At War with the Obvious

Psychoanalytic thought has already transformed our basic assumptions about the psychic life of individuals and cultures. Those assumptions often take on the valence of common sense. However, this can mean that their original and important meanings often become obscured. Disruptive ideas become domesticated. At War with the Obvious aims to return those ideas to their original disruptive status.

Donald Moss explores a wide range of issues—the loosening of constraints on deep systematized forms of hatred, clinical, and technical matters, the puzzling status of revenge and forgiveness, a consideration of the dynamics of climate change denial, and an innovative look at the problem of voice in the clinical situation. Because it is rooted in a profound reconsideration of the origins of psychic life, psychoanalysis remains vital, in spite of the perennial efforts to keep it effaced and quieted. Moss covers a range of central psychoanalytic concepts to argue that only by examining and challenging our everyday assumptions about issues like sexuality, punishment, creativity, analytic neutrality, and trauma, can psychoanalysis offer a radical alternative to other forms of therapy.

At War with the Obvious will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, cultural theorists and anyone for whom incisive psychoanalytic thought matters.

Donald Moss is a psychoanalyst with more than 40 years’ experience in private practice in New York City and a member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He edited the book Hating in the First Person Plural(Other Press, 2003), has authored the Routledge title Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man (2012) and written more than fifty articles linking basic Freudian concepts to contemporary social and clinical problems.