Culture and Psychoanalysis Books
The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking
After eighteen frustrating months heading a specialist adolescent unit, Philip Stokoe applied for a training in consultation at the Tavistock Clinic based on the ‘Tavi’ aka ‘group relations’ model.... (more)
Imaginary Existences: Dream, Daydream, Phantasy, Fiction
Imaginary Existences interweaves scholarly psychoanalytic knowledge and extensive clinical experience with insights derived from close readings of great literature in a uniquely imaginative and... (more)
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... (more)
Lives of Houses
A group of notable writers-including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow-celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists,... (more)
Psychoanalysis in the Technoculture Era
By now the internet and other forms of virtual communication have been in place for at least twenty years. However, surprisingly little has been written about the use of new technologies in the... (more)
Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis
Wilfred Bion once said, “I use the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis.” Both are preoccupied with catastrophe and faith, infinity and intensity of experience, shatter and growth of being that... (more)
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Anger. Fear. Guilt. Denial. Silence. These are the ways in which ordinary white people react when it is pointed out to them that they have done or said something that has - unintentionally - caused... (more)
The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness
This book explores how our social and economic contexts profoundly affect our mental health and wellbeing, and how modern neuroscientific and psychodynamic research can both contribute to and enrich... (more)
On Kindness
What is kindness? Does it make us happier? And does it have a place in a selfish world? Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of... (more)
Sigmund Freud's Desk: An Anecdoted Guide: Second Edition
This newly released book by Ro Spankie explores the world of Freud’s over 2000 antiquities. The first impression on entering Freud’s study and consulting room is that of an overwhelming profusion of... (more)
Melodies of the Mind: Connections Between Psychoanalysis and Music
What can psychoanalysis learn from music? What can music learn from psychoanalysis? Can the analysis of music itself provide a primary source of psychological data? Drawing on Freud's concept of the... (more)
Beckett and Bion: The (Im)Patient Voice in Psychotherapy and Literature
This book focuses on Samuel Beckett’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy with W. R. Bion as a central aspect both of Beckett’s and Bion’s radical transformations of literature and psychoanalysis. The... (more)
Political Freud: A History
In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of political... (more)
Crossroads in Psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and Mindfulness: The Word and the Breath
A comprehensive collection of essays exploring the interstices of Eastern and Western modes of thinking about the self, Crossroads in Psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and Mindfulness: The Word and the... (more)
Freud and Culture
In this book Eric Smadja explores the representations of society and culture that Freud developed in the course of his work. Distinct from contemporary sociological and anthropological conceptions,... (more)
On Minding and Being Minded: Experiencing Bion and Beckett
On Minding and Being Minded explores links between depictions of lived experience written by Samuel Beckett and the experience of psychoanalytic psychotherapy pioneered in the writings of W.R. Bion.... (more)
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination
Explores the difference between the sexes with reference to object-relations theory and Hegelian philosophy.
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty
From one of the most important contemporary thinkers we have, a compelling, forceful tract about women and motherhood that demands immediate attention. Moving commandingly between pop cultural... (more)
Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality
Does psychoanalysis have anything to say about the emotional landscapes of class? How can class-inclusive psychoanalytic projects, historic and contemporary, inform theory and practice? Class and... (more)
Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art
Combining theory and therapy - the clinic and the studio - Danielle Knafo's Dancing with the Unconscious extends the dialogue between psychoanalysis and art and shows how each discipline informs the... (more)
Freud and the Far East: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the People and Culture of China, Japan, and Korea
This book is a lexical ambassador with the dual responsibility of bridging the West and East and enhancing psychoanalytic conceptualization in the course of such an encounter. By juxtaposing the... (more)
From Dependency to Autonomy: Studies in Organisation and Change
The author draws on the experiences of three decades of working as an organizational consultant to various sorts of institutions, employing approaches drawn from psychoanalysis, systems theory, and... (more)
On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It
The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we... (more)
Beyond Sexuality:
Combining psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a respect for the variability of sexual identities, this work of queer theory makes the case for viewing erotic desire as fundamentally... (more)
The Mother's Hands: Desire Fantasy and the Inheritance of the Maternal
The social changes of the last century have fundamentally transformed motherhood. From a patriarchal society which reduced women almost entirely to their maternal function, new social and sexual... (more)
In Writing
A collection of literary essays like no other - exploring the deep connections between literature and psychoanalysis - from Britain's leading psychoanalyst. For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many... (more)
The Therapeutic Imagination: Using Literature to Deepen Psychodynamic Understanding and Enhance Empathy
Use of the imagination is a key aspect of successful psychotherapeutic treatments. Psychotherapy helps clients get in touch with, awaken, and learn to trust their creative inner life, while... (more)
Immigration and Acculturation: Mourning, Adaptation, and the Next Generation
This book provides clinical strategies for working with immigrant and ethnically diverse patients and their offspring while drawing observations from the humanities to reveal truths about the... (more)
Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny
Interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and art - and other disciplines - is growing. In his new book Reflections on the Aesthetic: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny, Gregorio Kohon examines... (more)