Revisioning War Trauma in Cinema: Uncoming Communities uses philosophy and critical theory to examine films that participate in debates concerning trauma and representation. This book reflects upon films that invent—rather than represent—the moment history breaks down. Jessica Datema and Manya Steinkoler propose a twenty-first-century way forward across problems of trauma, inheritance, and representation into exceptional communities of artistic invention.

The burgeoning field of trauma and cinema is an exciting development within contemporary trauma studies. The author of this book describes the complex relationship between cinema and the trauma of defeat in war. An asymmetric and non-binary comparison of two test cases, post-World War II New German Cinema and post-Vietnam War American cinema, illuminates the indirect and intriguing ways these societies have dealt with the enormous psycho-cultural difficulty of acknowledging their defeat and understanding its manifold meanings. This book draws on psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, and corporeal feminism to explore the bodily experience of defeat. It examines themes and representations of body and sexuality to create a theoretical framework that reveals anew the link between defeated masculinity and nationalism. Building on an original analysis of such varied films as The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, The Tin Drum, and Paris Texas, the author suggests new criteria that highlight the characteristics of post-traumatic cinema.

Forced to contend with unprecedented levels of psychological trauma during World War II, the United States military began sponsoring a series of nontheatrical films designed to educate and even rehabilitate soldiers and civilians alike. Traumatic Imprints traces the development of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches to wartime trauma by the United States military, along with links to formal and narrative developments in military and civilian filmmaking. Offering close readings of a series of films alongside analysis of period scholarship in psychiatry and bolstered by research in trauma theory and documentary studies, Noah Tsika argues that trauma was foundational in postwar American culture. Examining wartime and postwar debates about the use of cinema as a vehicle for studying, publicizing, and even what has been termed “working through” war trauma, this book is an original contribution to scholarship on the military-industrial complex.

Trauma and Repair: Confronting segregation and violence in America is an interview-based interdisciplinary exploration of complex trauma in low-income communities and neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland; Oakland, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Elaine, Arkansas. Moving fluidly between the respondents’ life narratives and clinical and academic perspectives on trauma and inequality, Stopford depicts multidimensional and intergenerational trauma, including prolonged economic injustice and repeated exposure to community violence. Written in an accessible and engaging style that draws on insights from sociology, public health, history, legal studies, and clinical psychoanalysis, this original study is a vital addition to the literature on inequality and poverty in the United States.

Movement, Velocity, and Rhythm from a Psychoanalytic Perspective: Variable Speed(s) explores philosophical and psychoanalytic theories, as well as artworks, that show sensible bodily rituals for reviving our social and subjective lives. With a wide range of contributors from interdisciplinary backgrounds, it informs readers on how to find rituals for syncing ourselves with others and world rhythms. The book is divided into three parts on variability, speed, and slowness, and explores rhythmic rituals of renewal, revolution, and reflection. Each chapter provides unique examples from the applied arts, film, television, and literature to show how different practices of rhythm might aid in creative and deep contemplation and includes philosophical and cultural theories for bodily and rhythmic renewal. Without being limited to a clinical perspective, this book provides wide-ranging discussions of the relation between rhythm, trauma, cultural studies, psychosocial studies, continental philosophy, critical psychology, Lacan, and film, to explore modes of becoming more attuned to each moment, to others, and to our own era. Movement, Velocity, and Rhythm from a Psychoanalytic Perspective will be essential reading for Lacanian psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as anyone interested in rhythm at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and continental philosophy.

Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen examines the impact of cinema closures and the shift to small-screen consumption on our aesthetic and subjective desires during the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective. The chapters in this text hold a unique focus on the intersections of film, psychoanalysis, and the subjective implications of the shift from cinema to the small screen of domestic space. The subjects span historical and current Lacanian thinking, including the representation of psychoanalysis as artifice, Lacan appearing on television, the travails and tribulations of computer mediated analysis, the traumatrope, and the techno-inflected imagined social bond of what Jacques Lacan called the ‘alethosphere’. In this collection, the socio-cultural narratives and Real disruptions of the pandemic are framed as a function of the paradoxes of enjoyment characteristic of Lacanian psychoanalysis rather than merely the psychosocial repercussions of a planetary and contingent disaster. With contributions from practicing psychoanalysts, as well as academics working in related interdisciplinary areas, Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen will have appeal to readers of contemporary Lacanian work in general, to readers and researchers of contemporary psychoanalytic studies, and transdisciplinary and intersectional scholars engaged in psychoanalytic, cultural, and psycho-social research.

Transcending the sex and gender dichotomy, rethinking sexual difference, transgenerational trauma, the decolonization of gender, non-Western identity politics, trans*/feminist debates, embodiment, and queer trans* psychoanalysis, these specially commissioned essays renew our understanding of conventionally held notions of sexual difference. Looking at the intersections between psychoanalysis, feminism, and transgender discourses, these essays think beyond the normative, bi-gender, Oedipal, and phallic premises of classical psychoanalysis while offering new perspectives on gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. From Freud to Lacan, Kristeva, and Laplanche, from misogyny to the #MeToo movement, this collection brings a timely corrective that historicizes our moment and opens up creative debate. Written for professionals, scholars, and students alike, this book will also appeal to psychoanalysts, psychologists, and anyone in the fields of literature, film and media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and social work who wishes to grapple with the theoretical challenges posed by gender, identity, sexual embodiment, and gender politics.

Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears explores the intersection of sport and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the often-overlooked psycho-social dimensions underpinning the experience of sport. By challenging the idea that sport offers an “escape” from reality—a realm separate to the politics of everyday life—each chapter critically considers the unconscious desires, fantasies, and fears that underpin the sporting spectacle for both participants and spectators. Indeed, beyond simply applying psychoanalysis to sport, this book proposes how sport can be used to pose questions to psychoanalysis, thus using sport as a medium to elucidate key psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. This volume addresses a diverse range of theorists, including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Norman O. Brown, and Frantz Fanon, and applies them across a variety of topics and sports, including NFL coaching, Manny Pacquiao, play, football, basketball, baseball, poker, and the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, therefore providing a unique understanding of the cultural, social, and psychic significance of sports. A timely and relevant collection, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in understanding sport from both the cultural and clinical application of psychoanalytic theory as well as academics and practitioners in sport studies, psychology, sociology, education, and cultural studies.

How did we develop our current views of inner life? Psychic Mimesis From Bible and Homer to the Present: Inner Life Over Time reaches back to Biblical and Homeric times, then sweeps across over two millennia of Western literature to answer this question. We discover that while there are discrete contributions from different eras/cultures about inner life—volition, ego ideal, superego, development as a journey, relatedness, even the fact of innerness—there are also at least three trends that have endured from the beginning of our literature and continue as ostinatos beneath each theme and variation of development. These are emotions and our need to conceal and reveal secrets and attachment that is our ability to explore from a secure base. This book takes us through the journey of discovery to arrive at our twenty-first century sense of self and inner life. We follow Auerbach’s text, Mimesis, as a guide through the literature, but add surprises such as Maimonides’ Guide to the perplexed or Rousseau’s Confessions to arrive at the sense that while there are particularities to eras and cultures, there is also something universal that resonates with us and endures.