#1 Radical Psychoanalysis: An essay on free-associative praxis
Only by the method of free-association could Sigmund Freud have demonstrated how human consciousness is formed by the repression of thoughts and feelings that we consider dangerous. Yet today most therapists ignore this truth about our psychic life. This book offers a critique of the many brands of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that have forgotten Freud's revolutionary discovery.
Barnaby B. Barratt offers a fresh and compelling vision of the structure and function of the human psyche, building on the pioneering work of theorists such as André Green and Jean Laplanche, as well as contemporary deconstruction, feminism, and liberation philosophy.
#2 Winnicott's Theory of the Maturational Processes
This book presents the central concepts of Winnicott's theory of the maturational processes, clarifying its premises and providing an organised description of the various stages, with their respective tasks and achievements.
This theory, considered by Winnicott as the backbone of his theoretical and clinical work, can be used as a practical guide for the understanding of health phenomena and for the early detection of emotional difficulties. It also provides the framework from which different aspects of the study of human nature can be developed, such as those related to cultural achievements and the entire domain of creativity, as well as the basis on which it is possible to clarify concepts about psychic disorders, on account of their intimate connection with the stages of maturation.
Book preview: Winnicott's Theory of the Maturational Processes
#3 The Ethical Turn: Otherness and Subjectivity in Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Levinas (1969) claims that "morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy" and if he is right about this, might ethics also serve as a first psychology? This possibility is explored by the authors in this volume who seek to bring the "ethical turn" into the world of psychoanalysis. This phenomenologically rich and socially conscious ethics has taken centre stage in a variety of academic disciplines, inspired by the work of philosophers and theologians concerned with the moral fabric of subjectivity, human relationship, and socio-political life. At the heart of this movement is a reconsideration of the other person, and the dangers created when the question of the "Other" is subsumed by grander themes.
The Ethical Turn: Otherness and subjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis guides readers into the heart of this fresh and exciting movement and includes contributions from many leading thinkers, who provide fascinating new avenues for enriching our responses to suffering and understandings of human identity.
#4 Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy
From its etymological roots, sex is related to a scission, Latin for sectus, secare, meaning “to divide or cut.” Therefore, regardless of the various studies applied to defining sex as inscribed by discursive acts, i.e. merely a ‘performatively enacted signification,’ there is something more to sex than just a social construction or an aprioristic substance. Sex is irreducible to meaning or knowledge.
This is why psychoanalysis cannot be formulated as an erotology nor a science of sex (scientia sexualis). Following this argumentation, in the final class of his eleventh seminar, Lacan asserts that psychoanalysis has proven to be uncreative in the realm of sexuality. Henceforth, sex does not engrave itself within the symbolic: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. In this matter, sex escapes the symbolic restraints of language; however, it is through its failure that it manifests itself through the symbolic, e.g. symptoms or dream life. So, what is sex? Sex and Nothing embarks upon a dialogue between colleagues and friends interested in bridging psychoanalysis and philosophy, linking sex and thought, where what emerges is a greater awareness of the irreducucibility of sex to the discourse of knowledge and meaning: in other words, sex and nothing.
#5 Speaking of Bodies: Embodied Therapeutic Dialogues
While the body has received significant attention in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the last couple of decades, this still focused primarily on the body of pathology - the body as speaking for (or on behalf of) the mind. Here, leading psychoanalysts and psychotherapists join with experts whose field is the body to examine and celebrate generative, creative, vital, and irreducible aspects of our embodiment.
Book preview: Speaking of Bodies: Embodied Therapeutic Dialogues
#6 The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Spaces of Transition
How do external material environments and the inner world of emotion, memory and imagination influence each other? In this thought-provoking book, Jane Rendell explores how architectural space registers in psychoanalysis. She investigates both the inherently spatial vocabulary of psychoanalysis and ideas around the physical 'setting' of the psychoanalytic encounter, with reference to Sigmund Freud, D.W. Winnicott and Andre Green. Building on the innovative writing methods employed in Art and Architecture and Site-Writing, she also addresses the concept of architecture as 'social condenser' a Russian constructivist notion that connects material space and community relations. Tracing this idea's progress from 1920s Moscow to 1950s Britain, Rendell shows how interior and exterior meet in both psychoanalysis and architectural practice. Illuminating a novel field of interdisciplinary enquiry, this book breathes fresh life into notions of social space.
