Freud is a figure needing no introduction, yet his reputation owes as much to myth as to the facts of his life and work. Despite his groundbreaking work on theories including the functioning of the subconscious, the repression of trauma, and the psychological import of dreams, he has frequently been the subject of derision and even ridicule. David Carter here uncovers the man buried beneath the mythology, tracing the life of this inimitable figure from his origins as the gifted first of eight children born to Jewish parents in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, through his stellar academic career and the relationships and rifts with figures such as Josef Breuer. An essential read for anyone wishing to understand the life, times and work of this most seminal of theorists, Brief Lives: Sigmund Freud is published alongside Freud On Cocaine.

This book examines the use of myth in contemporary popular and high culture, and proposes that the aporetic subject, the individual that 'does not know', is the ideal contemporary subject. Using several contemporary novels, films and theatrical plays that illustrate aporia - such as Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Riordan, 2007), Tron Legacy (Koninski, 2010), Welcome to Thebes (Buffini, 2010), The Photographers (Koundouros, 1998), Prometheus (2012) and Prometheus Retrogressing (Sfikas, 1998) - Angie Voela introduces common ground between Lacanian psychoanalysis and some of Freud's most ardent critics, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, as well as the cultural philosopher Bernard Stiegler. These unprecedented systematic comparisons broaden the scope and impact of Lacanian psychoanalysis in inter-disciplinary debates of philosophy and culture and Voela argues that apart from dealing with the past, psychoanalysis must also deal more explicitly with the present and the future. She presents a unique inquiry into modern subjectivity that will be of great interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film, literature and contemporary culture.

Parenting and Childhood Memories is a collection of stories about the ways in which parents' childhood memories influence their current interactions with their babies and young children: the ghosts and magic of our minds. This book explores the underlying meanings of parents' memories that emerge in their perceptions of their children and their responses to the challenges of early development and the everyday life stresses of parenting. Drawing on extensive material originating in mother-child groups and parent consultations, the author demonstrates that parents' emotional growth and ability to nurture their young children's emotional health is promoted by uncovering the links between the past and the present and unearthing the underlying meanings of seemingly inexplicable behavior. This original book, grounded in long-established psychoanalytic ideas, is about moments in early development and parent-child interaction that tell this story. Offering useful insights, readers will be intrigued by the details of the therapeutic process described and be inspired by the outcomes. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, therapists, mental health professionals, and parents.

Parenting and Childhood Memories is a collection of stories about the ways in which parents' childhood memories influence their current interactions with their babies and young children: the ghosts and magic of our minds. This book explores the underlying meanings of parents' memories that emerge in their perceptions of their children and their responses to the challenges of early development and the everyday life stresses of parenting. Drawing on extensive material originating in mother-child groups and parent consultations, the author demonstrates that parents' emotional growth and ability to nurture their young children's emotional health is promoted by uncovering the links between the past and the present and unearthing the underlying meanings of seemingly inexplicable behavior. This original book, grounded in long-established psychoanalytic ideas, is about moments in early development and parent-child interaction that tell this story. Offering useful insights, readers will be intrigued by the details of the therapeutic process described and be inspired by the outcomes. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, therapists, mental health professionals, and parents.

This fascinating book applies social theorist Georges Bataille's revolutionary thinking to psychotherapy, offering clinicians a new and valuable context for practicing therapy. In adding Bataille's ideas to several different psychotherapeutic modalities, this book makes the notoriously obscure thinker more accessible while testing the validity of his far-reaching work in the treatment room. Through an in-depth examination of several clinical case studies, the book demonstrates how to balance an understanding of the social and historical contexts of participants with a therapeutic approach that offers empathy for individual distress. It also explains how Bataille's innovative approach can be applied to work with couples, groups, institutions, and even one of Freud's classic case studies. Both the content and form of each chapter demonstrate the therapeutic value of a reflexive, critical approach to one's practice and exemplify how to write about it. Offering an unprecedented opportunity to imagine how Bataille's own interest in psychoanalysis and clinical psychology might have developed, this book will be of interest to both practitioners in the field and scholars of continental philosophy and social theory.

The Baby and the Drive presents a new reading of psychoanalytic drive theory, as well as offering clinical tools for early identification of difficulties and intervention with babies and their parents. This volume demonstrates that the concept of the drive is the crucial factor in early life. The drive is presented as a force with pathways that are established in the newborn's psychic development. Four drive fields are distinguished, which are activated during the first year, and the volume examines the points at which they may encounter difficulties and how these difficulties may be treated. The Baby and the Drive explains that access to the drives and their activation orients work with the newborn-an operation at once fundamental and indispensable if researchers accept the existence of a subject in the newborn. Allowing a new orientation in work with newborns and infants, this volume will be a valuable resource for academics, scholars, and students of Lacanian studies and Lacanian analysis. It will also be of great interest to Lacanian psychologists and Lacanian psychoanalysts in practice and in training.

