Culture and Psychoanalysis Books
Words in Pain: Letters on Life and Death
Words in Pain is a rediscovered treasure. First published anonymously in 1919, these letters from a dying woman to her doctor encapsulate an attitude to death which is fiercely independent of... (more)
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)
Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life
A leading philosopher explores the ethics and psychology of flourishing during times of personal and collective crisis.
Imagine the end of the world. Now think about the end-the purpose-of life.... (more)
Opera on the Couch: Music, Emotional Life, and Unconscious Aspects of Mind
In this widely ranging collection of essays, a group of contemporary psychoanalyst/authors turn their finely-honed listening skills and clinical experience to plumb the depths and illuminate themes... (more)
Everybody: A Book about Freedom
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long... (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)
Enduring Time
The ways in which we imagine and experience time are changing dramatically. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social... (more)
Mirroring and Attunement: Self-Realization in Psychoanalysis and Art
Mirroring and Attunement offers a new approach to psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion. Viewing these activities from a broadly relational perspective, Kenneth Wright proposes that each... (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)
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)
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)
Key Papers in Literature and Psychoanalysis
Since Freud invoked the Oedipus story to exemplify and verify his findings with patients and in analyzing his own dreams, psychoanalysis and literature have had a fruitful if often distrusting... (more)
A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature: Reading the Reader
What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading... (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)
Freud's Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis
Freud's lifelong involvement with the Russian national character and culture is examined in James Rice's imaginative combination of history, literary analysis, and psychoanalysis. Freud's Russia... (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)
Art in Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Approach to Creativity and Analytic Practice
A revolution is brewing in psychoanalysis: after a century of struggle to define psychoanalysis as a science, the concept of psychoanalysis as an art is finding expression in an unconventional... (more)
The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche
The unconscious, cornerstone of psychoanalysis, was a key twentieth-century concept and retains an enormous influence on psychological and cultural theory. Yet there is a surprising lack of... (more)
A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory
How is psychoanalytic theory relevant in the modern age? How does it inform and interact with culture? From Freud to Lacan, this insightful text clearly explores key psychoanalytic writers, core... (more)
Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution
In 1981 the Communist Party of China declared: “The ‘Cultural Revolution’, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the... (more)
On Balance
Are we too obsessed with excess? What can childhood teach us about bad behaviour? And should we be happy, or is there something better we might be? In On Balance, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam... (more)
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story - up to a certain point. "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground," he... (more)
The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis
A brilliantly witty book about the intertwined lives of psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, surgeon Wilfred Trotter and the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Ernest Jones was Sigmund Freud's... (more)
Fifty Key Thinkers in Psychology
The new edition of Fifty Key Thinkers in Psychology introduces the life, thought, work and impact of some of the most influential figures who have shaped and developed modern psychology, considering... (more)
Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic
This groundbreaking work synthesizes concepts from thirteen crucial philosophers and psychologists, relating how the ancient problem of opposites has been opening to an integration which not only... (more)
The Fashion System
Fashion never ceases to interest psychologists, aestheticians and sociologists. Roland Barthes, however, examined fashion from a new point of view. Using descriptions from magazines, he uncovered a... (more)
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)
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)
Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-traumatic Cultures
Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of... (more)
Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy: Sacred Science and the Search for Soul
In Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy Todd Hayen explores what the spiritual concepts of the enigmatic ancient Egyptians can teach us about our own modern psyches and the pursuit of a meaningful... (more)