#1 Freud: In His Time and Ours
Elisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud s biography for the twenty-first century a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours.
Roudinesco traces Freud s life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis' annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siécle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire.
Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture.
#2 Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics
Nietzsche and the Clinic reimagines what a sustained engagement with Nietzsche's thinking has to offer psychoanalysis today. Beyond the headlines that continue to misrepresent Nietzsche's project, this book portrays Nietzsche as a thinker of tremendous practical import for those treating the emergent pathologies of the twenty-first century with an interpretive approach.
#3 Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism
The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "marriage of Marx and Freud," psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "foundation stone" of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation.
Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance.
#4 Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives: New Conceptions of Geometry and Space in Freud and Lacan
The volume addresses the philosophical, epistemological and interdisciplinary aspects of the link between psychoanalysis and topology. Looking at the historical developments of psychoanalytic theory, one can hardly overlook the significant presence of architectonic and geometrical references that traverse Freud's writings. Lacan's return to Freud made a decisive step in taking these metaphors seriously and engaged with the mathematical correspondence of Freud's topological models. He thereby intensified the link with topology, which obtained an important didactic and conceptual value. The contributions highlight the ongoing relevance of this "topological turn" in psychoanalysis by exploring both concrete topological objects and outline the philosophical framework that supports the relation of psychoanalysis to topology.
#5 Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis
It is often said that Lacan is the most radical representative of structuralism, a thinker of negativity and alienation, whereas Deleuze is pictured as a great opponent of the structuralist project, a vitalist and a thinker of creative potentialities of desire. It seems the two cannot be further apart. This volume of 12 new essays, breaks the myth of their foreignness (if not hostility) and places the two in a productive conversation. By taking on topics such as baroque, perversion, death drive, ontology/topology, face, linguistics and formalism the essays highlight key entry points for a discussion between Lacan's and Deleuze's respective thoughts. The proposed lines of investigation do not argue for a simple equation of their thoughts, but for a 'disjunctive synthesis', which acknowledges their differences, while insisting on their positive and mutually informed reading.
#6 The Analyst Who Laughed to Death: The Double-Story of a Traumatic Childhood
The Analyst Who Laughed to Death recounts Dr Reuben Moses’ last days as a therapist for suicidal, psychopathic, and depressed patients. Despite his geniality, Moses is tortured. His wife has an affair, exiling Moses to a tiny flat with his neurotic retriever, Jaffe-Jaffe.
Written as a tragic-comic case-history, this novel, like Freud’s Wolf-Man, addresses the complexity of trauma, memory, and childhood love of a powerful woman. Set in present-day Toronto, Dr Moses represents a vanishing breed, a medical psychoanalyst exploring the meaning of patients’ suffering set against the current landscape of brief psychotherapy and overuse of drugs.
#7 Critical Flicker Fusion: Psychoanalysis at the Movies
The premise of this book is that films, like other works of the imagination, may be elucidated by applying methods derived from psychoanalysis, and that doing so will result in a deeper and richer appreciation of the film's meaning. The book explores a number of feature films that lend themselves particularly well to this process. Both in his introduction and throughout the text, the author comments on the method and discusses continuities, similarities and differences among the films.
Book preview: Critical Flicker Fusion: Psychoanalysis at the Movies
#8 Encounters with John Bowlby: Tales of Attachment
Encounters with John Bowlby: Tales of Attachment is an insightful, heartfelt and faithful homage to John Bowlby (1907-1990), the ‘father’ of attachment theory. The book unfolds as a touching and absorbing biographical journey into his life and work, where Bowlby is portrayed vividly through his individual, family and group attachment history, as well as his personal and professional development.
Book preview: Encounters with John Bowlby: Tales of Attachment
#9 Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community: History and Contemporary Reappraisals
Trauma is one of the hottest contemporary topics within psychoanalysis, whilst many psychoanalysts are increasingly interested in applying their skills outside the traditional setting of the consulting room, especially in response to disasters, wars and serious social issues. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community seeks to correct the misconceptions of what analysts do and how they do it and debunk the stereotype of psychoanalysts stuck in their offices plying their wares on the worried well.
#10 Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on truth, scandal, secrets, and lies
Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung delves into the mysteries of scandalous behavior- behavior that can seem shocking, unfathomable, or self-destructive - that is outrageous and offensive on the one hand, yet fascinating and exciting on the other. In the process, this anthology asks fundamental questions about the self: what the self is allowed to be and do, what must be disallowed, and what remains unknown.
Book preview: Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung
#11 Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide
Every day, clinicians encounter challenges to empathy and communication while struggling to assist patients with diverse life histories, character, sexuality, gender, psychopathology, cultural, religious, political, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Most writing pertaining to ideas of similarity, discrepancy, and ‘the Other’ has highlighted differences. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide offers a different focus, emphasising points of contact, connection, and how divisions between people can be transcended.
#12 Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Adolescents with Depression: A Treatment Manual
Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP) is a manualised, time-limited model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy comprising twenty-eight weekly sessions for the adolescent patient and seven sessions for parents or carers, designed so that it can be delivered within a public mental health system, such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the UK.
#13 Permission to Narrate: Explorations in Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis, Culture
Permission to Narrate develops exciting new theory and explorations for group analysis. They are diverse in range and, from differing bases in theory and research, aim to cast light on how clients find voice and speak out in groups and the importance of rhetoric in the understanding of communication. It addresses the ways in which silenced, submerged and less confident voices emerge, finding permission and narration, often against the odds. Positioning and dialogical theory is used to show how such voices are caught up in and defined by discourses, and also how we can transcend the definitions and positions into which we are thrown. Accessible clinical and historical examples bring theory to life.
#14 The Future of Psychoanalysis: The Debate About the Training Analyst System
This book is concerned with the question of what psychoanalytic training should look like today. Should we go on with the system that has developed over time? Or should we abandon it, and if so, for which reasons?
With contributions by Emanuel Berman, Harold P. Blum, Elias M. da Rocha Barros, Kenneth Eisold, Cláudio Laks Eizirik, Gigliola Fornari Spoto, Cesar Garza Guerrero, Otto F. Kernberg, Douglas Kirsner, Robert Michels, Luiz Meyer, Robert L. Pyles, Robert S. Wallerstein, Sara Zac de Filc, and Peter Zagermann.
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