#1 Under the Totem: In Search of a Path
Totem conveys spirit, a sense of the sacred. Freud attempted to get under the totem and explore psychic forces and pressures below the surface. Jung opened further depths in exploration of the sacred. Engagement with a sense of mystery that permeates existence lives in many quarters, including art, music, religion and depth psychologies.
The method of this book is fragmentary. Different facets of experience emerge, recede, reappear, while others enter. The emphasis is on feeling and imaginative reflection. A good deal draws on therapy sessions and ongoing dialogues with workers who have touched the author, including Bion, Winnicott, Freud, Jung, Klein, Buber, Suzuki, Milner, Wittgenstein, and Wertheimer.
#2 The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration
Psychoanalysts have long been fascinated with creative artists, but have paid far less attention to the men and women who motivate, stimulate, and captivate them.
The Muse counters this trend with nine original contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts, art historians, and literary scholars―one for each of the nine muses of classical mythology―that explore the muses of disparate artists, from Nicholas Poussin to Alison Bechdel.
The Muse breaks new ground, pushing the traditional conceptualization of muses by considering the roles of spouse, friend, rival, patron, therapist―even a late psychoanalytic theorist―in facilitating creativity. Moreover, they do so not only by providing inspiration, but also by offering the artist needed material and emotional support; tolerating competitive aggression; promoting reflection and insight; and eliciting awe, anxiety and gratitude.
#3 Lacan's Return to Antiquity: Between nature and the gods
Lacan’s Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in
Lacan’s work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan’s case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud’s ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature.
#4 Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy
This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic from a
psychoanalytic perspective. Edited by two leading practicing
psychoanalysts and with original contributions from Lacanian
practitioners and scholars, this cutting-edge volume proposes a paradigm
swerve, a Freudian slip on a banana peel. Psychoanalysis has long been
associated with tragedy and there is a strong warrant to take up comedy
as a more productive model for psychoanalytic practice and critique.
Jokes and the comic have not received nearly as much consideration as
they deserve given the fundamental role they play in our psychic lives
and the way they unite the fields of aesthetics, literature, and
psychoanalysis.
Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy addresses this lack and
opens up the discussion.
#5 The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction
The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction explores Bollas’s extraordinarily wide contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis. The book aims to introduce and explain the fundamentals of Bollas’s theory of the mind in a systematic way, addressing many of the questions that commonly arise when people approach his work.
Through chapters on topics such as the receptive subject, the creative unconscious and the implications of Bollas’s metapsychology for the technique of free association, the book enables the reader to acquire an understanding of his unique psychoanalytic language, to grasp the conceptual building blocks of his thinking and how these interrelate, and to appreciate the theoretical and clinical coherence of his thinking.
#6 The Death of Desire: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
A stunning exploration of the relation between desire and psychopathology,
The Death of Desire is a unique synthesis of the work of Laing, Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that renders their often difficult concepts brilliantly accessible to and usable by psychotherapists of all persuasions. In bridging a critical gap between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, M. Guy Thompson, one of the leading existential psychoanalysts of our time, firmly re-situates the unconscious – what Freud called "the lost continent of repressed desires" – in phenomenology. In so doing, he provides us with the richest, most compelling phenomenological treatment of the unconscious to date and also makes Freud’s theory of the unconscious newly comprehensible.
#7 Deleuze and Psychology: Philosophical Provocations to Psychological Practices
An increasing number of scholars, students and practitioners of psychology are becoming intrigued by the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and of Felix Guattari. This book aims to be a critical introduction to these ideas, which have so much to offer psychology in terms of new directions as well as critique.
#8 Freud's 'Outstanding' Colleague/Jung's 'Twin Brother': The suppressed psychoanalytic and political significance of Otto Gross
Otto Gross was the first analyst to link his work with radical politics, connecting inner, personal transformation with outer, collective change. Since his death in 1920 his work has been suppressed, despite his seminal influence on the developing analytic discipline and on the fields of sociology, philosophy and literature. Here Gottfried M. Heuer introduces Gross’ life and ideas, using an innovative, historiographic methodology he terms trans-historical: a psychoanalytic, intersubjective, and trans-temporal approach to the past, aimed at ‘healing wounded history’ in the present.
