#1 Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis
If psychoanalysis will survive in the twenty-first century, this book’s wager is that it will be Lacanian psychoanalysis. Today, the survival of psychoanalysis is in question. Even Jacques Lacan himself, at the peak of his influence when psychoanalysis was a dominant discourse, did not believe that psychoanalysis would triumph and merely posed questions about the survival of psychoanalysis, when future subjects would want something else.
This book articulates a possible future for Lacan and psychoanalysis, through an exploration of the historical trajectory of psychoanalysis and a survey of the ways Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a unique response to the pressing clinical demands of our time.
Much of the book stages this through explications of specific ways Lacanian concepts have developed as a reading of the clinical - as well as the broader psychic and social - phenomena of our moment in history. Psychosis, which is an increasing clinical phenomena, and addiction, which is often described as a contemporary epidemic, are given longer treatment here, while other chapters address central concepts such as trauma, fantasy, the symptom, the body, transference, knowledge, and love.
The book closes with two sections of reflections on psychoanalysis outside of the Lacanian orientation and on the general mental health field.
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#2 The New Analyst's Guide to the Galaxy: Questions about Contemporary Psychoanalysis
This book consists of a dialogue between a young psychoanalyst, Luca Nicoli, and a renowned teaching analyst, Antonino Ferro. It touches upon many of the key areas of contemporary psychoanalysis: setting, technique, theory, as well as post Bionian models and the "BFT" - the famous Bionian Field Theory devised by Ferro.
Using a friendly, informal style, Ferro and his colleague Nicoli challenge the certainties of orthodoxy, leading the discourse toward the unknown and the as yet undiscovered. Both young and experienced analysts will find not only practical advice in this book but also challenges to their own theoretical and emotional assumptions in the unexplored, ever-changing encounter with the patient. Reading this guide is guaranteed to make them reassess their working methods.
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#3 The Digital Age on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media
The Digital Age is on the couch. Working today, it is essential that clinicians understand the world we live in. The transition from an industrial economy to an information economy impacts not just the external structure of society and commerce, but also the internal psychic economies of our brains and, inevitably, how clinicians conceptualise the analytic setting in which they practice as therapists and analysts.
The Digital Age on the Couch seeks to understand more about how new technologies interact with the prerogatives of an individual’s internal world, how they may alter psychic structure itself in fundamental ways and the implications this may have for the individual’s functioning and for the operation of society. This book attempts, from the perspective of a working clinician, to make some sense of this. The impact of mediation via technology and the consequent disintermediation of the body represent central themes throughout, as they impact on the experience of embodiment, on the ‘work of desire’ and on the way new media influences psychoanalytic practice.
New media offer opportunities for increasing accessibility to mental health care, including psychoanalytic interventions. However, this requires a sophisticated understanding of how to best create and safeguard the analytic setting. Alessandra Lemma here guides the clinician through an exploration of the limitations and risks of mediated psychotherapy, illustrated with clinical examples throughout.
The Digital Age on the Couch offers an accessibly written guide to combining existing psychoanalytic theory and practice with the challenges presented by digital media. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and counsellors.
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#4 The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost
Drawing on a large-scale survey and interviews with students on thirteen college campuses, Freitas finds that what young people are overwhelmingly concerned with--what they really want to talk about--is happiness. They face enormous pressure to look perfect online--not just happy, but blissful, ecstatic, and fabulously successful. Unable to achieve this impossible standard, they are anxious about letting the less-than-perfect parts of themselves become public. Far from wanting to share everything, they are brutally selective when it comes to curating their personal profiles, and worry obsessively that they might unwittingly post something that could come back to haunt them later in life. Through candid conversations with young people from diverse backgrounds, Freitas reveals how even the most well-adjusted individuals can be stricken by self-doubt when they compare their experiences with the vast collective utopia that they see online. And sometimes, as on anonymous platforms like Yik Yak, what they see instead is a depressing cesspool of racism and misogyny. Yet young people are also extremely attached to their smartphones and apps, which sometimes bring them great pleasure. It is very much a love-hate relationship.
While much of the public's attention has been focused on headline-grabbing stories, the everyday struggles and joys of young people have remained under the radar. Freitas brings their feelings to the fore, in the words of young people themselves. The Happiness Effect is an eye-opening window into their first-hand experiences of social media and its impact on them.
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#5 There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan
Published in 1973, "L'Etourdit" was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship," which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality.
In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "with" Lacan about his propositions and what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought.
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#6 Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma
Psychoanalytic work with socially traumatised patients is an increasingly popular vocation, but remains extremely demanding and little covered in the literature. In Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony, a range of contributors draw upon their own clinical work, and on research findings from work with seriously disturbed Holocaust survivors, to illuminate how best to conduct clinical work with such patients in order to maximise the chances of a positive outcome, and to reflect transferred trauma for the clinician.
Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony closely examines the phenomenology of destruction inherent in the discourse of extreme traumatization, focusing on a particular case study: the recording of video testimonies from a group of extremely traumatized, chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in psychiatric institutions in Israel. This case study demonstrates how society reacts to unwanted memories, in media, history, and psychoanalysis – but it also shows how psychotherapists and researchers try to approach the buried memories of the survivors, through being receptive to shattered life narratives.