In this new edition Blake gives a personal account of his professional experience of working with children and adolescents over the last 45 years. Providing a wonderful integration of the conceptual and the practical, this book clarifies complex theory while giving practical advice for clinicians through a nuts and bolts description of how to interview parents, emotionally assess a child and adolescent, set up a consulting room and conduct a therapy session. The addition of chapter summaries, questions and suggested further readings provides a valuable structure to those in child and adolescent training programmes. The author's experience, gained from public and private work, is vividly described with the use of clinical examples to illustrate his thinking and way of working. This third edition highlights his evolution from a more traditional epistemological (knowing) approach, with its emphasis on interpretation and insight, to a more ontological (being) framework. He explores a more intuitive and unconscious way of working and argues this is more developmentally appropriate to children and adolescents. His accessible writing style transports the reader into his clinical world: a world full of fascinating stories of children talking through their play; of adolescents exploring who they are through their discussions about music, films, sport and computer games; of helping parents to understand and thoughtfully manage their child's emotional struggles. This new edition, an amalgam of theoretical orientations (Kleinian, Bionian, Winnicottian, relational, non-linear and neurological), draws from recent developments, both in theory and technique. It will be of immense value to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and all those involved in the treatment of children's mental health.

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be 'politically correct', this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to 'PC Debates', contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC 'mockumentary', The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

How postwar film represents absent bodies via the cinematic practices of audiovisual erasure by key filmmakers. Following World War II, the world had to confront the unmournable specters of those who had been erased socially and historically. Cinematic Cryptonymies: The Absent Body in Postwar Film explores how cinema addressed these missing bodies through an in-depth analysis of key filmmakers from the immediate postwar moment through the present. Ofer Eliaz provides a cinematic history as well as a theoretical framework rooted in psychoanalysis that allows the reader to see and understand the absence and erasure of bodies in film as a response to historical trauma. Drawing on a psychoanalytic technique focused on what one leaves unspoken, Cinematic Cryptonymies investigates a diverse range of postwar film. The first chapter examines how Georges Franju deployed Paris as a city that hides the horrors of its past-here the vanished bodies of the victims of the Holocaust-behind its facade. Eliaz then looks at intergenerational haunting in the early horror films of Mario Bava, in which unacknowledged violence and loss is passed down across generations during the time of Italy's economic miracle. The unique use of montage in the late films of Jean-Luc Godard is the focus of the third chapter through which the viewer only receives a fragmented and partial image of struggle-an attempt to address the failure of cinema to bear witness to the horrors of the wars and mass killings of the 1990s. Eliaz ends in the 2000s by examining the transnational films of Naomi Uman, whose experimental films engage the violence and loss experienced in different forms of border crossings, including national and social borders. Centered on the question of how one can mourn losses that are so traumatic they become unspeakable, Cinematic Cryptonymies is an important contribution to conversations on postwar film, trauma and the intersection of psychoanalysis and the humanities. Scholars interested in postwar film and history, trauma and war or psychoanalytic theory will all find this volume of interest.

The book takes the reader "into the trenches" with the author as he describes his psychoanalytic work with a variety of patients with difficult and complex conditions. The reader becomes familiar with the clinical and theoretical difficulties psychoanalysts encounter in their day to day practice with such patients, especially the counter-transference reactions so common with patients who rely on rigid defense systems. While presented from a Kleinian viewpoint, the book is written in a very inclusive and flexible manner that brings together a variety of analytic thought and provides easy access to the reader unfamiliar with Kleinian theory. The book provides a wealth of in-depth clinical material including severe personality disorders, chronic depressive conditions, pathological phantasies of grief and loss, and destructive states of narcissism. Each chapter provides a vivid look into the workings of psychoanalytic treatment in the context of the contemporary focus on understanding projective identification, enactment, acting out, and the careful and thoughtful interpretive working through of these complex clinical situations. Much of the book also addresses how to notice, learn from, and utilize these volatile moments. Indeed, once properly understood, what once was fertile ground for the analyst's acting out can become a bridge to better translating and interpreting the patient's core anxieties and providing a therapeutic experience of change and growth. This volume shows the therapeutic power the modern Kleinian approach can have with patients throughout the diagnostic spectrum. By attending to the interpersonal, transactional, and intra-psychic levels of transference, counter-transference and unconscious phantasy with consistent here-and-now and in-the-moment interpretation, the Kleinian method can be therapeutically successful with severely neurotic, borderline, and narcissistic patients. By making the goal of psychoanalytic treatment the gradual establishment of analyst contact, a broader range of patients can be helped and understood.

