Culture and Psychoanalysis Books
Apropos of Nothing: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Coen Brothers
The Coen Brothers’ films are rife with figures of absence. In The Big Lebowski, the Dude does nothing. He is put on the trail of a kidnapping that never took place, and pays the ransom to a gang of... (more)
The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind
In The Poet’s Voice in the Making of Mind, Russell Meares presents a fascinating inquiry into the origin of mind. He proposes that the way in which mind, or self, evolved, may resemble the way it... (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 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)
A Spirit that Impels: Play, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis
This volume brings together some of the papers presented by leading scholars, artists and psychoanalysts at an annual Creativity Seminar organised by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center.... (more)
Toward Mutual Recognition: Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative
Ever since its nascent days, psychoanalysis has enjoyed an uneasy coexistence with religion. However, in recent decades, many analysts have been more interested in the healing potential of both... (more)
The Psychology of Physical Attraction
People have long been interested in the complexities of human beauty, but until recently the science of attractiveness was largely left to poets, playwrights, philosophers, and artists. This book... (more)
Does God Help?: Developmental and Clinical Aspects of Religious Belief
Can psychoanalysis lead us toward understanding the roots and nature of religious belief? In this text, five classical psychoanalysts representing five different religious faiths share their... (more)
Mourning sex: Performing public memories
This study employs a range of cultural representations in order to examine how cultures perform 'mourning'. Experimentally and theoretically informed, this text places performance theory in a... (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)
Why Does Patriarchy Persist?
The election of an unabashedly patriarchal man as US President was a shock for many--despite decades of activism on gender inequalities and equal rights, how could it come to this? What is it about... (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)
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)
Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film
The experience of watching films - entertaining, moving, instructive, frightening or exciting as they may be - can be enriched by the opportunity to reflect upon them from unconventional... (more)
Shrinking the News: Headline Stories on the Couch
Shrinking the News brings together Coline Covington’s wide range of articles from her regular column in the online newspaper, The Week. The articles cover current events from October 2008 until... (more)
The Severed Head: Capital Visions
Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying... (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)
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)
Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art
Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and... (more)
Shakespeare on the Couch
Drawing upon a vast literature in psychoanalytic journals and either upon Shakespeare's characters themselves or alluding to those characters in the course of other topics, this book discusses eight... (more)
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art
Desire in Language presents a selection of Julia Kristeva’s essays that trace the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts.... (more)
God Is Undead: Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers
The undead are neither alive nor dead. They are animate yet non-living. In God Is Undead, Lorenzo Chiesa and Adrian Johnston contend that true unbelief today sees the divine precisely as exemplifying... (more)
Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life
Jonathan Lear is one of the most distinctive intellectual voices in America, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who draws from ancient
and modern thought, personal history, and everyday experience to... (more)
Cognitive science and the unconscious:
Written by a group of researchers and clinicians, this text surveys a major strand in the fresh research to identify the essential characteristics and effects of the unconscious: the formulation and... (more)
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Power in Contemporary Fiction: Malice, the Victim and the Couple
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Power in Contemporary Fiction psychoanalytically examines contemporary fiction portraying the female in a reversal of the stereotyped victim role. The recent... (more)
Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game
The Film Theory in Practice Series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of... (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)
Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process
Creative Analysis: Art, Creativity and Clinical Process explores the dynamics of creativity in psychoanalytic treatment. It argues that the creative process of the analytic interaction is... (more)
The Zizek Dictionary
Slavoj Zizek is the most popular and discussed philosopher in the world today. His prolific writings - across philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, film, music and religion - ... (more)