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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging
The Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today You're British. Your parents are British. Your partner, your children and most of your... (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)
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)
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)
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)
Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion - A Psychohistory
In an age when America elected its first black president and the Middle East stirred with popular uprising, Britons were again content to elect the products of their elitist Public Schools. But,... (more)
Looking Through Freud's Photos
A moody Freud posed against a background of holiday pictures pinned to a wall; or lurking at the very edge of a large family group; or lost in a crowd of nineteenth-century scientists. These... (more)
The Last Resistance
While Israel-Palestine is the repeated focus, The Last Resistance also turns to post-apartheid South Africa, to American national fantasy post-9/11, and to key moments for the understanding of Jewish... (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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
On Revelation
Revelation occurs to each of us at every hour in the form of thoughts, feelings, dreams, insights and intuitions that seemingly derive from an unknown source. It feels like a gift. And yet it is... (more)
Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles Through Freud to Cocteau
When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle - he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture's central narratives about... (more)
Football Delirium
In the tradition of Adam Phillips and Darian Leader, Chris Oakley shines his spotlight on the world of football and with wit and erudition looks at the question of why there is this worldwide... (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)