Develops a new psychoanalytic theory of genius, a concept that is often invoked and pervasive in popular culture but which is rarely scrutinized in depth.

In the absence of this scrutiny, genius has come to be understood as exceptional talent or intelligence-an elitist notion. Genius After Psychoanalysis intervenes in this debate by offering a new account of genius.
Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, K. Daniel Cho argues that genius is not exceptional talent or intelligence but is related to and illuminated by the psychological concept of sublimation, where the unpleasures that arise when our intellectual products fail become themselves pleasurable. Beginning with a close examination of Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci, Cho analyzes film, art, our relationship to nature, politics, group psychology, love, and philosophy to demonstrate that genius, far from an elitist notion, is universally available through a different approach to ideas of imperfection, disappointment, and failure.

Genius After Psychoanalysis is a bold new intervention on a culturally central but understudied topic.

K. Daniel Cho is Professor of Education at Otterbein University in Columbus, USA. He works on psychoanalysis in a variety of disciplinary contexts. He is the author of Psychopedagogy: Freud, Lacan, and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Education and coeditor of Marcuse's Challenge to Education.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Economic Problem of Genius
Part I. Critique of Pure Pleasure
1. Freud's Leonardo
2. Sublimation or, On the Sexual Life of Genius
3. Finding Satisfaction
4. Otherwise than Guilt
Part II. The Trouble with Objects
5. The Thing about Objects or, Sublimation after Lacan
6. Something Missing
7. Acute Nostalgia or, The Strange Case of Coca-Cola
8. A Problem of Narcissism
Part III. Group Psychology and the Analysis of Genius
9. The Secret Life of Groups
10. The Logic of Debasement
11. Toward an Ethics of Subjective Cession
12. Life after the Image or, Cluny Brown
Conclusion: Drive within the Limits of Death Alone
Bibliography
Index