rural, America against urban elites and immigrants. Richard Hofstadter’s famous characterization of the New American Right as “paranoid” drew on the Frankfurt School yet r…

  • Liberalism and Mass Psychology: The American Experience

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEPolity2022Cited by: 1References: 9

    European liberals have viewed themselves as the avatars of the rational individual as opposed to the mob or tyrant. Faced with the populist, democratic, and egalitarian character of US society, American liberals could not take this point of view for granted. For that reason, they turned to Freud, although with mixed success. I explore this turn in three consecutive moments: the New Deal, when liberals first understood America to be not only a cla…

  • The Culture Wars of the 1960s and the Assault on the Presidency: The Meaning of the Clinton Impeachment

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyCHAPTEROur Monica, Ourselves2020

  • Response to Fong and Henry

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLECritical Historical Studies2018

    The 1970s encounter between feminism and psychoanalysis was a turning point in the history of the left. On the surface, Freud, who until then had been increasingly drawn on for revolutionary purposes, was discredited as a proponent of male supremacy and innate aggression. Thereafter, feminism effectively replaced psychoanalysis as a “folk psychology,” that is, an everyday ethic and popular hermeneutic. At a deeper level, the encounter presaged a …

  • Freudianism and anti‐freudianism in recent US culture

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEConstellations2018References: 1

  • My Life and Psychoanalysis

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEAmerican imago2016

    My Life and Psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky (bio) Psychoanalysis has coursed through my entire life, pervading my personal and sexual experiences, my family life, my work as a historian, my politics, my innermost questioning of self. Its salience did not arise out of questions concerning neurotic symptoms, treatment, or cure. Rather, I was drawn to psychoanalysis because it seemed to me to offer a superior way of living: deeper, more conscious and mo…

  • From Psychoanalysis to Cybernetics: The Case of Her

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEAmerican imago2015

    The essay argues that there has been a shift in the culture’s mode of representing and articulating subjectivity—from psychoanalysis to cybernetics. It describes this shift as one from interpretation to feedback. It further argues that the shift is never complete and that psychoanalytic metaphors and images continue to pervade the cybernetic world. Using an analysis of the recent film Her , the essay places the 1970s revolution in gender and sexu…

  • Michael E. STAUB. Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948-1980

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEThe American Historical Review2013

    Madness Is Civilization is an account of an important episode in the American interrogation of the meaning of the self: the idea that the self is a social construct, developed among psychiatric reformers in the 1940s and 1950s and reaching its highpoint two decades later. According to Michael E. Staub, there were five stages in the formation of this idea. First, such figures as psychiatrists R. D. Laing, Nathan Ackerman, and Frieda Fromm-Reichman…

  • Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEThe International Journal of…2012Cited by: 1

    Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas by Nancy Caro Hollander Routledge , New York, NY 2010 ; 403 pp; $36.95 The complicity of psychoanalysis with authoritarian politica

  • Why the Freudian Century: Reflections on the Statue of Athena

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEAmerican imago2011

    Why the Freudian Century: Reflections on the Statue of Athena Eli Zaretsky (bio) Between the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and the 1970s, psychoanalysis transformed the understanding of the human mind not just in the West, but also throughout the world. It affected not only sciences such as psychiatry and medicine, and arts such as literature, theatre, painting, and film, but also advertising, design, news coverage, and mann…

  • Psychanalyse, vulnérabilité et guerre

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLELe Coq-héron2010

    Cet article examine le rôle de la psychanalyse dans la mise en évidence de la vulnérabilité humaine et du rôle qu'elle joue en temps de guerre. Trois épisodes sont étudiés : la Première et la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et le 11 Septembre aux États-Unis

  • Beyond the Blues: Richard Wright, Psychoanalysis, and the Modern Idea of Culture

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyCHAPTERTransnational Unconscious2009

    The transformation in the self-image of American blacks between 1903, when The Souls of Black Folk appeared, and the 1963 March on Washington is one of the most inspiring episodes in all of history. Early twentieth century black America was a ravaged continent, rural, protoliterate and impoverished, still dominated by lords and masters, whether plantation-owners and ex-confederates, internal despots such as Booker T. Washington, or Northern patro…

  • Collective Memory and Narrative: A Response to Etkind

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEConstellations2009Cited by: 4

  • Narcissism, Personal Life and Identity: The Place of the 1960s in the History of Psychoanalysis

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEPsychoanalysis Culture & Society2008

  • Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEConstellations2008Cited by: 5

  • La psychanalyse et l'esprit du capitalisme

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEActuel Marx2007

    In 1904-5, Max Weber famously argued that Calvinism had supplied early capitalism with a "spirit" (Geist) without which such capitalist virtues as methodical devotion to task would not have developed. More recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in Le Nouvel Espirit de Capitalisme have argued that capitalism always has an esprit, and have traced in outline the history of the spirit of capitalism for the last one hundred years. In my paper I will…

  • Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938 (review)

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLEBulletin of the history of medicine2006

    Reviewed by: Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938 Eli Zaretsky Elizabeth Ann Danto . Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xi + 348 pp. Ill. $29.50 (0-231-13180-1). Against the background of today's multiculturalism and identity politics, Freud's emphasis on the individual sometimes seems conservative, but Elizabeth Ann Danto situates psychoanal…

  • Global Rift: Robert Kagan and the Europe/America Divide

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEConstellations2003

  • Trauma and Dereification: September 11 and the Problem of Ontological Security

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEConstellations2002Cited by: 17

  • Nothing Sacred: Florida 2000 and America's Two Presidencies

    Open AccessEli ZaretskyARTICLEConstellations2001

  • Charisma or Rationalization? Domesticity and Psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1950s

    Eli ZaretskyARTICLECritical Inquiry2000Cited by: 7

  • Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy

    Eli ZaretskyREVIEWJournal of American History1999

    Eric Caplan's fascinating exploration of Victorian culture in the United States shatters the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the long-buried 'prehistory' of American mental therapeutics, Mind Games tells the remarkable story of how a widely assorted group of actors - none of them hailing from Vienna or from any other European city - compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role …