Questions of bearing witness, testimony, the role of denial, and the impact of traumatic narrative on society and subsequent generations are explored. A central thread of this book is the unconscious countertransference resistance to the trauma discourse, which manifests itself in arenas that are widely apart, such as genocide denial, the "disappearance" of the hospitalized Holocaust survivors and of their life stories, mishearing their testimonies and ultimately refusing them the diagnosis of "traumatic psychosis".
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#7 The Essential Being: Psychoanalytic Understanding of Totalitarianism
This book explores the concept of “pre-conceptual trauma”, drawing in particular on the pioneering research of Wilfred Bion. A comparison is established between two different groups of individuals: five well-known dictators and five famous creative individuals. The authors have defined “pre-conceptual traumas” as ubiquitous experiences that all human beings go through during the first years of their lives, when a temporary absence changes into a permanent presence, determining the outcome of what any individual might do or perform in the future. Pre-conceptual traumas split the mind into two dialectical and correlated states: the "traumatized" (conflictive or pathological), and the "non-traumatized (developmental or normal).
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#8 Field Theory in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Reacting to Unexpected Developments
Field Theory in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis looks at the intersection of two types of psychoanalysis that challenge the classic model; child analysis, and field theory.
Children impose a faster pace on the analysis and a much less stable structure than adults, whilst psychoanalytic field theory looks at the patient-analyst relationship in a much wider context than is typical. By combining these two approaches, this book advocates the use of a set of tools and techniques that allow the psychoanalyst to understand and react much faster than normal, and to be better prepared for unexpected developments. This book shows the reader how to navigate smoothly and steadily through passages of tense analytical situations, which might otherwise feel like being trapped in a maze with no obvious way out.
Bion's writings allowed the improvement of new techniques or instruments for exploring the psychoanalytical process. Discussion about technique is a hugely important and necessary step for improving the evidence base of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This book also seeks to improve the research in therapeutic effectiveness and unexpected relations between body and mind, emotions and dreams. By doing so, Elena Molinari contributes to expanding the perspectives that child and adolescent psychoanalysts have had in exploring primitive functioning of the mind.
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#9 Meltzer in Paris
This book focuses on work with children undertaken by the GERPEN (Groupe d’Études et de Recherches Psychoanalytiques pour le developpement de l’Enfant et du Nourisson) of Caen and Paris. It is one of a series that record Donald Meltzer’s clinical seminars and supervisions, which were conducted in various countries on a regular basis over many years.
Despite his interest in the theoretical advances of psychoanalysis made during what he termed The Kleinian Development, Meltzer believed that clinical supervision was the only way to teach psychoanalytic practice. In effect, he treated supervision as an art form, just as he regarded psychoanalysis as an art form. The library of his supervision work, almost all recorded outside the UK, thus forms a valuable teaching model for future practitioners, as well as demonstrating Meltzer’s wealth of insight into both character development and analytic technique.
With contributions by Catherine Druon, Didier Houzel, Bianca Lechevalier, Ann Levy, Antoine Meyer, Jeanne Pourrinet, and Rosella Sandri.
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#10 Meltzer in Sao Paulo
This book is one of a series that record Donald Meltzer’s clinical seminars and supervisions, which were conducted in various countries on a regular basis over many years. Despite his interest in the theoretical advances of psychoanalysis made during what he termed The Kleinian Development, Meltzer believed that clinical supervision was the only way to teach psychoanalytic practice. In effect he treated supervision as an art form just as he regarded psychoanalysis as an art form. The library of his supervision work, almost all recorded outside the UK, thus forms a valuable teaching model for future practitioners, as well as demonstrating Meltzer’s wealth of insight into both character development and analytic technique.
Edited by Marisa Pelella Melega, with contributions by Alfredo Colucci, Celia Fix Korbivcher, Alicia Beatriz Dorado de Lisondo, Martha Maria de Moraes Ribeiro, and Paulo Cesar Sandler.
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#11 Obsessions: The Twisted Cruelty
This book explores the interrelatedness between obsessive compulsive disorders, thinking disorders, and depression. The issue is considered both from a psychiatric viewpoint and from a psychodynamic perspective. The age of the cases presented in the book ranges from childhood through adolescence to adulthood.
Obsessions: The Twisted Cruelty is a challenging contribution to contemporary clinical debate, especially regarding the role of analytically-oriented psychotherapy in the treatment of OCD, and how to deal with the psychiatric treatment and combine the two approaches, while keeping the focus on the transference-countertransference interplay. After the first theoretical chapter, the relationship between obsessions and thinking impairments is discussed, with specific reference to delusional ideation. A section entitled “the anal conundrum” follows. Encopresis and anal masturbation during childhood are discussed, as well as the identification of the child with a maternal “faecal object. The last section explores the connection with depression, and some specific features of sadism.
The author explores the Bionian and post-Bionian perspective on the one hand, as well as developments of the post-Jungian theory, such as the applications of the complexity theory, and the contemporary definitions of complex and archetype. The recent contributions of neuroscience research is also considered.
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