On the one hand, Creation and Discovery, Lacan and Klein: An Essay of Reintroduction seeks to disclose the often suppressed or unacknowledged proximity, even intimacy, between Lacan and Klein, and thereby to facilitate a re-introduction between Lacan and Klein such that their works can read anew, both independently and together. On the other hand, by reconstructing the highly divergent metapsychological theories and clinical orientations of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein from their discussions of the same case material, the text seeks to demonstrate the irreducible plurality of psychoanalysis and the ethico-political significance of this plurality. Siding with neither Lacan nor Klein's perspective, Adam Rosen-Carole argues that within and between these exaggerated positions, a dialectic of creation and discovery emerges that affords the reader unique insights into the nature and status of psychoanalytic knowing and its particular objects. Special attention is paid to the indelible exaggerations and distortions, the guiding sensitivities and urgencies, and the concomitant structures of blindness and insight organizing various psychoanalytic perspectives. Written for clinicians as well as for students and scholars interested in psychoanalysis and philosophy, this book serves not only as a comprehensive introduction to Lacan, but also a reassessment of psychoanalytic method.

Psychoanalysis is a historical discourse of suffering and healing under conditions of modernity rather than a metaphysical discourse of universal truth, and must be so due to the ontological indeterminacy of psychic life. Demonstrating this proceeds through the substantiation of two primary theses. First, pluralism in psychoanalysis, thus the perspectival character of psychoanalytic knowing, is irreducible. Second, psychic life is partially pliable to interpretive constitution rather than a self-subsistent object domain fully available to third-personal, objective description. Together, these theses provide the framework for a radical rethinking of the authority of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice and of the nature of psychoanalytic claims to objectivity. Psychoanalytic interpretations are best understood as existentially interrogative - they test who and how one might be - and if successful, to some extent identity formative. The validity conditions of psychoanalytic knowledge thus concern the creation/discovery of satisfactory forms of practice-orienting self-narration rather than those regularly operative in the natural sciences. However, an adequate assessment of psychoanalytic claims requires that the claims of science are given due consideration and the impediments to practice-orienting self-narration under conditions of late modernity are acknowledged.

This book provides a timely exploration and comparison of key concepts in the theories of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, two thinkers and clinicians whose influence over the development of psychoanalysis in the wake of Freud has been profound and far-reaching. Whilst the centrality of the unconscious is a strong conviction shared by both Klein and Lacan, there are also many differences between the two schools of thought and the clinical work that is produced in each. The purpose of this collection is to take seriously these similarities and differences. Deeply relevant to both theoretical reflection and clinical work, the New Klein-Lacan Dialogues should make interesting reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, mental health professionals, scholars and all those who wish to know more about these two leading figures in the field of psychoanalysis.The collection centres around key concepts such as: 'symbolic function', the 'ego', the 'object', the 'body', 'trauma', 'autism', 'affect' and 'history and archives'.

Throughout the year of 1995, a series of debates took place under the auspices of the Higher Education Network for Research and Information in Psychoanalysis. Leading Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysts were brought together to debate key topics of psychanalytic theory. Subsequently, they were asked to submit their papers in written form and this book was compiled. The following areas were discussed: "phantasy", by Darien Leader and Robert M. Young; "child analysis" by Bice Benvenuto and Margaret Rustin; "transference and countertransference" by Robert Hinshelwood and Vincetn Palomera; "technique and interpretation" by Catalina Bronstein and Bernard Burgoyne; "sexuality" by Jane Temperley and Dany Nobus; "the unconscious" by Robin Anderson and Filip Geerardyn; The book ends with interviews with Donald Meltzer and Eric Laurent, each significant figures in the fields of Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis respectively. Mary Sullivan provides an introduction setting out the similarities and divergences of the two psychoanalytic pradigms.

