Culture and Psychoanalysis Books
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)
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)
Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond
For more than fifty years, Leo Bersani’s writing has inspired and challenged scholars in the fields of literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and film and... (more)
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This... (more)
Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A Study of Schizophrenia and Culture in Turkey
This book explores the relationship between subjective experience and the cultural, political and historical paradigms in which the individual is embedded. Providing a deep analysis of three... (more)
The Becoming Room: Filming Bion's A Memoir of the Future
The contents of this book represent a series of experiments in dramatizing Bion’s A Memoir of the Future, the primary one being an unfinished film begun in India in the 1980s and directed by Kumar... (more)
Geographies of Psychoanalysis: Encounters Between Cultures in Tehran
Can psychoanalytical hypotheses have a universal value? Can they describe the same - or a similar – psychic dynamic for any human, regardless of the historical, social and cultural context? Can... (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)
Deleuze and Desire
The engagement of Deleuze with psychoanalysis has led to the development of a remarkable and highly influential theory about human desire. The most systematic account of this theory, crucial for... (more)
Fighting Melancholia: Don Quixote's Teaching
Françoise Davoine has been investigating psychotic phenomena and trauma for over thirty years, in collaboration with Jean-Max Gaudillière. In this book, she draws on her literary background to take... (more)
Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization
Psychoanalysis in an Age of Accelerating Cultural Change: Spiritual Globalization addresses the current status of mental health work in the public and private sectors. The careful, thorough, approach... (more)
The Motive for Metaphor: Brief Essays on Poetry and Psychoanalysis
This book is a small anthology: each chapter a kind of meditation—on poetry and psychoanalysis; on a poem, sometimes two; on poetry in general; on thought itself. The poems are beautiful, some are... (more)
Creativity and Psychotic States in Exceptional People: The Work of Murray Jackson
Creativity and Psychotic States in Exceptional People tells the story of the lives of four exceptionally gifted individuals: Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jose Saramago and John Nash. Previously... (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)
Freud and War
During the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking the fundamental question: What can be done to liberate humanity from the menace of war? The... (more)
The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation
Brilliantly synthesizing human insights with Christian dogma, Soren Kierkegaard presented, in 1844, The Concept of Anxiety as a landmark psychological deliberation, suggesting that our only hope in... (more)
The Bonds of Love, Revisited
Jessica Benjamin is one of the most important and influential psychoanalysts of the last four decades. She is one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, a movement that has by now expanded... (more)
God, Freud and Religion: The Origins of Faith, Fear and Fundamentalism
The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image. Freud argued the reverse - that Man created God in his image. This book interrogates these two propositions to provide a coherent account of... (more)
Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose: A Writer's Guide for Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists: 581
Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose will teach you how to read gifted writers for inspiration and practical lessons in the craft of writing. It will help you apply the principles and... (more)
Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons from Literature
Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons from Literature describes the problematic ways people learn to cope with life's fundamental challenges, such as maintaining... (more)
Body Image and Identity in Contemporary Societies: Psychoanalytic, Social, Cultural and Aesthetic Perspectives
Popular interest in body image issues has grown dramatically in recent years, due to an emphasis on individual responsibility and self-determination in contemporary society as well as the seemingly... (more)
The Freudian Orient: Early Psychoanalysis, Anti-Semitic Challenge, and the Vicissitudes of Orientalist Discourse
This study consists of a twofold, interrelated enquiry: the Orientalism of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalysis of Orientalism – bringing into conversation Sigmund Freud and Edward Said and,... (more)
A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World
As he developed his striking new science of the mind, Sigmund Freud had frequent recourse to ancient culture and the historical disciplines that draw on it. A Compulsion for Antiquity fully explores... (more)
Women and Images of Men in Cinema: Gender Construction in La Belle et la Bête by Jean Cocteau
Women and men in cinema are imaginary constructs created by filmmakers and their audiences. The film-psychoanalytic approach reveals how movies subliminally influence unconscious reception. On the... (more)
Art, Psychoanalysis, and Adrian Stokes: A Biography
Illustrated with Barbara Hepworth’s abstract stone carving, with other works of art, and with fascinating vignettes from Adrian Stokes’s writing, this biography highlights his revolutionary emphasis... (more)
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
One of the most important texts of modern times, Herbert Marcuse's analysis and image of a one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional society has shaped many young radicals' way of seeing and... (more)
Narcissism and its Discontents
Narcissism and Its Discontents challenges the received wisdom that narcissism is only destructive of good social relations. By building on insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory it puts... (more)
Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Cinema
What is the role of the unconscious in our visceral approaches to cinema? Embodied Encounters offers a unique collection of essays written by leading thinkers and writers in film studies, with a... (more)
Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor: Conversations with Literary and Visual Artists
Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor offers an intriguing window onto the creative thinking of several well-known and highly creative individuals. Internationally renowned writers, painters,... (more)
Fragile Learning: The Influence of Anxiety
What are the barriers and obstacles to adults learning? What makes the process of adult learning so fragile? And what exactly do we mean by Fragile Learning? This book addresses these questions in... (more)