Laurence A. Rickels
American psychotherapist
Laurence Arthur Rickels (born December 2, 1954) is an American literary and media theorist, whose work examines psychoanalysis, media culture, and German intellectual history. His scholarship draws on the traditions of the Frankfurt School and deconstruction in its engagement with psychoanalysis and mass-media culture. His books include ''The Case of California'' (1991), ''The Vampire Lectures'' (1999), and the three-volume ''Nazi Psychoanalysis'' (2002).
Early life and education
Rickels was born in Cherokee, Iowa on December 2, 1954. He currently resides and works in Palm Springs and Berlin.
Rickels studied English literature as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1975. During this period he also spent time studying in Germany in connection with the Free University of Berlin.
He continued his graduate studies at Princeton University, where he completed a Ph.D. in German literature in 1980. His doctoral dissertation examined visual imagination and representation in the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gottfried Keller, and Franz Kafka.
Academic career
Rickels taught in the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his teaching and research focused on psychoanalytic theory, German literature, film, and media culture.
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This entry incorporates text from “Laurence A. Rickels” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.