“A timely and important project that changes our understanding of the role of abjection both in cultural politics and in the structure of film.” —Ewa Ziarek, State University of New York at Buffalo Tina Chanter resolves a fundamental problem in film theory by negotiating a middle path between “gaze theory” approaches to film and spectator studies or cultural theory approaches that emphasize the position of the viewer and thereby take account of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Chanter argues that abjection is the unthought ground of fetishistic theories. If the feminine has been the privileged excluded other of psychoanalytic theory, fueled by the myth of castration and the logic of disavowal, when fetishism is taken up by race theory, or cultural theory, the multiple and fluid registers of abjection are obscured. By mobilizing a theory of abjection, the book shows how the appeal to phallic, fetishistic theories continues to reify the hegemonic categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender, as if they stood as self-evident categories. “An intriguing read, especially for those who favor psychological models of criticism in film theory . . . Recommended.” —Choice

A modernist icon, an object of forbidden desire, a symbol of loss and suffering, and an incorrigible survivor - the mother takes all of these forms in Chinese literature from the 1920s and 1930s. In an innovative analysis, Sally Taylor Lieberman explores the meanings the maternal figure acquired at a particular place and time and then engages those meanings in a feminist rereading of the master narratives of modern Chinese intellectual and literary history. Drawing on feminist literary criticism and the theories of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, and Sigmund Freud, Lieberman breaks traditional analytical boundaries as she explores the place of the mother in the ideological struggles through which the modern Chinese canon attained its present shape.

On the one hand, Creation and Discovery, Lacan and Klein: An Essay of Reintroduction seeks to disclose the often suppressed or unacknowledged proximity, even intimacy, between Lacan and Klein, and thereby to facilitate a re-introduction between Lacan and Klein such that their works can read anew, both independently and together. On the other hand, by reconstructing the highly divergent metapsychological theories and clinical orientations of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein from their discussions of the same case material, the text seeks to demonstrate the irreducible plurality of psychoanalysis and the ethico-political significance of this plurality. Siding with neither Lacan nor Klein's perspective, Adam Rosen-Carole argues that within and between these exaggerated positions, a dialectic of creation and discovery emerges that affords the reader unique insights into the nature and status of psychoanalytic knowing and its particular objects. Special attention is paid to the indelible exaggerations and distortions, the guiding sensitivities and urgencies, and the concomitant structures of blindness and insight organizing various psychoanalytic perspectives. Written for clinicians as well as for students and scholars interested in psychoanalysis and philosophy, this book serves not only as a comprehensive introduction to Lacan, but also a reassessment of psychoanalytic method.

Combining approaches from literary studies and historical sociology, this book provides a groundbreaking cultural history of the strategies Freud employed in his writings and career to orchestrate public recognition of psychoanalysis and to shape its institutional identity.

Melanie Klein and Marcelle Spira: Their Correspondence and Context includes 45 letters Melanie Klein wrote to the Swiss psychoanalyst Marcelle Spira between 1955 and 1960, as well as six rough drafts from Spira. They were discovered in Spira’s library after her death in 2006. As only a few of the letters that Klein wrote to her colleagues have been preserved, this moving, historically important correspondence sheds new light upon the last five years of Klein’s creative life. The common theme of the letters is their discussion of the French translation of The Psycho-Analysis of Children by Boulanger in collaboration with Spira. The translation, first undertaken by Lacan, went through many ups and downs until it was published in 1959 by the Presses Universitaires de France. Klein also discusses her current work, in particular Envy and Gratitude (1957). She encourages her pioneering Swiss colleague Spira to be patient in the face of the resistance shown towards Kleinian thinking. Identifying herself to some extent with her younger follower, Klein reveals a very touching autobiographical account of the difficulties that she herself had encountered in her work and how she overcame them. In Melanie Klein and Marcelle Spira: Their Correspondence and Context, Jean-Michel Quinodoz brings together these important letters. This rare collection of their correspondence is a valuable contribution to the history of psychoanalysis and will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, trainee psychoanalysts and lay readers with an interest in the work of Klein and Spira.

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses’s term “fetishism” has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to “magic,” but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses’s term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all, On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy. The product of de Brosses’s autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses’s work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of its time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, Hartmut Böhme, and Alfonso Iacono through illuminating new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity and the new materialisms.