by Admin General | Jan 21, 2025
Yael PIlowsky Bankirer
Routledge 2024
This book reads into Freud’s writings with the unique prism of circumcision as a marker for both the formation of masculine identity, and for matricide, the disappearance of the mother. Using Freud’s idea of circumcision within a text as a Leitfossil: a key‑fossil through which an unresolved unconscious conflict can be traced, it conducts a close reading of Freud’s texts – including Little Hans, The Wolf Man, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism – to illuminate and uncover the textual unconscious, deconstruct the explicit narrative and open alternative psychoanalytic possibilities inherent to the encounter with the maternal. Throughout the volume, the analysis is informed by considering the work of Freud in tandem with that of Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Benjamin, Butler and more.
Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal: Uncovering the Image of Circumcision in Freud’s Works will be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and practising analysts alike, particularly those interested in the intersection of gender studies and psychoanalysis
by Admin General | Oct 2, 2023
When James O’Neill started his placement as a trainee psychotherapist at a therapy centre in west London, his first referral was Abraham, a silent and frightened young man in a tightly-zipped, hooded anorak. For the majority of their initial sessions, Abraham hardly spoke. But this book describes how O’Neill gradually gained his trust and learnt of the abuse and violence Abraham had been subjected to as a child that caused him to hide away from the world – barely sleeping, too afraid to get undressed even in the shower. Over the many years they met, Abraham’s unfolding story and bravery inspired O’Neill to confront his own complicated past. Together they achieved something radical.
‘It was Abraham’s idea that his therapist, James O’Neill, should write a book about him. This removes, for the reader, the potential for unease about literary profiteering – sometimes a nagging undertow when reading books by analysts about their patients. O’Neill’s extraordinarily moving book is about mutual disclosure, a shared story between patient and therapist … This is a story about trust … and O’Neill wins ours with his unvarnished prose’ Kate Kellaway, Observer Book of the Week (click for the full review)
‘…[W]riting that is creatively bold… the most rewarding kind of book, in that it frequently stopped me reading to meander off into my own thoughts’ Carol Topolski
‘A brave and moving book which demystifies what it is to be a good and generous therapist’ Nell Dunn
‘O’Neill’s sensibility – in the plain and subtle artfulness of his sentences – is startling in its sympathetic intelligence, in his tact and his straightforwardness’ Adam Phillips
Published by Short Books in 2019. Available at most good bookshops or click here to order from Karnac Books
by Admin General | Jun 20, 2020
Abstract
This paper is a phenomenological and psychoanalytical response to a set of papers. As a psychoanalyst, philosopher, and intellectual historian, I am interested in ‘intention’ in the phenomenological sense, that is, how someone both reaches out to and shapes their world. How does our thinking in this phenomenological way affect our doing of empirical research? How does it affect our psychoanalytical practice? I argue for approaching this kind of critique heterotopically, with an emphasis on other worlds and the relation of these to subjectivity and the unconscious.
The full article can be read here
by Admin General | Mar 26, 2015
Narcissism and Its Discontents challenges the received wisdom that narcissism is only destructive of good social relations. By building on insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory it puts forward a theorisation of narcissistic sociability which redeems Narcissus from his position as the subject of negative critique. Following a close engagement with Sigmund Freud’s 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, two further critical moments are considered: first, the mobilisation of narcissism in Anglo-American cultural discourse of the 1970s to 1990s where the term functioned as a descriptor for cultural malaise; and second, the discursive shift from narcissism to melancholia associated with more contemporary critical theory. This book pays particular attention to the paradoxical relation between the narcissist and the social world, identifying in Narcissus a figure whose turning away extends a call to others, and who finds in the vulnerabilities of the self the makings of the social scene.
Julie Walsh is a member of the SITE and an Institute of Advanced Study Global Research Fellow in the department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK.
by Admin General | Mar 10, 2015
Jane Hayne’s new book examines doctors’ attitudes to medicine, their family lives, their health concerns and their attitudes to death, dying and suffering.
Read the Guardian review here
