#1 Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the Unforbidden, from the fall of our 'first parents' Adam and Eve to the work of the great twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers.
Phillips' latest ambitious project explores the philosophical, psychological and social complexities that govern human desire and shape our reality.
Book preview: Unforbidden Pleasures
#2 The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis: The Rise and Fall of Cognitivism by Agnes Aflalo
It can happen that a law incurs the wrath of the very people it set out to protect. This is what happened in France at the end of 2003 with the Accoyer Amendment, a Bill that intended to regulate the exercise of psychotherapies even at the cost of the disappearance of psychoanalysis itself. The public that this law was supposed to protect thus ran the risk of finding themselves stripped of certain freedoms that democracy usually guarantees.
How had it become possible to reach such a point? This is what this book sets out to examine. Evaluation and cognitive-behavioural scientism, which have been progressively infiltrating different forms of knowledge with destructive effect, undoubtedly played a major role. And then, the International Psychoanalytical Association, despite having been founded by Freud to protect his invention, started to endorse the forced cognitivisation of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, psychiatry slid back into its nineteenth century hygienic obscurantism and its new recruit, epidemiology, began playing host to racialist discourses.
Book preview: The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis
#3 Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game by Todd McGowan
The first book in the series, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, offers a concise introduction to psychoanalytic film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Jean Renoir's classic film. It traces the development of psychoanalytic film theory through its foundation in the thought of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan through its contemporary manifestation in the work of theorists like Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec.
Book preview: Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game
#4 Rensal the Redbit: A Psychoanalytic Fairy Tale by Eugene J. Mahon
'Many years ago in Mytherranea, before the stars had names, when daisies were still called days' eyes, and the moon stayed up all night to keep the darkness company, there lived a race called redbits...'
So begins the tale of Rensal, a small creature trying to make sense of a big world. Running along one day, Rensal bumps into the Tall One, a wise and mysterious redbit who loves to talk. Over tea, toast, and berries, the friends discuss life, love, creation, dreams, death, and everything else that lies under the sun.
Book preview: Rensal the Redbit
#5 Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion, Edited by Alex Hoffer
This book investigates what psychoanalysis and Buddhism can learn from each other, and offers chapters by a Buddhist scholar, a psychiatrist-author, and a number of leading psychoanalysts. It begins with a discussion of the basic understanding of both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, viewed not as a religion but as a psychology and a philosophy with ethical principles.
Book preview: Freud and the Buddha
#6 Political Freud: A History by Eli Zaretsky
In this masterful psychological-intellectual history, Eli Zaretsky shows Freudianism to be something more than a method of psychotherapy. When considered alongside the major struggles of the twentieth century, Freudianism becomes a catalyst of the age. Political Freud is Zaretsky's account of the way twentieth century radicals, activists, and thinkers used Freudian thought to understand the political developments of their century.
Book preview: Political Freud
#7 Money as Emotional Currency, Edited by Anca Carrington
The book explores the impact of the emotional undercurrent stirred by money from its beginnings in childhood to its consolidation into adult life, for individuals and society alike, and with an emphasis on ordinary development, rather than on pathology. Bringing together Freud's seminal work with more recent applications of psychoanalytic thinking to financial markets, with Borges' prose and Lacanian insights, this book crosses discipline and school boundaries with the aim of making new insights possible.
Book preview: Money as Emotional Currency
#8 The Feeling Brain: Selected Papers on Neuropsychoanalysis by Mark Solms
Neuropsychoanalysis is the fastest growing area within psychoanalysis, providing a bridge between "classic" psychoanalysis and the neurological sciences. This book provides an accessible introduction to the field through a selection of papers by one of its leading figures. It includes papers on the theoretical and philosophical foundations of neuropsychoanalysis, scientific papers on the brain mechanisms of dreaming and consciousness, the application of neuropsychoanalysis in psychiatry and neurology, and clinical case studies.
Book preview: The Feeling Brain
#9 The Psychoanalytic Craft: How to Develop as a Psychoanalytic Practitioner by Laurence Spurling
Why is developing as a psychoanalytic practitioner so often laden with anxiety? A simple answer is that psychoanalytic work is intrinsically complex and difficult. But Laurence Spurling argues traditional accounts of practice make these difficulties even worse for students and practitioners: he shows that case descriptions and examples in psychoanalytic textbooks often give a misleading picture of practice, because they explore what practitioners ought to do rather than what they actually do.
This book has been written specifically for those students and practitioners moving beyond beginner level towards skilled and resourceful practice.