#9 The Wisdom of Lived Experience: Views from Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Metaphysics
In our quest toward truth we often rely on the guidance and clarity of conscious thought, but in doing so we may bypass awareness of a more deeply informing resource, which is embodied in lived experience. This book highlights aspects of this deeper dialogue where neuroscience (McGilchrist's work on right- and left-brain dynamics) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and others) verify the Hegelian dialectics that seem to underlie all living processes and perhaps all of Nature. Hegel's concept of Aufhebung embraces the creative negating transformations that carry forward what has gone before in new and evolving forms and structures.
Becoming, as on-going lived experience, exemplifies this dialectic as it embodies the cycle in which the emergence of unconscious (implicit) intuition is externalized and clarified (made explicit) via conscious notation and thought to then be enfolded back (made implicit once again) into the newly enriched unconscious matrix that becomes the root for the next intuition. While it is often difficult to surrender the clarified products of conscious thought, the deepest sources of wisdom in Becoming are those that involve the implicit and the bodily because the deepest reaches of Reality are those that resonate with somato-sensory experience.
#10 Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality
In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value.
#11 On Group Analysis and Beyond: Group Analysis as Meta-Theory, Clinical Social Practice, and Art
By extending the views of Foulkes, Bion, Freud, and Klein, this book draws the outline of a group analytic theory and meta-theory by studying the paternal and maternal functions as expressed by the conductor and the group analytic group respectively and extrapolating them to the psychoanalytic aspects of Lacan and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss's anthropological views. From this perspective, it investigates major group analytic phenomena, such as the role of money, envy, scapegoating and the regular or early ending of group therapy by patients with neurosis and borderline personality disorders.
#12 A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education
A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom provides rich descriptions of the surprising ways individuals handle matters of love and hate when dealing with reading and writing in the classroom. With wit and sharp observations, Deborah P. Britzman advocates for a generous recognition of the vulnerabilities, creativity, and responsibilities of university learning. Britzman develops themes that include the handling of technique in psychoanalysis and pedagogy, the uses of theory, regression to adolescence, the inner life of gender, the untold story of the writing block, and everyday mistakes in teaching and learning. She also examines the relationship between mental health and experiences of teaching and learning.
#13 From Illiteracy to Literature: Psychoanalysis and Reading
From Illiteracy to Literature presents innovative material based on research with ‘non-reading’ children and re-examines the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, through the lens of the psychical significance of reading: the forgotten adventure of our coming to reading.
Anne-Marie Picard draws on two specific fields of interest: firstly the wish to understand the nature of literariness or the "literary effect", i.e. the pleasures (and frustrations) we derive from reading; secondly research on reading pathologies carried out at St Anne’s Hospital, Paris. The author uses clinical observations of non-reading children to answer literary questions about the reading experience, using psychoanalytic theory as a conceptual framework. The notion that reading difficulties or phobias should be seen as a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, allows Picard to shed light on both clinical vignettes taken from children’s case histories and reading scenes from literary texts.
#14 The Non-Linear Mind: Psychoanalysis of Complexity in Psychic Life
This book is concerned with whether we can develop our understanding of the mind through the application of new approaches to the study of complex systems. It is divided into two sections. The first is concerned with the application of non-linear systems theory to the psychoanalytic study of the mind. The second is concerned with the technical application of the ideas of chaos theory to the understanding of therapeutic action and psychic change. It concludes with a consideration of the research and clinical implications of considering the mind as a non-linear system.
#15 Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory: Stories, Dreams, and Metaphor
Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory articulates the theory, heuristic principles, and clinical techniques of psychoanalytic field theory. S. Montana Katz describes the historical, philosophical and clinical contexts for the development of field theory in South America, North America and Europe.
