The Ethics of Immediacy - (Psychoanalytic Horizons) by Jeffrey McCurry

About the Book

"Argues that modernism can be seen as a therapeutic project for transforming human experience, and draws from Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf's criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology"--

Book Synopsis

Drawing connections between Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf's criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, The Ethics of Immediacy recounts the far-reaching consequences of the modern turn towards a new ethics of immediacy.

During the first half of the 20th century, a profound transformation - an existential revolution - took place in European culture in how human beings conceived of themselves. Inspired by Freud's psychoanalysis, a newfound appreciation for the realm of immediate experience in human life emerged. With Freud himself making a signal contribution to this existential revolution, and with Woolf and Merleau-Ponty taking up Freud's ideas in their own unique ways, all three figures began to regard first-order, spontaneous, direct, unselfconscious, concrete experience of self and world as standing at the heart of what it means to be human.

Jeffrey McCurry describes how this new state of affairs stood in contrast to how immediate experience had been historically dismissed, devalued, repressed, and even negated in the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy. This experience posed dangers to psychological stability, social order, and philosophical certainty. McCurry examines how Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Woolf's modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life.

Review Quotes

"Jeffrey McCurry's superb study - of Freud, Virginia Woolf, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - reveals the essence of the phenomenological project as shared by all three: a focus on the ephemeral yet indelible immediacy of our existence as living subjects. In so doing he sheds original light on the ethical, esthetic, and spiritual resonances of this project, thereby locating phenomenology at the beating heart of modernist life and thought. McCurry shows that Woolf and Merleau-Ponty are key participants in what he terms the Freudian age. At a still deeper level he demonstrates that Freud himself is imbued with the spirit of phenomenology. This is a book of unusual subtlety that offers a novel orientation toward key questions of psychology and philosophy." --Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion

"It is generally thought phenomenology and psychoanalysis do not go together.The Ethics of Immediacy shows the limits of this view. Jeffrey McCurry demonstrates and develops Freudian interpolations in Woolf's modernist literature and in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, and in doing, so incites the possibility of a renewed ethics from immediate experience. This book launches an ethical depth-charge to its reader: without any ideal, normative prescription, or even expectation, what responsibility, if any, does one have to interrogate immediate experience in one's own life and times?" --Athena V. Colman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Brock University, Canada

About the Author

Jeffrey McCurry is Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University, USA. He is also a member of the faculty at the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.