Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis
Author: Lauren Levine
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2023-04-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000860515

In this compelling book, Lauren Levine explores the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, Levine considers the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one’s own story, resonant with personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. Levine sees creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. She utilizes film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. She is concerned too with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim what has been lost, is at the heart of this volume. Attentive to the work of helping patients reclaim their memory and creative agency, his book will prove invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.

Forces of Destiny

Forces of Destiny
Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1315533391

Christopher Bollas is one of the most expressive and eloquent exponents of the ideas, meanings and experience of psychoanalysis currently writing. He has a real gift for taking the reader into the fine texture of the psychoanalytic process. Forces of Destiny examines and reflects on one of the most fundamental questions – what is it that is unique about us as individuals? How does it manifest itself in our personalities, our lives, relationships and in the psychoanalytic process? Drawing on classical notions of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ and Winnicott’s idea of the true self, Bollas develops the concept of ‘the human idiom’ to explore and show how we work out – both creatively and in the process of analysis – the ‘dialectics of difference’. In particular he reflects on how the patients may use particular parts of the psychoanalyst’s personality to express their own idiom and destiny drive. Forces of Destiny was Bollas’ second book. His first, The Shadow of the Object (1987), was described by the reviewer in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis as a ‘unique and remarkable book. I think of it as one of the most interesting and important new books on psychoanalysis which I have read in the last decade.’ Forces of Destiny confirmed his position as one of the most important, thoughtful and engaging psychoanalytic writers. With a new preface from Christopher Bollas, Forces of Destiny remains a classic of psychoanalytic literature, appealing to psychoanalysts as well as readers in art history, literature, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Capitalism and Desire

Capitalism and Desire
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231542216

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and the Problem of Epistemology

Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and the Problem of Epistemology
Author: Alice Bar Nes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000435768

This book presents key psychoanalytic theories from a fresh perspective: that of the mystical element. The author explores the depth-structure of central assumptions in psychoanalytic theory to uncover the mystical core of conventional analytic thinking. Exploring authors from Freud and Ferenczi, through Bion and Winnicott, to contemporary voices such as Ogden, Bollas and Eigen, the book shows that psychoanalysis has always operated on the assumption of psychic overlap, a "soul-to-soul" contact, between patient and analyst. Surprisingly, the book shows how this "magical" facet goes hand in hand with a pragmatic worldview that explores the epistemological complexities of psychoanalysis in search of a way to join the subjective, even the mystical, with the practical aim of serving as a validated mental health discipline. This is accomplished through an interdisciplinary and intertextual encounter between psychoanalysis and the innovative pairing of William James’ pragmatic philosophy and Martin Buber’s dialogic thought. The author's paradoxical stance surrounding the nature and role of psychoanalysis and its mystical facet resonate the great challenge embedded in Winnicott's insistence on tolerating paradox and Bion's demand to respect all parts of the (psychoanalytic) truth, in this case, the practical and mundane alongside the mystical and magical. The book’s broad, interdisciplinary outlook will captivate both psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists as well as scholars of philosophy.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence
Author: Gertraud Diem-Wille
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000336859

Puberty is a time of tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood activated by rapid physical changes, hormonal development and explosive activity of neurons. This book explores puberty through the parent-teenager relationship, as a "normal state of crisis", lasting several years and with the teenager oscillating between childlike tendencies and their desire to become an adult. The more parents succeed in recognizing and experiencing these new challenges as an integral, ineluctable emotional transformative process, the more they can allow their children to become independent. In addition, parents who can also see this crisis as a chance for their own further development will be ultimately enriched by this painful process. They can face up to their own aging as they take leave of youth with its myriad possibilities, accepting and working through a newfound rivalry with their sexually mature children, thus experiencing a process of maturity, which in turn can set an example for their children. This book is based on rich clinical observations from international settings, unique within the field, and there is an emphasis placed by the author on the role of the body in self-awareness, identity crises and gender construction. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, parents and carers, as well as all those interacting with adolescents in self, family and society.

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Author: Dylan Evans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2006-06-19
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134780125

Jacques Lacan's thinking revolutionised the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and had a major impact in fields as diverse as film studies, literary criticism, feminist theory and philosophy. Yet his writings are notorious for their complexity and idiosyncratic style. Emphasising the clinical basis of Lacan's work, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis is an ideal companion to his ideas for readers in every discipline where his influence is felt. The Dictionary features: * over 200 entries, explaining Lacan's own terminology and his use of common psychoanalytic expressions * details of the historical and institutional context of Lacan's work * reference to the origins of major concepts in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and other key thinkers * a chronology of Lacan's life and works.

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2011-10-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307957330

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Papers on Psychoanalysis

Papers on Psychoanalysis
Author: Hans W. Loewald
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1989-09-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780300046175

This volume brings together many of the important writings of Hans Loewald, one of the major theoreticians of psychoanalysis today. Among other subjects, Dr. Loewald discusses the nature of the internalization processes and structure building, the nature the role of reality, pre-oedipal modes of perceiving and the permanence of a "psychotic core" in every personality, the relationship of psychoanalysis to culture, mastery and defense, and the nature of time. "[Loewald's] writing is stimulating and challenging, and his work contains some profound psychoanalytic insights."--Steven J. Ellman, Contemporary Psychology "Loewald belongs securely in the ranks of major psychoanalytic thinkers. . . . [His book] contains memorable contributions to our theoretical and clinical understanding of a broad range of topics, and should be read by anyone interested in human psychology."--Sydney E. Pulver, M.D., Review of Psychoanalytic Books "A pleasure to read."--F. H. G. Balfour, British Journal of Psychiatry

Psychoanalysis of Technoscience

Psychoanalysis of Technoscience
Author: Hub Zwart
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2019
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3643910509

This book presents a psychoanalysis of technoscience. Basic concepts and methods developed by Freud, Jung, Bachelard and Lacan are applied to case histories (palaeoanthropology, classical conditioning, virology). Rather than by disinterested curiosity, technoscience is driven by desire, resistance and the will to control. Moreover, psychoanalysis focusses on primal scenes (Dubois' quest for the missing link, Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex) and opts for triangulation: comparing technoscience to "different scenes" provided by novels, so that Dubois's work is compared to missing link novels by Verne and London and Pavlov's experiments with Skinner's Walden Two, while virology is studied through the lens of viral fiction.