Field theory is a family of related bi-personal psychoanalytic perspectives falling into three principal models, which developed relatively independently. One of the principal models is based upon the work of Madeleine and Willy Baranger. The second, constructed by Katz, draws upon what is held in common by the implicit field theories in the United States of the interpersonal, intersubjective, relational and motivational systems’ psychoanalytic perspectives. The third is based upon the work of Antonino Ferro. For each, Katz elucidates its conception of mind, unconscious processes, the specific field concept employed, therapeutic goals, and clinical techniques. Similarities and differences of the models are illustrated.
#16 Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice
Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice isthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and our character.
#17 Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis: Theory and Clinical Applications
Emotional Presence in Psychoanalysis provides a detailed look at the intricacies of attaining emotional presence in psychoanalytic work. John Madonna and a distinguished group of contributors draw on both the relational and modern psychoanalytic schools of thought to examine a variety of different problems commonly experienced in achieving emotional resonance between analyst and patient, setting out ways in which such difficulties may be overcome in psychoanalytic treatment, practical clinical settings and in training contexts.
#18 Defining Psychoanalysis: Achieving a Vernacular Expression
The empirical baseline of today's psychoanalytic vernacular may be inferred from what psychoanalysts read. Contemporary information aggregation provides us with a unique moment in 'reading' today's psychoanalytic vernacular. The PEP Archive compiles data on journal articles analogous to radio stations' 'hit parades' of contemporary favorites.
Defining Psychoanalysis: Achieving a Vernacular Expression provides a close reading of this contemporary assemblage, including three 'strong' readings by Winnicott and two by Bion. It pursues the elements generated by these papers as an indication of contemporary psychoanalytic 'common sense', our consensual building blocks of theory and practice.
#19 Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking Towards the Post-Relational
Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics offers a new paradigm approach which advocates reengaging the importance of metaphysics in psychoanalytic theorizing. The emergence of the relational trend has witnessed a revitalizing influx of new ideas, reflecting a fundamental commitment to the principle of dialogue. However, the transition towards a more pluralistic discourse remains a work in progress, and those schools of thought not directly associated with the relational shift continue to play only a marginal role.
#20 The Seed of Madness: Constitution, Environment, and Fantasy in the Organization of the Psychotic Core
More and more individuals with ego defects, severe object relations conflicts, affective turbulence, and unassimilated contradictions are seeking help from psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Contributors to this book explore hereditary and constitutional factors, environmental influences and unconscious fantasies in the development of the psychotic core in such patients and provide guidance for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to hear and therapeutically respond to these patients' uncanny ways of describing their internal worlds.
This volume includes contributions by experienced clinicians from Europe and the United States, as well as case histories illustrating the transformation of the psychotic core and how these patients can develop healthier internal structures. The editors' introductory and closing summaries integrate knowledge dealing with especially difficult patients. By reading this book, psychoanalysts and therapists will be prepared to gain insights as newer neurobiological and psychological research findings become available and, hopefully, enthusiasm about working with individuals with 'the seed of madness'.
#21 Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis
What happens when the intellectual giant of twentieth-century literature,
James Joyce, is made an object of consideration and cause of desire by the intellectual giant of modern psychoanalysis,
Jacques Lacan?
This is what Joyce and Lacan explores, in the three closely interrelated areas of reading, writing, and psychoanalysis, by delving into Joyce’s own relationship with psychoanalysis in his lifetime. The book concentrates primarily on his last text, Finnegans Wake, the notorious difficulty of which arises from its challenging the intellect itself, and our own processes of reading. As well as the centrality of the Wake, concepts of Joycean ontology, sanity, singularity, and sexuality are excavated from sustained analysis of his earliest writings onward.