#7 Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism
Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism provides rich new insights into the history of political thought and clinical knowledge. In these chapters, internationally renowned historians and cultural theorists discuss landmark debates about the uses and abuses of ‘the talking cure’ and map the diverse psychologies and therapeutic practices that have featured in and against tyrannical, modern regimes.
These essays show both how the Freudian movement responded to and was transformed by the rise of fascism and communism, the Second World War, and the Cold War, and how powerful new ideas about aggression, destructiveness, control, obedience and psychological freedom were taken up in the investigation of politics. They identify important intersections between clinical debate, political analysis, and theories of minds and groups, and trace influential ideas about totalitarianism that took root in modern culture after 1918, and still resonate in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they suggest how the emergent discourses of ‘totalitarian’ society were permeated by visions of the unconscious.
Book preview: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism
#8 Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis
In Reclaiming Unlived Life, influential psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden uses rich clinical examples to illustrate how different types of thinking may promote or impede analytic work. With a unique style of "creative reading," the book builds upon the work of Winnicott and Bion, discussing the universality of unlived life and the ways unlived life may be reclaimed in the analytic experience. The book examines the role of intuition in analytic practice and the process of developing an analytic style that is uniquely one’s own.
Book preview: Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis
#9 The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: The Origin of a Two-Person Psychology and Emphatic Perspective
The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis brings together a collection of expertly written pieces on the influence of the Budapest (Ferenczi) conception of analytic theory and practice on the evolution of psychoanalysis. It touches on major figures Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint whilst concurrently considering topics such as Ferenczi’s clinical diary, the study of trauma, the Confusion of Tongues paradigm, and Balint’s perspective on supervision. Further to this, the book highlights Jacques Lacan’s teaching of Ferenczi, which brings a fresh perspective to a relatively unknown connection between them.
Book preview: The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: The Origin of a Two-Person Psychology and Emphatic Perspective
#10 False Bodies, True Selves: Moving Beyond Appearance-Focused Identity Struggles and Returning to the True Self
False Bodies, True Selves explores the phenomenon of growing numbers of people in western society and beyond completely embedding their sense of identity in their appearance. Unlike other books which address either theoretical models of appearance-focused identity struggles or explore lived experiences of appearance-based battles, False Bodies delves into both. Importantly, the spiritual aspects of what it is to become enemies with one’s body are given centre stage in the context of Donald Winnicott’s theory of the true Self and the false Self.
Book preview: False Bodies, True Selves: Moving Beyond Appearance-Focused Identity Struggles and Returning to the True Self
#11 Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language
Psychosis, an invasion of mind and body from without, creates an enigma about what is happening and thrusts the individual into radical isolation. What are the subjective details of such experiences? This book explores psychosis as knowledge cut off from history, truth that cannot be articulated in any other form.
#12 Andre Green at the Squiggle Foundation: Revised Edition
Despite being one of the foremost psychoanalysts working today, much of Andre Green's work has until recently been unavailable in English. This work aims to rectify this, by collecting together five lectures given to the Squiggle Foundation in London. This accessible and clearly written book provides a unique introduction to Green's work and its relation to the work of D.W. Winnicott, as promoted by the Squiggle Foundation itself.
Book preview: Andre Green at the Squiggle Foundation: Revised Edition
#13 On Freud's ''Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning''
This book is a collection of papers by leading contemporary psychoanalysts who comment on the continuing important relevance of Freud's (1911) paper, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. The contributors gathered here represent current European, Latin American, and North American perspectives that elaborate the continuing value of Two Principles for present-day psychoanalytic thinking. Each author examines Freud's paper through a personal lens that is coloured by the psychoanalytic culture from which he or she comes. In each instance, the writers' chapters demonstrate the heuristic value of Two Principles for twenty-first century psychoanalytic theory and technique.
