72 years (21 March 1949)

Slavoj Žižek (1949 —) Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Žižek’s work is infamously idiosyncratic.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and Lacanian psychoanalyst. A prolific writer and lecturer, he is best known for his seemingly endless supply of brilliant and provocative insights into contemporary politics and culture.

In his entertaining film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Žižek relates the idea of ideology to the glasses in the movie They Live by John Carpenter. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is about a man who realizes that the world is controlled by aliens who use subliminal messages to influence the human race.

Start with Nobus’ Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis, Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and at least Chapters 1-3 and 7-8 of Apollon et al.’s After Lacan (chapters 9-12 would be worth reading as more application than basic theory, chapters 4-6 are worth reading but …

Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development that guides psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work.

Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of “reading” employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own neuroses.

Originating in the work of Sigmund Freud, the psychodynamic perspective emphasizes unconscious psychological processes (for example, wishes and fears of which we’re not fully aware), and contends that childhood experiences are crucial in shaping adult personality.

Criticism of Psychodynamic Theory Psychodynamic theory has been criticized as being too deterministic or victim-blaming to be used in modern psychology and social work . The original theories believed people had no control over their own behavior.