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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Psychoanalysis and Architecture: The Inside and the Outside
This book explores how psychoanalysis and architecture can enhance and increase the chances of mental 'containment', while also fostering exchange between inside and outside.
The way in which... (more)
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China: Volume 1
This peer-reviewed journal proposes to explore the introduction of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapy, and the wider application of psychoanalytic ideas into China. It aims to have articles... (more)
Freud and the Non-European
Banned by the Freud institute in Vienna, this controversial lecture eventually became Edward Said's final book. Freud and the Non-European builds on Said's abiding interest in the psychoanalyst's... (more)
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts
The story of how psychoanalysis was used in the war against Nazi Germany - in the crucial quest to understand the Nazi mind.
Daniel Pick brings both the skills of the historian and the trained... (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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)