This volume addresses trauma not only from a theoretical, descriptive and therapeutic perspective, but also through the survivor as narrator, meaning maker, and presenter. By conceptualising different outlooks on trauma, exploring transfigurations in writing and art, and engaging trauma through scriptotherapy, dharma art, autoethnography, photovoice and choreography, the interdisciplinary dialogue highlights the need for rethinking and re-examining trauma, as classical treatments geared towards healing do not recognise the potential for transfiguration inherent in the trauma itself. The investigation of the fissures, disruptions and shifts after punctual traumatic events or prolonged exposure to verbal and physical abuse, illness, war, captivity, incarceration, and chemical exposure, amongst others, leads to a new understanding of the transformed self and empowering post-traumatic developments. Contributors are Peter Bray, Francesca Brencio, Mark Callaghan, M. Candace Christensen, Diedra L. Clay, Leanne Dodd, Marie France Forcier, Gen’ichiro Itakura, Jacqueline Linder, Elwin Susan John, Kori D. Novak, Cassie Pedersen, Danielle Schaub, Nicholas Quin Serenati, Aslı Tekinay, Tony M. Vinci and Claudio Zanini.

This volume comprehensively explores the life trajectories of nine child/adolescent Holocaust concentration camp survivors as recollected when the subjects were elders. Based on extensive face to face interview material, enduring psychological and symptomatic effects were evident. Survivors retained vivid recollections of the horror of internment and expressed ongoing grief for the multiple losses they had experienced. Unresolved grief contributed to a sense of existential loneliness, particularly prominent in their late life reflections. Despite indications of resilience and life productivity, a ‘Trauma Trilogy’ of inter-linked catastrophic grief, anger, and survivor guilt contributed to a sense of pain and struggle in negotiating Erikson’s final life task of Integrity versus Despair.

This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

Chappie is a punked-out teenager rejected by his mother and abusive stepfather. Out of school and in trouble with the police, he drifts through crash pads, doper squats, and malls until he finally settles in an abandoned school bus with Rose, a seven-year-old child, and I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian who will dramatically change his life. Together they begin an amazing journey...

Eschewing the all-pervading contextual approach to literary criticism, this book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern democratic urban society in place of the traditional agrarian one. Moreover, counter-intuitively it turns out that fantasy literature is analogous to modern Galilean science in its manipulation of the symbolic thereby changing our conception of reality. It is imaginary devices such as vampires and ape-men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, repressed by the contemporary hegemonic discourses.

In Wind and Whirlwind the great philosopher Ágnes Heller and social scientist Riccardo Mazzeo explain the pros and cons of utopias and dystopias as they are described in literary works and their relevance to understand the world we live in and the hidden consequences of apparently appealing life trajectories.

The theme of Dr. Robert Waska’s new book involves how all patients, whether neurotic, borderline, or psychotic, want their problems to ease and their stress to stop but unconsciously they avoid any real psychological change. They strive to maintain their psychic equilibrium regardless of how destructive it may be, in an effort to avoid the loss of what is known and to avoid the unknown pain or punishment that change might bring. Each chapter provides the reader with a contemporary Kleinian focus on central theoretical and clinical concepts such as projective identification, enactment, transference, pathological organizations, and depressive or paranoid acting out. The reader then is shown the careful and thoughtful interpretive work necessary in these complex clinical situations.

‘Love is not consolation, it is light’ From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil comes a novel set in the months after 9/11, when Western armies invaded Afghanistan—a story of love, hope and grief, of uncorrupted faith and of what it means to be alive. Jeo and his foster-brother Mikal leave their home in Pakistan to help care for wounded Afghans. Within hours of entering the wide-horizoned Afghan landscape, Mikal and Jeo are separated and, emerging from the carnage, Mikal begins his search for Jeo. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Jeo’s wife. The Blind Man’s Garden maps a place both phantasmally beautiful and chilling. Taking us on a journey from Al Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons to a family left behind—Mikal’s and Jeo’s blind, regretful father, Jeo’s resolute wife and her superstitious mother—it unflinchingly examines war and brotherhood, devastation, separation and remorse, while celebrating the redemptive power of nature, art and literature.

"A savagely comic portrait of an archetypal, middle class family, Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky, falling apart. When David comes back from the war blinded, he is pursued by furies that haunt him. Wanting to return their son to normal, Ozzie offers camaraderie, while Harriet cooks and bakes the foods he once loved, and shares her faith in her beloved religion. But David grows even more vengeful. Ozzie feels the foundation of his world crumbling. In a darkly hilarious scene, a catholic priest called in to give his blessing is, ingeniously, rebuffed by David. Finally, Ozzie and Harriet break under the pressure, for it seems David is about to turn their home into his nightmare. It's up to guitar-playing, fudge-eating Ricky to save the day and allow the family to return their cherished status qua with a tidy, ritualistic atrocity all their own."--Publisher's description.

Marcus Caldwell, and English widower and Muslim convert, lives in an old perfume factory in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan. Lara, a Russian woman, arrives at his home one day in search of her brother, a Soviet soldier who disappeared in the area many years previously, and who may have known Marcus’s daughter. In the days that follow, further people arrive there, each seeking someone or something. The stories and histories that unfold, interweaving and overlapping, span nearly a quarter of a century and tell of the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan—as well of the love that can blossom during war and conflict.