#22 Better Late than Never: The Reparative Therapeutic Relationship in Regression to Dependence
This book is concerned with an enigmatic set of experiences which theorists in the Object Relations tradition have characterised as regression to dependence, a return to a primitive, pre-verbal relational process presenting in some clients in psychotherapy. It highlights the effects of early infantile trauma resulting in the experience of failed dependency. Clients who present with chronic anxiety, relational failures and an inner emptiness are considered, and the opportunity for a therapeutic repair is explored with recommendations for the therapeutic stance being made. This book is aimed at psychotherapists, supervisors, trainers and trainees who will encounter such clients and those who will go on to offer them a therapeutic repair. It will also interest researchers interested in reflexivity and a heuristic approach to clinician as researcher. Written from an Integrative Psychotherapy perspective, it addresses the current absence of writing in the field from a Relational/Developmental viewpoint on concepts more usually addressed in psychoanalytic writing. The insights of Winnicott are particularly highlighted in relation to failed dependency and maternal failure. This work aims to offer a way forward to successfully work with this client group.
#23 Separation-Individuation Struggles in Adult Life: Leaving Home
Separation-Individuation Struggles in Adult life: Leaving Home focuses on the developmental task of separating from parents and siblings for individuals and couples who have not been able to resolve these issues earlier in life.
Sarah Fels Usher extends Mahler’s theory, and includes the writing of Loewald and Modell, among others, stressing the right of adult patients to a separate life. She describes the predicament of Oedipal victors (or victims), their introjected feelings of responsibility for their parents, and their resultant inability to be truly individuated adults. Difficulties separating from siblings are also given analytic attention. Usher’s experience treating couples adds a new and powerful dimension to her theory. She is optimistic throughout about the therapist’s ability to help adult patients resolve the rapprochement sub-phase in a satisfying manner.
#24 A Different Path: An Emotional Autobiography
'Our human task is to be lived by Life. Life as a transcendent principle. It seems to me that a reliable test of whether we have lived worthwhile lives is this: is the world a better place for my having lived in it?'
Neville Symington has written a dozen books about psychoanalysis but this one is different from all the others. It is an emotional autobiography that starts with his own birth and gives a character sketch of his mother and father and his upbringing in Portugal, with a two year period in Canada, and takes the reader through to the age of 45 by which time he was a qualified psychoanalyst, married with two sons and, at the time, living in London.
#25 Scenes from a Clinical Life: A Novel
This novel provides a vital and engaging picture of current psychotherapeutic practice. It describes scenes from the life of a psychologist working psychoanalytically, including vignettes of his clinical work which present an accurate and intimate picture of a clinician at work. The protagonist's career development and his own personal therapy provide a counterpoint to the clinical scenarios.
The forward momentum in the book is provided by the protagonist's romantic involvement with another clinician, and his attempts to be accepted for training at a prestigious psychotherapy training institution. This book considers the question, what do therapists do?
#26 On Loving, Hating, and Living Well: The Public Psychoanalytic Lectures of Ralph R. Greenson
Ralph R. Greenson, MD, was perhaps psychoanalysis's most gifted and eloquent spokesperson. In this volume Dr Greenson is presented in one of the roles he enjoyed most: communicating to a lay audience his understanding of people and life and his insights into the science and art of psychoanalysis. These important talks profoundly influenced countless professional workers and lay people.
The twenty-four public lectures in this remarkable collection are each a gem of wisdom and humor. With deep psychoanalytic wisdom Greenson addresses such timeless and universal human concerns as love and emotional development; hate, aggression, and war; masculinity, femininity, and sexuality; jealousy, envy, and possessiveness; and the vicissitudes of child rearing and family development.
#27 Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis
The story of Emma and Carl Jung's highly unconventional marriage, their relationship with Freud, and their part in the early years of Psychoanalysis.
Labyrinths tells the story of the Jungs’ unconventional marriage, their friendship and, following publication of Jung’s
The Psychology of the Unconscious, subsequent rift with Freud. It traces Jung’s development of word association, notions of the archetype, the collective unconscious, the concepts of extraversion and introversion and the role played by both Carl and Emma in the early development of the scandalous new Psychoanalysis movement.
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