Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely. Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult – if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen. Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching Trauma, Sense and Gesture, Impossible Poetics, Without Words, Wounds and Suture and Auto/Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption, the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about. The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, academics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and film studies, filmmakers and artists.

Based on experience of analytic practice and illustrated by fascinating clinical material, this book addresses what the authors call the work of figurability as a way of outlining the passage from the unrepresentable to the representational.

For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes. This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger. Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.

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 and reflects upon psychoanalytic understandings of estrangement, the Freudian notions of the uncanny and Nachträglichkeit, exploring how these are evoked in works of literature and art, and are present in our response to such works. Kohon provides close readings of and insights into the works of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louise Bourgeois, Juan Muñoz, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra, Edvard Munch, Kurt Schwitters, amongst others; the book also includes a chapter on the Warsaw Ghetto Monument and the counter-monument aesthetic movement in post-war Germany. Kohon shows how some works of art and literature represent something that otherwise eludes representation, and how psychoanalysis and the aesthetic share the task of making a representation of the unrepresentable. Reflections on the Aesthetic is not an exercise in "applied" psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis and art are considered by the author in their own terms, allowing a new understanding of the aesthetic to emerge. Kohon’s book makes compelling reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art therapists, literary and art critics, academics, students and all those interested in the matter of the aesthetic.

This book presents a new reading of film noir through psychoanalytic theory. In a field now dominated by Deleuzian and phenomenological approaches to film-philosophy, this book argues that, far from having passed, the time for Lacan in Film Studies is only just beginning. The chapters engage with Lacanian psychoanalysis to perform a meta-critical analysis of the writing on noir in the last seven decades and to present an original theory of criticism and historiography for the cinema. The book is also an act of mourning; for a lost past of the cinema, for a longstanding critical tradition and for film noir. It asks how we can talk about film noir when, in fact, film noir doesn’t exist. The answer starts with Lacan and a refusal to relinquish psychoanalysis. Lacanian theories of retroactivity and ontology can be read together with film history, genre and narrative to show the ways in which theory and history, past and present, cinema and psychoanalysis are fundamentally knotted together. Tyrer also explores Lacan through particular noir films, such as Double Indemnity andThe Maltese Falcon — and demonstrates the possibilities for a Lacanian Film Studies (as one that engages fully with Lacan’s entire body of work) that has hitherto not been realised.

Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.

This work offers an exploration and critique of Blanchot’s various engagements with psychoanalysis, from the early 1950s onward. Kuzma highlights the political contours of Blanchot’s writings on Freud, Lacan, Leclaire, Winnicott, and others, ultimately suggesting a link between these writings and Blanchot’s broader attempts at rethinking the nature of human relationality, responsibility, and community. This book makes a substantive contribution to our understanding of the political and philosophical dimensions of Blanchot’s writings on madness, narcissism, and trauma, among other topics of critical and clinical relevance. Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis comprises an indispensable text for anyone interested in tracing the history of psychoanalysis in post-War France.

Over the past decades, Lawrence Friedman has emerged as one of the most erudite and provocative theoriss in contemporary psychotherapy. The Anatomy of Psychotherapy interweaves Friedman's major contributions to the analytic and psychiatric literature with extensive new material in arriving at an extraordinarily rich and nuanced appreciation of psychotherapy. The Anatomy of Psychotherapy describes how the therapist makes use of theories and styles in order to achieve equilibrium under stress. This stress, according to Friedman, is related to the "absolute ambiguity" that is essential to psychotherapy. To cope with this ambiguity, the therapist alternates among three different roles, those of reader, historian, and pragmatic operator. Friedman examines these "disambiguating postures" in detail, paying special attention to their bearing on the therapist's narrative prejudice, the relativity of his knowledge, and the relationship of his work to natural science and hermeneutics. Brilliantly constructed and masterfully written, The Anatomy of Psychotherapy traverses the same basic themes in each of its six sections. Readers who are interested in theory can hone in on relevant topics or the work of particular theorists. Readers seeking insight into the demands of daily clinical work, on the other hand, can bypass the systematic studies and immerse themselves in Friedman's engrossing reflections on the experience of psychotherapy. Best served will be those who ponder Friedman's writings and therapy as complementary meditations issuing from a single, unifying vision, one in which psychotherapy, in both its promise and frustrations, becomes a subtle interplay among theories about psychotherapy, the personal styles of psychotherapists, and the practical exigencies of aiding those in distress.

Originally published in 1990, Psychoanalysis and... brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan’s seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But Psychoanalysis and... demonstrates that psychoanalysis – and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism – was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain.