Psychoanalysis has not examined violence as such since it is a sociological and criminological concept; psychoanalysis is concerned with speech. On Psychoanalysis and Violence brings together noted Lacanian psychoanalysts and scholars to fill an important gap in psychoanalytic scholarship that addresses what the contributors term the "angwash" of our current time. Today violence is everywhere. We are inundated with it, exhausted by it, bombarded by images and reports of it on a daily, even hourly basis. This book examines how psychoanalysis can account for the many manifestations of violence in contemporary society. Drawing on a broadly Lacanian perspective, the authors explore violence in war, terrorism, how the media portrays violence, violent video games, questions of identity, difference and the ‘other’; violence narratives and violence and DSM, and explain how to account for how violence arises and the effect it has on us on both an individual and social level. These are just some of the daily social realities of the present day whose aggression are felt by everyone, which horrify us and which we often feel powerless to change. The contributors have therefore coined a term for this cultural malaise: "angwash", arguing that we are awash in angoisse or anxiety, in a constant panic regarding the impossible and contradictory demands of a "civilization" in crisis. On Psychoanalysis and Violence will be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

A collection of case studies from analysts who have treated patients who have committed serious acts of violence either against others or themselves.

What turns an apparently 'normal' individual into a killer? Many people who commit "rage type" murders have no history of violence. Using psychoanalytic theory and a number of case studies, this book isolates key psychological factors that appear to help explain why such acts of extreme violence occur. Starting from a psychoanalytic standpoint, Psychoanalysis, Violence and Rage-Type Murder argues for a pluralistic approach to understanding aggression, and claims that the origins of aggression have no single source or cause. Drawing broadly on psychological, criminological and psychoanalytic research the author outlines the clinical features of the act and explores the possible role that psychopathology and personality might play in the build up to murder. These observations raise a number of questions about the so-called 'normality' of the individual alongside the capacity to commit murder, and how we might understand the stability of such offenders. Psychoanalysis, Violence and Rage-Type Murder will be of great interest to psychotherapists, forensic psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, criminologists and health care workers.

In The Violence of Emotions the author marries an ability to introduce the reader to the intimate climate of an analytic session with a passionate rereading of Bion. To emphasize both the empirical nature of psychoanalysis and its extraordinary capacity to engender illuminating hypotheses concerning the functioning of the mind, clinical examples alternate with theoretical argument. The psychoanalytic model espoused by Giuseppe Civitarese in his approach to both is analytic field theory. Developed by various authors, including Ferro, commencing with Bion and continued with contributions from the Barangers, Grotstein and Ogden, the theory of the analytic field reveals the social nature of subjectivity and, in clinical work, the intersubjective and dreamlike climate in which a psychoanalytic session unfolds. This leads to a new way of interpreting the facts of analysis. As such, topics of discussion include: transcending the caesura as Bion’s theoretical method hypochondria as de-subjectivation and narrative genre in analysis the aesthetic conflict and alfa function Bion’s search for ambiguity the casting of characters in the analytic dialogue metaphor of text and translation in Freud and Bion. Yet the book has an even more specific objective, focusing attention as it does on the central importance of emotions in mental life and of aesthetic experience as the model of what truly happens in analysis. This is an aspect which the author rediscovers and explores in the thought of Bion and his successors, and which he regards as a way of investigating the deepest and most primitive levels of mental life. This book will be of great interest to psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists.

This book discusses the kind of mental processing that can free victims from their unspeakable trauma, a trauma that has no framework in time or words with which to express it. It discusses the traumatic scenes that are extreme expressions of historic and political conditions.

Published in English for the first time, this is a seminal work by an original and creative analytical thinker. Piera Aulagnier's The Violence of Interpretation bridges the work of Winnicott and Lacan, putting forward a theory of psychosis based on children's early experiences. The author's analysis of the relationship between the other's communications and the infant's psychic experience. and of the pre-verbal stage of development of unconscious fantasy starting from the 'pictogram', have fundamental implications for the psychoanalytic theory of development. She developed Lacan's ideas to enable the treatment of severe psychotic states. Containing detailed discussion of clinical material, and written in the author's precise yet provocative style, The Violence of Interpretation is a welcome addition to the New Library of Psychoanalysis.

The central theme of this book is the operation of intersecting discourses of power, privilege and positioning as they are revealed in fraught encounters between in-groups and out-groups in our deeply fractured world. The authors offer a unique perspective on inter-group dynamics and structural violence at local, societal, cultural and global levels, dissecting processes of toxic ‘othering’ and psychosocial (re-)traumatisation. The book offers the Diogenes Paradigm as a unique conceptual tool with which to analyse the ways in which those of us who come to be located outside or on the margins of dominant social structures are, in one way or another, the inheritors of the legacies of centuries of oppression and exclusion. This analysis offers a distinctive psycho-social redefinition of trauma that foregrounds the relationship between the inhospitable environments we generate and the experiences of un-housedness that we thereby perpetuate. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Psycho-social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence directly addresses pressing global issues of racial trauma, human mobility and climate disaster, and offers a manifesto for the creative re-imagining of the places and spaces in which conversations about restructuring and reparation can become sustainable. This is an essential and compelling book for anyone committed to social justice, especially for all practitioners working in health, social care and community justice settings, and researchers and academics across the behavioural and social sciences.

This important book provides a bridge between psychoanalytic perspectives and socio-cultural issues to shine a spotlight on the experiences of women in India today. Women’s well-being and security has often depended upon their gender positioning while other binaries like rural-urban, class, and caste have also played a crucial role globally and especially in India. Historically, women have been subjected to various forms of oppression that include sex selective abortions, domestic violence, bride burning for dowry, and acid attacks. Threats to women’s security have recently increased with progressive polarization and hardening of socio-political and cultural ideologies. This book assesses how women’s lives are impacted by these social and cultural conventions and stigma, including ideas around motherhood, religion, intimacy and femininity itself, and the psychological implications these have. Topics include the seduction of religion, motherhood in contemporary times, intimacy and violence, and fundamentalist states of mind in the clinical space. While the book echoes a regional specificity, it simultaneously resonates a backdrop of global change of affairs that has its impact on ideological freedom and the concept of inclusivity in terms of gender, race, culture, and politics across the world. For this comprehensive perspective, the effort is to create a platform of authors comprising psychoanalysts, social scientists, scholars from the liberal arts discipline, as well as social activists. In a country where women have been historically subjected to both psychological and physical oppression, this timely and original book will interest a range of scholars interested in gender, mental health and contemporary Indian society, as well as clinicians in the field.

A critical, philosophical engagement of the psychological structures that propagate the continued oppression of women. In this book, the Italian feminist thinker Lea Melandri argues that systemic violence against women has deep psychoanalytic roots. Drawing inspiration from the work of Freud and the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli, along with feminist practices of consciousness-raising, Melandri demonstrates how male dominance and female subservience are established by society through a binary and oppositional understanding of sex and gender. This understanding—and the oppression and violence against women that results—is inscribed in the psyches of both men and women, and is replicated anew from generation to generation. Melandri analyzes women in media, politics, philosophy, and literature to show how this plays out, and calls for awareness of these deep psychic structures and expectations formed within the dynamics of society and primary family relations. “This is a book by a seasoned, experienced, and quite committed Italian feminist thinker who has much to offer to our current context. Linking love and violence as she does, Melandri asks us to face the disturbing fact that deep, often almost atavistic, ties between son and mother, and then husband and wife, are the source both of intense bonds of love as well as furious clashes of hate and violent acting out. For this insight, and for the careful way she works out her argument in this book, Melandri should be read by an English-language audience, and this fine translation will provide the means for it to do so.” — Rebecca West, University of Chicago

David Gray Carlson and Peter Goodrich argue that the postmodern legal mind can be characterized as having shifted the focus of legal analysis away from the modernist understanding of law as a system that is unitary and separate from other aspects of culture and society. In exploring the various "other dimensions" of law, scholars have developed alternative species of legal analysis and recognized the existence of different forms of law. Carlson and Goodrich assert that the postmodern legal mind introduced a series of "minor jurisprudences" or partial forms of legal knowledge, which both compete with and subvert the modernist conception of a unitary system of law. In doing so scholars from a variety of disciplines pursue the implications of applying the insights of their disciplines to law. Carlson and Goodrich have assembled in this volume essays from some of our leading thinkers that address what is arguably one of the most fundamental of interdisciplinary encounters, that of psychoanalysis and law. While psychoanalytic interpretations of law are by no means a novelty within common law jurisprudence, the extent and possibilities of the terrain opened up by psychoanalysis have yet to be extensively addressed. The intentional subject and "reasonable man" of law are disassembled in psychoanalysis to reveal a chaotic and irrational libidinal subject, a sexual being, a body and its drives. The focus of the present collection of essays is upon desire as an inner law, upon love as an interior idiom of legality, and represents a signficant and at times surprising development of the psychoanalytic analysis of legality. These essays should appeal to scholars in law and in psychology. The contributors are Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Peter Goodrich, Pierre Legendre, Alain Pottage, Michel Rosenfeld, Renata Salecl, Jeanne L. Schroeder, Anton Schutz, Henry Staten, and Slavoj Zizek. David Gray Carlson is Professor of Law, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law, University of London and University of California, Los Angeles.