David Levine and Matthew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most commonly in t...

We live in a world where our livelihood depends on our ability to relate to strangers. The central quality that defines strangers is that they are unknown. Because strangers are unknown, they represent, in the world outside, the unknown self within. The unknown self is the core of the personality considered as a potential to become something yet to be determined. To be already known is to be determined prior to and independently of our presence in our lives. At the outset of the process of...

In this book, David P. Levine applies psychoanalytic object relations theory to understanding work motivation and the meaning of work. Drawing on the writings of authors such as Donald Winnicott, Otto Kernberg and Melanie Klein, he explores three factors central to our effort to understand work: guilt, greed and the self. Special attention is paid to the factors that determine the individual’s emotional capacity to do work that engages the self and its creative potential and to the related...

Recent trends in politics culminating in the US with the election of Donald Trump both provoked and expressed a troubling intensification of emotion in the body politic. Heightened levels of anger, frustration, and distrust, the dismissal of the norms of politics and policy making, and the prevalence of intractable conflict indicated an increase in the power of regressive forces. The power of these forces takes the form of dark fantasies involving the loss, indeed the destruction, of safe ...

This book develops a creative theoretical framework for understanding the welfare state: the theory of the state and the idea of welfare connected to autonomy.Written by a well-known expert of political economy and welfare, it explores the nature of welfare and connects welfare not to basic needs, but to what Levine refers to as the capacity to lead the self-made life, considering different ways of grounding the claim that providing for the welfare of citizens might be considered a...

Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, the study of creativity and fine art has been a special concern. Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art: Making Contact with the Self makes a distinct contribution to the psychoanalytic study of art by focusing attention on the relationship between creativity and greed. This book also focuses attention on factors in the personality that block creativity, and examines the matter of the self and its ability to be present an...

Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World explores ideas from psychoanalysis that can be valuable in understanding social processes and institutions and in particular, how psychoanalytic ideas and methods can help us understand the nature and roots of social and political conflict in the contemporary world.Among the ideas explored in this book, of special importance are the ideas of a core self (Heinz Kohut and Donald Winnicott) and of an internal object world (Melanie ...

First published in 1997, this volume delves into the most influential theories of economic justice, which ground themselves in utilitarian or related contractarian ideas about the self. These ideas take self-interest to be transparent and unproblematic. Favoured assumptions about the self also make scarcity the primary reality with which economic justice must deal. Much is lost in consideration of the justness of economic arrangements when we take the wants and interests of the self for gr...

Over the past several decades, colleges and universities in the United States and United Kingdom have made significant commitments to increasing diversity, most notably regarding race and gender. The result has not, however, been an amelioration of conflict over matters of difference. Instead, there has been continuing, if not increasing, conflict and strife in universities, often reflecting conflict in the larger society.A Dangerous Place to Be examines identity-based con...

'Political economy' has been the term used for the past 300 years to express the interrelationship between the political and economic affairs of the state. In Theories of Political Economy, first published in 1992, James A. Caporaso and David P. Levine explore some of the more important frameworks for understanding the relationship between politics and economics, including the classical, Marxian, Keynesian, neoclassical, state-centred, power-centred, and justice-centred approaches. The boo...

Forget the old-school “motivation” and pop-psychology that fills so many self-improvement books—it’s out of date and, honestly, doesn’t work that well in the first place. What you need to thrive in today’s distracting, fast-paced world are three, fundamental self-mastery skills—cognitive control, emotional self-regulation, and impulse control. Together, these skills are the holy grail of personal development, and Raise Your Inner Game presents the world's first m...

When humanity’s finest scientists spotted it, they checked and rechecked their calculations—then checked them again. Appallingly, unthinkably, they were right—a mysterious anomaly was systematically devouring the universe. Moving faster than the speed of light, it would reach earth’s solar system in well under a year, maybe sooner. Should they alert the world’s people? No, better to let them live out their last months in peace instead of enduring the social breakdown that would surely resu...