In this elegantly written book, eight distinguished psychoanalysts address the ubiquitous phenomenon of guilt. They describe the childhood experiences that form the bedrock of this emotion and delineate various types of guilt, including pre-oedipal guilt, oedipal guilt, survivor guilt, separation guilt, induced guilt, and so on. Noting that guilt, by itself, is neither 'good' nor 'bad,' these master clinicians highlight the adverse (e.g. self-punishment, masochism, irritability) and potentially positive (e.g. reparation, helpfulness towards others) outcomes of guilt. They critically assess previously published findings, review diverse theories, and offer illustrative material from treatment of children and adults. As a result, Guilt: Origins, Manifestations, and Management is replete with clinical pearls and highly useful tips for the management of patients driven by feelings of guilt and remorse.

How did humans develop the capacity for symbolic imagination? In this ground-breaking book, Warren Colman provides a reformulation of archetypal symbols as emergent from humans' embodied and affective engagement with their social and material environment. Beginning with the oldest known figurative image in the world, the 40,000-year-old Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, he traces the emergence of symbolic imagination through the origins of language, the growth of human sociality and co-operation, and the creative use of material objects, from the earliest stone tools through the cave paintings and figures of Upper Paleolithic Europe and beyond. This leads to a consideration of how the imaginal world of the spirit may have come into being, not as separate from the material world but through active participation within a world alive with meaning.

Lacan's four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. This book provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental concepts of Psychoanalysis.

A diverse set of contributors, from backgrounds in psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology and cultural studies. Covers topics including loss of hope and confidence, international political and social turbulence, technological change, climate change, and the stresses of late stage capitalism. The only book to explore the relationship between social turbulence, shame, and temporality.

Originally published in 1978. These essays are written by distinguished philosophers from many countries and were published as a homage to Spinoza in the year which marked the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. A special feature of the book is that it includes a recently discovered letter by Spinoza, reproduced for the first time in English and in facsimile, with a commentary. The controversial influence of Spinoza on Freud is discussed, and illustrated by facsimile reproductions of original letters, hitherto unknown to Freudians and Spinozists alike. These letters direct revealing light on some of Freud's attitudes. Important parallels between East and West will also attract the student of Spinoza.

How We Became Human: A Challenge to Psychoanalysis tackles the question of what distinguishes human beings from other animals. By interweaving psychoanalysis, biology, physics, anthropology, and philosophy, Julio Moreno advances a novel thesis: human beings are faulty animals in their understanding of the world around them. This quality renders humans capable of connecting with inconsistencies, those events or phenomena that their logic cannot understand. The ability to go beyond consistency is humans' distinctive trait. It is the source of their creativity and of their ability to modify the environment they inhabit. On the basis of this connective-associative interplay, Moreno proposes a new approach to the links human beings create amongst themselves and with the world around them. This theory focuses on a key question: What is the difference between human beings and the other animals? From this perspective, Moreno seeks to reformulate many of the classic psychoanalytic, psychological, and anthropological postulates on childhood, links, and psychic change.

New Perspectives on Happiness and Mental Wellbeing in Schoolchildren presents a revolutionary approach to handling social rejection during the latency period. It offers the reader an innovative educational approach, adapted to this pre-adolescent age group, for systemic intervention in classes experiencing negative social phenomena. Presenting latency as a significant developmental stage, it explains children's cruelty in social rejection from a developmental perspective. The book presents the "Envelopes" therapy method to improve children's status immediately and proposes a school intervention for social rejection. It also offers an educational approach appropriate to the developmental needs of latency age children. The approaches described are based on a new developmental psychology paradigm that can illuminate latency with far-reaching insights that aid in adapting approaches suitable to this age. This new paradigm of significant and unique intrapsychic development during early childhood asserts that the most important human development occurs during latency. With informative case studies used throughout, this book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in the fields of clinical psychology, educational psychology, and teacher training.

At the time group analysis was emerging in the United Kingdom through the ideas of S. H. Foulkes, one of his followers, Eduardo Luis Cortesao, returned to Portugal and founded the Portuguese Society of Groupanalysis, with the first group-analytic Symposium taking place in Estoril, Portugal, in 1970. In this vital new book, an impressive collection of contributors demonstrate how group analysis in Portugal has always embraced the relational paradigm that has become central to contemporary psychoanalysis. The Portuguese school of groupanalysis, through several of its senior members, has contributed to many of the organizations responsible for the development of group analysis, such as EGATIN, IAGP and GASi. Nevertheless some of the concepts and variations of the Portuguese school of groupanalysis tend to be unknown to the English speaker. Their focus is on the "pattern", allowing transformation of each patient's personal matrix, working through primitive relational failures and paving the way to new beginnings, always in a transgenerational group context. This book will be of tremendous importance to psychotherapists working in group analysis around the world.

