Culture and Psychoanalysis Books
Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology?
The intellectual traditions initiated by Freud and Marx have enabled a range of scholars to critically reflect upon the ideological foundations upon which modern and now postmodern western societies... (more)
Proust and the Sense of Time
Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, first delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first... (more)
Psychoanalysis, Society and Culture: Building Bridges
This book looks at the intersection of psychoanalytic thinking, society and culture, using examples drawn from literature, clinical practice and everyday life.
The book explores the various ways... (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)
How to be Real: A Survival Guide in Challenging Times
In How to Be Real, leading psychosocial thinker Stephen Frosh tackles one of our most urgent questions: how can we thrive in a world so troubling and confusing? Despite constant exhortations to be... (more)
Media and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Introduction
Our lives are saturated by media that we use in conscious as well as unconscious ways. Spanning a wide range of examples, from film and TV to social media, from gaming to robots, this critical... (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)
Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism
The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse... (more)
The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation
The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of... (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)
Culture and Psyche: Selected Essays: Second Revised Edition
A new edition including three additional essays and a new introduction. Culture and Psyche is a collection of Sudhir Kakar's essays on cultural psychology, which analyses various facets of Indian... (more)
Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and engages in the dangerous pleasures of national... (more)
Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment and Transformation
Why do people migrate from one country to another? What is the difference between an immigrant and an exile? What determines the psychological outcome of immigration? Can one ever mourn the loss of... (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)
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)
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)
Art and Analysis: An Adrian Stokes Reader
This edition is an introductory selection from the writings of Adrian Stokes (1902-1972), the Kleinian aesthete who created a unique vision of the relation between psychoanalysis, art, and aesthetic... (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)
Elements of Reparation: Truth, Faith, and Transformation in the Works of Heidegger, Bion, and Beyond
Damage and reparation are central themes of human existence. Melanie Klein, among other pivotal discoveries, noted our capacity for destructiveness towards others and ourselves. More importantly, she... (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 Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict
For decades India has been the scene of outbursts of religious violence, thrusting many ordinary Hindus and Muslims into bloody conflict. This work analyzes the psychological roots of Hindu-Muslim... (more)
A Psycho-Political Analysis of Netanyahu’s Israel: The Israeli Anxiety
This book weaves together philosophical, theological, psychoanalytical and political paradigms, providing both a historicization and a theorization of the Israeli experience and encompassing... (more)
A Word to the Wise: Don Quixote Returns to Fight Perversion
After giving us a fascinating reading of Cervantes’ classic novel in Don Quixote: Fighting Melancholia, Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière co-author a second work, to reflect on the hero’s... (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)
Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution
In 1981 the Communist Party of China declared: “The ‘Cultural Revolution’, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the... (more)
Not the Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of Progress
For well over half a century, since the first credible warnings of petroleum depletion were raised in the 1950s, contemporary industrial civilization has been caught in a remarkable paradox: a... (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)
Organisations, Anxiety and Defence: Towards a Psychoanalytic Social Psychology
Psychoanalysis has been applied to the understanding of social groups, organisations and cultures for a very long time, and there have been many different approaches. This book brings together the... (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)