Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences is a significant contribution to the literature. The question of whether psychoanalysis is a science and of its relationship to psychology is very much alive; Althusser's solution was and remains an original one. -- William S. Lewis, Skidmore College Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences is short, clear and readable. Its accessibility and lucidity will appeal to both novices and experts in Continental-style philosophy -- Adrian Johnston, author of Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change Exploring the epistemic break affected by Lacan's departure from psychology and its reduction of Freud's teaching to a technique of social adaptation, Louis Althusser clarifies the difference between science and ideology. The result is a powerful defense of the scientificity of the human sciences that manages to liberate their objects from the normalizing function of technocratic ideology and social control. -- Linda M. G. Zerilli, author of A Democratic Theory of Judgment This intervention exemplifies Althusser's conception of the role of philosophy in the history of scientific revolutions and reveals the outlines of the larger project of intellectual renovation within which the rereading of Marx took place. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences provides a vivid account of the combative intellectual world of Althusser and his contemporaries, with many delightful digressions and personal anecdotes. -- Gopal Balakrishnan, author of Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us today? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser distinguishes psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. He then applies these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. Althusser's enlivened methodology had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.