The publication in English of Serge Moscovici's Psychoanalysis, Its
Image and Its Public is an event of singular importance for social
psychology. For the first time, English-speaking readers will have
access to one of the most influential books published in the discipline
in the past 30 years.
Moscovici's development of the theory of social representations has long
been recognised as a major contribution to social psychology, but
discussion of the theory has been limited been by the unavailability in
English of the text in which he provides his most extensive presentation
of the theory and demonstrates its fecundity through his empirical study
of representations of psychoanalysis in France. Psychoanalysis is in
many ways the founding text of the theory of social representations and
is, as such, a modern classic. As well as tracing the ways in which
knowledge of psychoanalysis is transformed as it is reconstructed by
different social groups in French society, Moscovici provides an
extensive analysis of the representations of psychoanalysis within the
mass media, showing how different interests structure such communication
through the different forms of propaganda, propagation and diffusion.
This book will be an indispensable text for students and scholars of
social psychology. It will also be of interest to psychologists,
sociologists and cultural theorists concerned with mass communication,
and to all those with an interest in current perspectives in the social
sciences.