Book preview: The Psychoanalytic Craft
#10 Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy by Gillian Isaacs Russell
Can an effective therapeutic process occur without physical co-presence? What happens to screen-bound treatment when, as a patient said, there is no potential to “kiss or kick?” Our most intimate relationships, including that of analyst and patient, rely on a significant implicit non-verbal component carrying equal or possibly more weight than the explicit verbal component. How is this finely-nuanced interchange affected by technologically-mediated communication?
Book preview: Screen Relations
#11 Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis (2nd Edition), Edited by Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton
Sabina Spielrein is perhaps best known for her love affair with her doctor, Carl Gustav Jung. Their intense therapeutic relationship led to a mutual fascination that lasted, for Spielrein, for the rest of her life. It is debatable whether Spielrein and Jung’s relationship was consummated, but it did give birth to some of the most important ideas within psychoanalysis and analytical psychology today, the most notable being that of the death instinct. But what happened to Spielrein and why have her story and work remained in the dark for so many years?
This new edition compiles the essential writings of Spielrein along with commentaries by prominent psychoanalytic and Jungian scholars. It is the definitive source book on Spielrein for clinicians, scholars and historians of psychoanalysis.
Book preview: Sabina Spielrein
#12 Wilhelm Reich, Biologist by James E. Strick
Psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies, prophet of the sexual revolution all fitting titles, but Wilhelm Reich has never been recognized as a serious laboratory scientist, despite his experimentation with bioelectricity and unicellular organisms. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist "is an eye-opening reappraisal of one of twentieth-century science s most controversial figures perhaps the only writer whose scientific works were burned by both the Nazis and the U.S. government. Refuting allegations of pseudoscience that have long dogged Reich s research, James Strick argues that Reich s lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions.y
Book preview: Wilhelm Reich, Biologist
#13 Laplanche: An Introduction by Dominique Scarfone
Dominique Scarfone's Laplanche: An Introduction is now available in Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz’s brilliantly clear English translation. More than an overview of Laplanche’s career, Scarfone’s text presents an unparalleled insight into the mechanisms, provocations, and spectacular theoretical achievements of Laplanche’s work, which has been increasingly recognized as integral to Francophone — and more recently, Anglophone — psychoanalytic practice and theory.
#14 Living Moments: On the Work of Michael Eigen, Edited by Stephen Bloch and Loray Daws
Michael Eigen is widely regarded as a significant and increasingly influential figure in contemporary psychoanalysis. His writings represent a singular interpretation of Bion and Winnicott, as well as being characterised by a striking and poetic style.
The papers are divided into three sections: Reflections (psychoanalytic and philosophical concerns, such as Heidegger, the Hindu Goddess Kali, Buddhism, the sense of Time); Refractions (clinical implications, papers on murder and aliveness, the nature of the analytic interaction, addiction and work with the mother-infant relationship), and Responses (personal impacts of his works, as well as poetry and the thoughts of a creative writer on Eigen's oeuvre). There are also papers on the experience of supervision with Michael Eigen as well as on his weekly seminars on Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, ongoing for more than forty years, in New York. The book is a long-overdue celebration of and homage to a creative and unique figure in contemporary psychoanalysis.
Book preview: Living Moments: On the Work of Michael Eigen
#15 The New Klein-Lacan Dialogues, Edited by Julia Borossa, Catalina Bronstein, Claire Pajaczkowska
This book provides a timely exploration and comparison of key concepts in the theories of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, two thinkers and clinicians whose influence over the development of psychoanalysis in the wake of Freud has been profound and far-reaching. Whilst the centrality of the unconscious is a strong conviction shared by both Klein and Lacan, there are also many differences between the two schools of thought and the clinical work that is produced in each. The purpose of this collection is to take seriously these similarities and differences.
The collection centres around key concepts such as: 'symbolic function', the 'ego', the 'object', the 'body', 'trauma', 'autism', 'affect' and 'history and archives'.
Book preview: The New Klein-Lacan Dialogues
#16 Let's Keep Talking: Lacanian Tales of Love, Sex, and Other Catastrophes by Yael Baldwin
Let’s Keep Talking: Lacanian Tales of Love, Sex, and Other Catastrophes is a collection of original Lacanian case studies of young people today as they struggle with their own modern existential dilemmas of sex and love, life and death. The context, background, and forms of expression may be contemporary, but the clients’ problems, structures, and existential dilemmas are quite classic. The five narrative tales highlight the role a Lacanian orientation played in the interactions, formulations, and results, from initial meetings to terminations.
#17 Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t, Edited by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler
This new collection of essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians will revolutionize your understanding of madness. Essential for those on both sides of the couch eager to make sense of the plethora of theories about madness available today, Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t provides compelling and original perspectives following the work of Jacques Lacan.
This book offers a fresh view on a wide variety of manifestations and presentations of madness, featuring clinical case studies, new theoretical developments in psychosis, and critical appraisal of artistic expressions of insanity.
Book preview: Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t
#18 Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference by Bruce Fink
Can psychoanalysis – with ample assistance from philosophers, poets, novelists, and songwriters – give us a new perspective on the wellsprings and course of love? Can it help us fathom how and why we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and are fundamentally confused about what love really is ?
In this lively and wide–ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions – from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism – and providing an in–depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan s paradoxical claim that love is giving what you don t have. He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don t have.
#19 Transference: Book 8: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
“Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades’ desire – ágalma, the good object.
I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.
It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire’s serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates’ desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other – the object, ágalma – was at his mercy.
Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed – its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.”
Jacques Lacan
Freud, Lacan and Liberation - Psychoanalytic Radical Thinkers by Verso
#20 Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious by Octave Mannoni
Octave Mannoni worked in France, Madagascar, and Africa throughout the twentieth century to develop Lacanian psychoanalytic methods in the feld of ethnology. He is best known for his research on the psychic affects of colonization: domination of a mass by a minority, economic exploitation, paternalism, and racialism.
Positioning his perspectives within the Freudian framework, Mannoni’s book Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious is a well-crafted and concise introduction to the Austrian neurologist’s life, work, and theories.
Buy Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious here. (50% off, Free shipping and bundled ebook)
#21 Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists by Joan Copjec
In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses – psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan’s explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be “literate in desire,” that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements.
Buy Read My Desire here. (50% off, Free shipping and bundled ebook)
#22 The Weary Sons of Freud by Catherine Clément
In this passionately written and controversial book, first published in 1978, Catherine Clément, Communist, feminist and analysand, asks what the social function of psychoanalysis should be and condemns what it has become.
She attacks psychoanalysis as an institution disdainful of treatment and cure, serving the interests of a new intelligentsia, the nouveaux riches of a narcissistic literary culture and publishing industry. Contrasting the insights of psychoanalytic theory to the obsessive imitations of Jacques Lacan by those who followed him as a practitioner-trainer, she offers an anthropological perspective and a political critique of Parisian psychoanalysis as a profession. How has the attentive ear of the analyst become deaf to questions about the social and political meaning of his or her work? Does a woman who is both a socialist and analysand necessarily hear such questions more clearly and answer them differently?
Buy The Weary Sons of Freud here. (50% off, Free shipping and bundled ebook)
#23 The Dialectics of Liberation by Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Paul Sweezy, and others
The Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of modern dissent, in which existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists, and political leaders met to discuss the key social issues of the following decade. Edited by David Cooper, this volume compiles speeches by Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Paul Sweezy, and others. The collection explores the roots of violence in society.
Buy The Dialectics of Liberation here. (50% off, Free shipping and bundled ebook)
#24 Hysteria Today, Edited by Anouchka Grose
Hysteria, one of the most diagnosed conditions in human history, is also one of the most problematic. Can it even be said to exist at all? Since the earliest medical texts people have had something to say about ‘feminine complaints’. Over the centuries, theorisations of the root causes have lurched from the physiological to the psychological to the socio-political. Thanks to its dual association with femininity and with fakery, the notion of hysteria inevitably provokes questions about women, men, sex, bodies, minds, culture, happiness and unhappiness.
#25 Hysteria: An illuminating visual guide to the birth of Psychoanalysis by Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate
Hysteria follows the early career of Sigmund Freud, from his training in neurological research to his establishment of a therapeutic practice in Vienna.
Taking in the psychoanalyst's earliest clinical experiences, his studies alongside Charcot at La Salpêtrière and his interest in the work of his friend and colleague Joseph Breuer, Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate introduce the characters and case histories that inspired the development of a revolutionary new clinical therapy. Drawing on the case histories of "Anna O.", Fräulein Elisabeth von R. and others, Hysteria shows Freud and his contemporaries developing ideas that would transform the intellectual landscape of the Western world. This is a masterful visual guide to the strange and fascinating characters that populate Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria, the founding text of psychoanalysis.
Book preview: Hysteria: An illuminating visual guide to the birth of Psychoanalysis
If you’re a publisher or author, please let us know about your upcoming books by emailing freud.quotes [at] gmail [dot] com so you may be included in future roundup.