Cultivating Mindfulness to Raise Children Who Thrive introduces an expanded view of human development and health, which begins before conception and moves through pregnancy, early childhood and adulthood. This book is a call for all prenatal and perinatal professionals and policy makers to appreciate indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and integrate them with scientific evidence in the care of expectant parents and their babies. It explains how this could also tackle pressing social issues facing the modern world and favour social innovations through a revaluation of preconception, pregnancy, birth and childcare practices. Sansone presents the reader with scientific discoveries of epigenetics, interpersonal neuroscience, quantum physics, attachment, anthropology, prenatal and perinatal psychology and mindfulness, which interestingly resonate with the intuitions of primal wisdom. The book will be of interest to clinicians, policy makers, researchers, parents, and those interested in the prenatal and perinatal roots of human development and well-being.

Language has a primary importance in Jungian psychology and its practice. C. G. Jung saw every act of speech as a psychic event. Even the "worker" words in language, like prepositions or conjunctions, carry particular archetypal energies, working dynamically and daimonically in the conduct of transformational narrative and realizing both personal and collective purposes. This book aims to deepen our consciousness of psyche's speech as it occurs in our professional discourses, in the psychoanalytic encounter, in dreams, fairy tales, myths and poetry. Vividly exploring the grammar of psyche, we are urged to constantly kindle and rekindle our engagement with language.

This book touches upon many of the key areas of contemporary psychoanalysis: setting, technique, theory, as well as post-Bionian models and the 'Bionian Field Theory'. It is meant to be a self-defence handbook for new, usually young, analysts.

The African American Urban Male's Journey to Success: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Social Class is an exploration of the interconnected nature of psychodynamics and social factors, especially in relation to experiences with success. Goedert uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine the roles of race, gender, and social class in the experiences of five professional African American men who transcended their origins in urban poverty. Through rich quotes and depictions, this book thematically explores the commonalities between each of their interpersonal and intrapsychic experiences, and provides implications for future research, policy, and practice. Recommended for scholars of psychology, sociology, social work, race studies, and gender studies.

This important book features collected essays on the distinguished psychoanalyst Dr Michael Eigen, who is an influential innovator within and beyond psychoanalysis. Drawing on the ideas of Bion, Winnicott, Kabbalah, and artists, Eigen's work is noted for fusing spirituality with psychoanalysis and his extraordinary creativity. The book begins with Dr Eigen's new essay "Rebirth: It's been around a long time." The other essays feature a rich array of subjects and reflections, with many clinical examples and applications to domains beyond psychotherapy and include such titles as "Healing longing in the midst of damage: Eigen's psychoanalytic vision" and "Breakdown and recovery: Going Berserk and other rhythmic concerns." Dr Eigen is one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the current era and this collection of essays provides insightful discussion on his ideas. This celebration of Michael Eigen will fascinate any psychoanalyst interested in his work.

Non-cognitive expressions of the life of the subject - feeling, motion, tactility, instinct, automatism, and sentience - have transformed how scholars understand subjectivity, agency and identity. This collection investigates the critical purchase of the idiom of affect in this 'post-humanist' thinking of the subject. It also explores political and ethical questions raised by the deployment of affect as a theoretical and artistic category. Together the contributors to this collection map the theoretically heterogeneous field of post-humanist scholarship on affect, making inspiring, and at times surprising, connections between Spinoza's and Tomkins's theories of affect, the concept of affect and psychoanalysis, and affect and animal studies in art and literature. As a result, the concepts, vocabulary, compatibility, and attribution of affect are challenged and extended. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

From Aristotle's theory of tragic katharsis onwards, theorists of the theatre have long engaged with the question of what spectatorship entails. This question has, directly or indirectly, often been extended to the investigation of acting. Acting, Spectating, and the Unconscious approaches the unconscious aspects of spectatorship and acting afresh. Interweaving psychoanalytic descriptions of processes such as transference, unconscious phantasy, and alpha-function with an in-depth survey of theories of spectating and acting from thinkers such as Brecht, Diderot, Rousseau and Plato, Maria Grazia Turri offers a significant insight into the emotions inherent in both the art of the actor, and the spectator's experience. A compelling investigation of the unconscious communication between spectators and actors, this volume is a must-read for students and scholars fascinated by theatre spectatorship.