Pages

▼

25 Psychoanalytic Theory Books Published in March & April 2016

#1 Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire


Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire explores the conjunction between psychoanalysis and democracy, in particular their shared commitments to free speech. In the process, it demonstrates how lawful constraints enable an embodied space or 'gap' for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols. This space, intuited by the First Amendment as it is by Freud's free association, enables personal and collective sovereignty. By naming a 'feminine law', we mark the primacy a space between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between knowledge and mystery.




#2 Religion and Psychoanalysis in India: Critical Clinical Practice 


Religion and Psychoanalysis in India questions the assumptions of an established scientific, evidence-based global mental health paradigm by examining the practices of faith-based healing. It proposes that human beings demonstrate a dual loyalty: to science as faith and faith as science, both of which get reconfigured in the process. In this particular context, science and faith are deployed in ways that are not only different but at times contrary to mainstream discourses of science and religion, and faith healing becomes a point where these two discourses collide head-on in negotiating cultural values and practices.




#3 Reading Italian Psychoanalysis


Psychoanalysis in Italy is a particularly diverse and vibrant profession, embracing a number of influences and schools of thought, connecting together new thinking, and producing theorists and clinicians of global renown. Reading Italian Psychoanalysis provides a comprehensive guide to the most important Italian psychoanalytic thinking of recent years, including work by major names such as Weiss, E.Gaddini, Matte Blanco, Nissim Momigliano, Canestri, Amati Mehler, and Ferro. It covers the most important theoretical developments and clinical advances, with special emphasis on contemporary topics such as transference, trauma and primitive states of mind where Italian work has been particular influential.




#4 The Skin-Ego


In this classic work, Didier Anzieu presents a synthesis of his research and proposes a theory on the functions of 'the skin-ego'. Just as the skin is envelope to the body, Anzieu sees 'the skin-ego' as a psychic envelope containing, defining and protecting the psyche. From this perspective, the structures and the function of the skin can provide psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with fertile analogies.

Book preview: The Skin-Ego



#5 The Clinical Erik Erikson: A Psychoanalytic Method of Engagement and Activation


The Clinical Erik Erikson: A psychoanalytic method of engagement and activation highlights Erikson’s transforming contributions to the field of psychoanalysis and honors his legacy by providing unpublished clinical case illustrations of his psychotherapeutic work.




#6 A Forgotten Freudian: The Passion of Karl Stern


This book explores the life and work of a neglected figure in the history of psychoanalysis, Karl Stern, who brought Freudian theory and practice to Catholic (and Christian) audiences around the world.

Karl Stern was a German-Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist who fled Germany in 1937 – first to London, then to Canada, where he taught at McGill University and the University of Ottawa, becoming Chief of Psychiatry at several major clinics in Ottawa and Montreal between 1952 and 1968, when he went into private practice. In 1951 he published The Pillar of Fire, a memoir that chronicled his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, his medical and psychiatric training, his first analysis, and his serial flirtations with Jewish Orthodoxy, Marxism and Zionism – all in the midst of the galloping Nazification of Germany. It also explored the long-standing inner-conflicts that preceded Stern’s conversion to Catholicism in 1943.




#7 Married Life and its Vicissitudes: A Therapeutic Approach


This book is about marital relations and its vicissitudes, and the possible way of dealing with them through marital therapy. It reflects the importance of turning marital miscommunications into constructive communications between partners in order to improve their relationship. The psychoanalytic perspective plays a significant role in exploring the marital relationship through the partners' emotional interaction with each other and the effect that their personal emotional development has on their constructive and destructive attitudes. On some occasions, other therapeutic models can be added to reinforce the therapeutic exploration and the possible therapeutic goal.




#8 Freud and War


During the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking the fundamental question: What can be done to liberate humanity from the menace of war? The psychoanalyst replied at length and their exchange of letters (reproduced here) was published in March 1933 under the title Why War?. The book would be included in the book burnings in Berlin on 10th of May that year.

Why War? is important in Freud’s work because in it he develops a fundamental idea that leads him to conclude that the life and death drives are linked – a thought that he had already entertained in works such as Death and Us (1915), which is also included here. In a terrible irony, Freud dedicated a copy of Why War? to Mussolini, who nonetheless instituted a police investigation of its author. The contributors to this volume explore the reasons underlying the dedication, as well as giving their own reflections on the genesis of war.

Book preview: Freud and War



#9 Freud on Time and Timelessness


Time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. In this book Kelly Noel-Smith pieces together Freud's scattered 'hints' and 'suspicions' about time and its negative, timelessness. She traces a careful temporal trail through Freud’s published works and his daunting Nachlass, and provides a compelling reason as to why Freud kept his remarkable thoughts about time to himself.   



#10 Trauma, Ethics and the Political Beyond PTSD


This book deals with a series of problems associated with the contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, by means of a philosophical analysis inspired by the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.




#11 Ethics of Evil: Psychoanalytic Investigations


In today's world where every form of transgression enjoys a psychological motive and rational justification, psychoanalysis stands alone in its ability to uncover the hidden motives that inform individual and social collective behaviour. Both in theory and practice, it bears witness to the impact of anonymity on the potential for perpetration, especially when others are experienced as faceless, disposable objects whose otherness is, at bottom, but a projection, displacement, and denial of our own interiority-in short, the evil within.




