Routledge The Death of Desire: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

A stunning exploration of the relation between desire and psychopathology, The Death of Desire is a unique synthesis of the work of Laing, Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that renders their often difficult concepts brilliantly accessible to and usable by psychotherapists of all persuasions. In bridging a critical gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, M. Guy Thompson, one of the leading existential psychoanalysts of our time, firmly re-situates the unconscious – what Freud called "the lost continent of repressed desires" – in phenomenology. In so doing, he provides us with the richest, most compelling phenomenological treatment of the unconscious to date and also makes Freud’s theory of the unconscious newly comprehensible. In this revised and updated second edition to the original published in 1985, M. Guy Thompson takes us inside his soul-searching seven-year apprenticeship with radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing and his cohorts as it unfolded in counterculture London of the 1970s. This rite de passage culminates with a four-year sojourn inside one of Laing’s post-Kingsley Hall asylums, where Laing’s unorthodox conception of treatment dispenses with conventional boundaries between "doctor" and "patient." In this unprecedented exploration, Thompson reveals the secret to Laing’s astonishing alternative to the conventional psychiatric and psychoanalytic treatment schemes. Movingly written and deeply personal, Thompson shows why the very concept of "mental illness" is a misnomer and why sanity and madness should be understood instead as inherently puzzling stratagems that we devise in order to protect ourselves from intolerable mental anguish. The Death of Desire offers a provocative and challenging reappraisal of depth psychotherapy from an existential perspective that will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, philosophers, social scientists, and students of the human condition. Review "In this wise, intellectually rich and deeply thoughtful book, M. Guy Thompson explores the central, complex and paradoxical role that human desire plays in life, love and madness. Building upon foundational Freudian premises, and synthesizing profound insights derived from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Laing, and with his own clinical experience, Thompson provides a compelling and deeply compassionate perspective on the human condition and the process of healing. In this new edition of his classic book, Thompson incorporates a detailed account of his own apprenticeship with R. D. Laing and grounds his thinking in a deeply personal memoir of a monumentally important and often misunderstood experiment in the treatment of psychotic and schizophrenic patients. The Death of Desire breathes new life into R.D. Laing’s legacy, at a time when our culture is in desperate need of it."--Jeremy Safran, Ph.D., Chair and Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research, New York "In our medicalized age of diagnosis and disease, we have forgotten what it means to be a person. In this superb book, M. Guy Thompson returns psychoanalysis to its existential origins.  Offering a sophisticated and shrewd exegesis of the phenomenology of desire and pathos, he humanizes suffering and situates therapy within a moral framework of embracing experience. Thompson succeeds brilliantly in advancing an authentic discourse on the human condition."-Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP, author of Inventing God. "Written with great clarity, insight and precision, this new, substantially revised edition of The Death of Desire by M. Guy Thompson invites its readers to reconsider their views on sanity and madness and the inter-connected role that each plays in our becoming who we are. Thompson's intent throughout is both radical and explicit: to excise from our understanding of madness all medically-attuned notions of pathology and, instead, to "return it to where it belongs: the everyday agony and ecstasy of living, in all its attendant myste