#14 Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason
The emotions pose many philosophical questions. We don't choose them; they come over us spontaneously. Sometimes emotions seem to get it wrong: we experience wrongdoing but do not feel anger, feel fear but recognise there is no danger. Yet often we expect emotions to be reasonable, intelligible and appropriate responses to certain situations. How do we explain these apparent contradictions?
Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason presents a bold new picture of the emotions that challenges prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. Talia Morag argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the "reasonableness" of emotions and far too little on two neglected areas: the imagination and the unconscious. She uses these to propose a new philosophical and psychoanalytic conception of the emotions that challenges the perceived rationality of emotions; views the emotions as fundamental to determining one's self-image; and bases therapy on the ability to "listen" to one’s emotional episode as it occurs.
Book preview: Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason
#15 Filmed School: Desire, transgression and the filmic fantasy of pedagogy
Filmed School examines the place that teaching holds in the public imaginary through its portrayal in cinema. From early films such as Mädchen in Uniform and La Maternelle to contemporary images of teaching in Notes on a Scandal and The History Boys, teachers’ roles in film have been consistently contradictory, portraying teachers as both seducers and selfless heroes, social outcasts and moral models, contributing to a similarly divided popular understanding of teachers as both salvific and sinister.
In this book, Stillwaggon and Jelinek present these contradictory images of teaching through the concept of transference―the fantastical belief in another’s knowing that founds a teacher’s authority in relation to her students and, to some degree, the public at large. Tracing the place of transference across a century of school films, each chapter demonstrates the persistence of this fantasy in one of the dreams or nightmares of teaching that recurs thematically in school films: the teacher-as-savior, seducer, signifier in a moribund discourse, and sacrificial object. Through these analyses, the authors suggest that something might be missing in our attempts to theorize education when we leave our unthought fantasies of teaching out of the picture.
#16 The Scientific Status of Psychoanalysis: Evidence and Confirmation
In his Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, Adolf Grünbaum claimed that the arguments supporting psychoanalytic hypotheses are both logically invalid and unsound. They are invalid because they violate the cannons of inductive elimination, and unsound because the clinical data is contaminated by the suggestive influence of the analyst.
In a spirited defence of psychoanalysis, Pushpa Misra asserts that Grünbaum's argument over suggestibility is not supported by textual evidence and gives her own formulation of Freud's argument to show how the problem of suggestibility can be dealt with. To counter the charge of the invalidity of the repression argument, the author addresses the two specific objections of Grünbaum: first, that repression can be a maintaining rather than an originating cause of neurotic symptoms, and, second, that by eliminating rival candidates it is possible to formulate a valid argument for repression aetiology.
#17 The Strange Case of Madeleine Seguin: A Novel
It is Paris in the 1880s and the century is in its final decadent throes as it moves towards the fin de siecle. New scientific ideas are countered by a resurgent interest in the practice of magic, whilst in the arts the Symbolists are exploring the strangeness of dream and the imagination.
In the Salpêtrière Hospital, hundreds of female patients are suffering from the curious malady of 'hysteria'. Many of these are being treated by hypnosis under the regime of the celebrated and charismatic Professor J-M. Charcot. One such patient is Madeleine Seguin, a young woman whose past is a mystery and who evokes a fascination and possessiveness in those who come close to her.
Book preview: The Strange Case of Madeleine Seguin: A Novel
#18 Anomalous Affections: A Novel
In middle age, Lin is diagnosed with a chronic disease. Yearning for change and solitude, she finds affirmation in the life of the eighteenth-century French writer Isabelle de Charrière. Seeking an explanation for her condition, Lin examines her own stressful childhood, torn between her father's love and her mother's jealousy. She describes her unrequited passion in her twenties for an older man - a relationship that would be repeated thirty-five years later in therapy.
In the course of this eroticised transference her feelings of love alternate with rage, and the power imbalance between patient and therapist is laid bare. She emerges with a new sense that her emotional anomalies, like her physical ones, must be accommodated, without blame or bitterness.
This is a searing tale from a patient's perspective of therapy, loneliness, and resolution.
Book preview: Anomalous Affections: A Novel
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