Culture and Psychoanalysis Books
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)
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)
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)
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)
Schelling, Freud and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis: Uncanny Belonging
Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis provides a long-overdue dialogue between two seminal thinkers, Schelling and Freud. Through a sustained reading of the sublime,... (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)
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)
Art and Mourning: The Role of Creativity in Healing Trauma and Loss
Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is... (more)
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge - or rather bury - the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life,... (more)
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a... (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)
Women, Sex, and Madness: Notes from the Edge
Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a... (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)
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 Psychodynamics of Social Networking: Connected-up Instantaneous Culture and the Self
Over the past decade, the very nature of the way we relate to each other has been utterly transformed by online social networking and the mobile technologies that enable unfettered access to it. Our... (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)
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)
Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis: Literature, Belief, and Neurosis
A remarkable rendering of psychoanalysis in contemporary thought and literature, offering a compelling theory of human development. (more)
The Uses of Enchantment
Wicked stepmothers and beautiful princesses... magic forests and enchanted towers... little pigs and big bad wolves... Fairy tales have been an integral part of childhood for hundreds of years. But... (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.
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)
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)
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)
Fifty Shades of Feminism
Half a century after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, have women really exchanged purity and maternity to become desiring machines inspired only by variations of sex, shopping and masochism... (more)
Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality
In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a... (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)
This Incredible Need to Believe
"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics,... (more)
The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature
The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye is the first volume of literary criticism to be co-authored by a practicing psychoanalyst and a literary critic. The result of this unique collaboration is a... (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)