One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside ...the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York—and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School—Veronika Fuechtner traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, she illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, she explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.
Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the twentieth century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an ...untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an ‘antiphilosophy’, that is, as a practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, 'Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy' offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.
Wilfred Bion’s theories of dreaming, of the analytic situation, of reality and everyday life, and even of the contact between the body and the mind offer very different, and highly fruitful, ...perspectives on lived experience. Yet very little of his work has entered the field of visual culture, especially film and media studies. Kelli Fuery offers an engaging overview of Bion’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis- his theory of thinking- and demonstrates its relevance for why we watch moving images.
Bion’s theory of thinking is presented as an alternative model for the examination of how we experience moving images and how they work as tools which we use to help us ‘think’ emotional experience. ‘Being Embedded’ is a term used to identify and acknowledge the link between thinking and emotional experience within the lived reception of cinema. It is a concept that everyone can speak to as already knowing, already having felt it - being embedded is at the core of lived and thinking experience. This book offers a return to psychoanalytic theory within moving image studies, contributing to the recent works that have explored object relations psychoanalysis within visual culture (specifically the writings of Klein and Winnicott), but differs in its reference and examination of previously overlooked, but highly pivotal, thinkers such as Bion, Bollas and Ogden. A theorization of thinking as an affective structure within moving image experience provides a fresh avenue for psychoanalytic theory within visual culture.
Wilfred Bion, Thinking, and Emotional Experience with Moving Images will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars and students of film and media studies, cultural studies and cultural sociology and anthropology, visual culture, media theory, philosophy, and psychosocial studies.
This book puts psychological trauma at its centre. Using psychoanalysis, it assesses what was lost, how it was lost and how the loss is compulsively repeated over generations. There is a ...conceptualization of this trauma as circular. Such a situation makes it stubbornly persistent. It is suggested that central to the system of slavery was the separating out of procreation from maternity and paternity. This was achieved through the particular cruelties of separating couples at the first sign of loving interest in each other; and separating infants from their mothers. Cruelty disturbed the natural flow of events in the mind and disturbed the approach to and the resolution of the Oedipus Complex conflict. This is traced through the way a new kind of family developed in the Caribbean and elsewhere where slavery remained for hundreds of years.
In Genres of Listening Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explores a
unique culture of listening and communicating in Buenos Aires. She
traces how psychoanalytic listening circulates beyond the clinical
setting ...to become a central element of social interaction and
cultural production in the city that has the highest number of
practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts in the world.
Marsilli-Vargas develops the concept of genres of listening to
demonstrate that hearers listen differently, depending on where,
how, and to whom they are listening. In particular, she focuses on
psychoanalytic listening as a specific genre. Porteños
(citizens of Buenos Aires) have developed a "psychoanalytic ear"
that emerges during conversational encounters in everyday
interactions in which participants offer different interpretations
of the hidden meaning the words carry. Marsilli-Vargas does not
analyze these interpretations as impositions or interruptions but
as productive exchanges. By outlining how psychoanalytic listening
operates as a genre, Marsilli-Vargas opens up ways to imagine other
modes of listening and forms of social interaction.
I appreciate Elizabeth Howell's creative ways of re-articulating and engaging with my work with Ellie, and I respond here to her elaboration of her own generative thinking in terms of dissociation ...and DID. In dialogue with Jody Davies, I reply to her critique in terms of my view that she overly privileges the capital E enactment model in relation to other aspects of psychoanalytic process. However, that debate is not what is most central for me here. Regardless of how Davies, or you, the reader, might regard my own particular ways of engaging in the treatment with Ellie, the raison d'etre for my current paper (as well as an earlier one also on Somatic Experiencing is much more wide ranging. While I have described the SE model and illustrated how I interweave it into my psychoanalytic work, I seek more broadly to convey how we may draw upon SE to enhance aspects of our psychoanalytic work, regardless of our theoretical allegiances or beliefs. I elaborate here on SE's organic, bottom-up ways of working with the body, how these truly differ from modes utilized by most analysts, and how SE can enfold into psychoanalytic treatment in both exploratory and regulatory processes, and in the therapeutic relationship. Howell's discussion and Davies' discussion/critique were quite generative in pushing me to clarify and deepen my thinking and to elaborate further here on the essence of Somatic Experiencing and what it has to offer to psychoanalytic treatment.
Although there have been many attempts to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to political thought, this book is the first to identify the political project inherent in the fundamental tenets of ...psychoanalysis. And this political project, Todd McGowan contends, provides an avenue for emancipatory politics after the failure of Marxism in the twentieth century.
Where others seeking the political import of psychoanalysis have looked to Freud's early work on sexuality, McGowan focuses on Freud's discovery of the death drive and Jacques Lacan's elaboration of this concept. He argues that the self-destruction occurring as a result of the death drive is the foundational act of emancipation around which we should construct our political philosophy. Psychoanalysis offers the possibility for thinking about emancipation not as an act of overcoming loss but as the embrace of loss. It is only through the embrace of loss, McGowan suggests, that we find the path to enjoyment, and enjoyment is the determinative factor in all political struggles-and only in a political project that embraces the centrality of loss will we find a viable alternative to global capitalism.
PDF
