Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art examines a strain of artists spanning more than a century, beginning at the dawn of photography and culminating in the discussion of contemporary artists, to illustrate various psychoanalytic concepts by examining artists working in a multitude of media. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, who applied psychoanalytic methods to art and literature to decipher the meaning and intention of the creator, as well as Jacques Lacan’s dissemination of scansion as a powerful disruption of narrative, the book explores examples of the long and rich relationship between psychoanalysis and the fine arts. Whilst guiding readers through the different artists and their artforms – from painting and music to poetry, collage, photography, film, performance art, technology and body modification – Sinclair interrogates scansion as a generative process often inherent of the act of creation itself. This is an intriguing book for psychoanalysts, psychologists and creative arts therapists who wish to explore the generative potential of scansion and the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts, as well as for artists and art historians interested in a psychoanalytic view of these processes.

This unusual book explores the transformative power of liminal experiences in ancient Greek texts, psychoanalytic theory, and the author’s own life, to demonstrate how a contemporary understanding of ancient thought can illuminate modern psychoanalytic theory and practice especially as it relates to trauma, grief, and the development of psyche. With the understanding that liminal experiencing involves engaging a psychic space outside the boundaries of ego organization, Dobson artfully interweaves autobiography, literary analysis, philosophical ontology, and psychoanalysis, to formulate a new paradigm for how to construct human beings, how to enliven and deepen personal and therapeutic experience, and how poetic language is the gateway to this magical realm of transformation. Alongside richly detailed case analyses, the author uses her dual expertise in psychoanalysis and ancient Greek literature to explore how the maternal and liminal in human life were displaced with the rise of Athens and a new way of being human — the rational citizen — and how this repression has resulted in diminished, constricted experiencing and the suppression of women throughout western history. With a deep understanding of classical literature and psychoanalysis, and extensive clinical insights, this is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, classicists, and historians wishing to understand how ancient thought and modern psychoanalysis can interact.

This book explores the universal human existential trauma of "original loss," a trauma the author describes as arising from our primal, human evolutionary loss of experiencing ourselves as innately belonging to, and instinctively at home within, the larger natural world. In this trauma arose our existential awareness of impermanence and mortality along with the need to mourn that loss in order to create a sense of belonging and identity. The book describes how the invention of art and group ritual became the collective ways we mourn our shared existential loss. It describes as well how it is the art within the psychoanalytic practice that enables both patient and analyst to grieve their individual versions of our shared original loss. Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Loewald and Ogden, as well as art theory and religion, this book offers a new perspective on the intersection of metaphorical artistic thinking and psychoanalysis. This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of poetic, visual and muscial metaphor, creativity, evolution and history of art.

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing. Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices.

How Does Analysis Work? uses short, compelling vignettes from people in Lacanian analysis to explore how analytic interpretation works. Insights, revelations, connections, meanings and non-meanings all feature in these anonymous accounts of crucial moments in analysis, providing a sense of what it is all about. Drawn from a wide range of analysands, some seasoned analysts and others just starting out, these vignettes show how change takes place. The short pieces are drawn from Lacanian analysis, but many go against cliched views of what Lacanians do in their work, spanning both the classical and the radically innovative and showing the use of humour and theatre in psychoanalytic practice. How Does Analysis Work? will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and Lacanian analysts in practice and in training, as well as anyone who is curious about the analytic process.

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.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman presents a contemporary Freudian-Lacanian assessment of this classic director. This collection is the first to bring together this unique psychological perspective on Bergman’s work. While Bergman and his films have been written about throughout the decades, until now there has not been a collection anthologizing Freudian-Lacanian perspectives on his work. Vanessa Sinclair brings together an international community of scholars and practicing psychoanalysts – some of whom are also filmmakers – to reflect on Bergman’s films, life, and work in philosophical, historical, and cultural contexts. They assess individual films in depth, compare multiple films, and focus on Bergman’s life and work in a cultural context. This book includes chapters on seminal films including Persona and The Silence. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman will be essential reading for academics and students of film studies, psychoanalytic theory, and Lacan, and of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Space in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis in Space explores the immense potential of psychoanalytic thought to questions of spatiality. The international contributors combine the symbolic, the corporeal, the libidinal and the affective aspects of human experience, using psychoanalysis to reveal numerous facets and aspects of spatiality which remain invisible or blurred from other points of view. The focus moves from readings of the very physical space of the analyst’s consulting room and spatiality of the analytic situation through philosophical analyses of spatiality of the body, subjectivity, love and materiality, to specific applications of psychoanalytic insights in a wide variety of fields from architecture to economics. Space in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis in Space will be of interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training as well as scholars of psychoanalytic theory, cultural theory, literary theory, psychology, urban studies, space studies and philosophy.

The Science and Art of Dreaming is an innovative text that reviews the neuroscience and psychology of how dreams are produced, how they are recalled and their relationship to waking life events and concerns of the dreamer. Featuring beautiful original artwork based on dream representations, the book delves deeply into what happens when we dream, the works of art we produce when asleep and the relevance of dreaming to science, art and film. The book examines the biological, psychological and social causes of dreaming, and includes recent advances in the study of nightmares and lucid dreaming. It shows how sleep can process memories and that dreams may reflect these processes, but also that dreams can elicit self-disclosure and empathy when they are shared after waking. The playfulness, originality and metaphorical content of dreams also link them to art, and especially to the cultural movement that has most valued dreams – Surrealism. The book details the history of scientific research into dreams, including a re-reading of the two dreams of Freud’s patient, the feminist hero Dora, and also the history of Surrealism and of films that draw on dreams and dream-like processes. Each chapter starts with a dream narrative and accompanying painting of the dream to highlight aspects of each of the chapter themes. This highly engaging book will be relevant to researchers, students and lecturers in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, consciousness and social evolution. It will also be of value within the study and practice of visual art, design and film, and will be of interest to the general reader and anyone who holds a personal interest in their own dreams.