#12 Fighting Melancholia: Don Quixote's Teaching


Françoise Davoine has been investigating psychotic phenomena and trauma for over thirty years, in collaboration with Jean-Max Gaudillière. In this book, she draws on her literary background to take the reader on a fascinating voyage with an unexpected but most helpful guide: Don Quixote.

In her work, Davoine approaches madness not as a symptom, but rather as a place, the place where the symbolic order and the social link have ruptured. She sees the psychotic as a seeker, engaged in a form of exploration into the nature and history of this place. This brings us to the seeker Don Quixote. Davoine takes the reader into the world of the knight-errant, to describe his adventures in a fascinating new light.




#13 From Soma to Symbol: Psychosomatic Conditions and Transformative Experience


This book traces the theoretical history of psychosomatics in psychoanalysis, and with it the ways that psychoanalytically-trained clinicians have tried to understand and treat patients with complex psychosomatic symptoms. It offers a rethinking of the mind-body relationship in psychoanalysis, eschewing past dichotomies between the psychological and the corporeal, and today's either-or distinctions between symbolizing and non-symbolizing patients. Theoretical and clinical issues are considered from a broad and integrative perspective. Psychosomatic patients' best interests are served neither by an indiscriminate embrace of dazzling new findings, nor by discarding established ways of understanding them. This volume exemplifies an approach that takes advantage of the rich history of the past as well as exciting new work in the neurosciences.

Book preview: From Soma to Symbol



#14 Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanlysis


Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time, while acknowledging, witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past.




#15 Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss


Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning.

In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life.




#16 The Urban Uncanny: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies


The Urban Uncanny explores through ten engaging essays the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city―as the organised and familiar environments in which citizens live, work, and go about their lives―and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it evokes. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in new and unexpected light; when its streets, buildings, and people suddenly appear strange, out of place, and not quite right.

Book preview: The Urban Uncanny



#17 New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning


Honoring the centennial of Sigmund Freud’s seminal paper Mourning and Melancholia, New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning is a major contribution to our culture’s changing view of bereavement and mourning, identifying flaws in old models and offering a new, valid and effective approach.




#18 Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis


What is the truth of the unconscious? Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis explores the intersection of these two concepts within a Bionian framework. Giuseppe Civitarese maps out the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and focuses on the differences between the Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian and Lacanian schools of thought on this topic, as well as drawing on findings from neuroscience.
 



#19 The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis


In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper explores a subject matter previously applied more exclusively to patients, but rarely to psychoanalysts. Cooper probes the analyst’s experience of the depressive position in the analytic situation. These experiences include the pleasures and warmth of helping patients to bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences of limitation, incompleteness, repetition and disappointment as a vital part of clinical work. He describes a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is always trying to find and re-find a position from which he can help patients to work with these experiences.

 


#20 Making Room for Madness in Mental Health: The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Psychotic Communication


In this book, Marcus Evans argues that in addition to providing a helpful treatment for patients who suffer from serious psychological difficulties, psychoanalytic thinking can also help mental health staff develop a better understanding of their patients and complement other ways of thinking about mental disturbance. Mental health professionals need to be receptive to their patients’ projections and communications, but these powerful projections can become overwhelming, especially for clinicians who are in direct contact with their patients for long periods of time. A psychoanalytic model which puts the understanding of the relationship between the clinician and patient at the centre of its preoccupations can also give mental health professionals a language for describing their experiences of, and interactions with, their patients. This model is developmental and provides a dynamic picture of the ways in which different parts of the patient’s self wrestle for control of the patient’s mind over time. Evans argues that this framework for understanding can help in the day-to-day management of these changes and fluctuations.




#21 Into the Darkest Places: Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States of Mind


This book explores the roots of borderline states of mind in early relational trauma and shows how it is possible, and necessary, to visit 'the darkest places' in order to work through these traumas. This is despite the fact that re-experiencing such traumas is unbearable for the patient and they naturally want to enlist the analyst in ensuring that they will never be experienced again. This is the backdrop for the extreme pressures and roles that are constellated in the analysis that can lead to impasse or breakdown of the analytic relationship.




#22 Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process


Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about the interdependence of subjectivity and intersubjectivity has reenvisioned the analytic process, and with it the very nature of creative and engaged psychoanalytic listening. Yet few systematic writings on psychoanalytic listening or technique provide comprehensive instruction that would prepare the analyst for the kind of analytic listening needed to participate imaginatively in this sort of intersubjective experience.Offering a short course in analytic listening, Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process provides a guide for the clinical uses of imaginative literature.



#23 Boundaries and Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis: Second Edition


Boundaries and Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis is a state-of-the-art overview of the problem of boundary violations in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This new edition is a major overhaul of the seminal first edition, published 20 years ago, and addresses topics with which every psychoanalyst, therapist, trainee, and training director should be conversant.




#24 The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities


The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the historical, theoretical and applied forms of psychoanalytical criticism. This path-breaking Handbook offers students new ways of understanding the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, and of the social, cultural and political possibilities of psychoanalytic critique.




#25 Freud and the Melancholy Rabbi: A Novel


'One day they will say that Sigmund Freud read the Law with a rabbi, and no one will believe it.'

Vienna, 1903, and two unlikely figures meet: Rashab, the fifth Rabbi of Lubavitch, and Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Rashab has journeyed from Lubavitch to Vienna with his son, his future successor; the paralysis in his arm and a persistent stutter leading him to this consultation with Freud.




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.



 See also:


http://amzn.to/10EsljR