Life, Sex and Death: Selected writings

Synopsis:

Dr Michael Sinason looks back on the 90, productive years of William Gillespie's life. He writes movingly of Gillespie's early years in China and Scotland, and charts his development as a psychoanalytic thinker, organizer, administrator, husband and father.

Description:

Not only was Gillespie an innovator and discoverer, but a pioneer investigator whose work encompasses the entire history of accomplishments of psychoanalytic thought on perversions.' - Charles Socarides William Gillespie began analytic training in Vienna in the early 1930s and has been a pioneer in the study of sexual perversion. His views on female sexuality, regression in old people facing death, and on instinct theory have been both influential and controversial. This first edited collection of twelve of Gillespie's key papers will provide a welcome source of reference for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in training and practice. In a specially written overview, Charles Socarides, an eminent psychoanalyst in the field of perversion and its treatment, shows how Gillespie's ideas influenced his own contribution and affected the field as a whole. The editor, Michael Sinason, contributes an eloquent biographical introduction, tracing the early influences in Gillespie's life which led to his celebrated role as a tactful and trusted advisor in negotiating the relationship between the International Psychoanalytic Association and the British Psychoanalytical Society.