Download or read book The Essentialist Villain written by Mikko Tuhkanen and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his first publications in the late 1950s, Leo Bersani's work has influenced numerous scholarly fields, from studies of French modernism and realist fiction to psychoanalytic criticism and film theory. It has occasionally helped precipitate the emergence of new disciplinary fields, such as queer theory in the late 1980s. The Essentialist Villain is the first book-length study of this impressively rich oeuvre. Mikko Tuhkanen tracks the unfolding of Bersani's onto-ethics/aesthetics, paying particular attention to his persistent references to "essence," a concept central to classical speculative philosophy, which has fallen into distinct disfavor since the emergence of deconstructive thought. Because of his early influences—particularly Gilles Deleuze's philosophy—Bersani remains an ontologist through decades when deconstruction seems to have all but disallowed any thought of being. Tuhkanen also locates Bersani's thought amidst numerous literary, artistic, and philosophical interlocutors, including Deleuze, Freud, Proust, Laplanche, Beckett, Baudelaire, Genet, Leibniz, and others.

Download or read book Subversion and Desire written by Manu Bazzano and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the importance of subversion in psychotherapy and revaluates the positive role of desire as an integrating force in the individual and collective psyche. The text provides a solid philosophical frame which helps to expand the scope of contemporary psychotherapy at a time when it is being curtailed by a reductionist neoliberal zeitgeist. The latter emphasizes cognition over motivation, behaviour over emotion, consciousness over the unconscious, the self over the organism, and tends to reframe psychotherapeutic practice as a reprogramming of individuals. In response, this book outlines concerted acts of "soft subversion" which can undermine the status quo and open new possibilities of individual and collective transformation. The author also retraces and reassesses some of the more inspiringly subversive legacies in psychoanalysis, with a view to sketching a life-affirming psychology wedded to broadminded political engagement. Covering psychotherapy, politics, art and literature, and social and cultural theory, this book will appeal to anyone interested in understanding how psychotherapy and philosophy can be more radical and subversive endeavours.

Download or read book Seductions and Enigmas written by John Fletcher and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a career spanning more than five decades the distinguished French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) elaborated a distinctive methodology for the reading of Freud's corpus and evolved, in connection with it, a radical new metapsychology - one that critically recast Freud's early 'seduction' theory of trauma and placed at the heart of psychic life a particular model of 'enigmatic signification.' Seductions and Enigmas is a volume dedicated to the implications of Laplanche's thought for reading and interpretation. It collects papers that elaborate Laplanche's unique method for the interpretation of Freud, with its attention to the decentering and recentering movements of thought that structure the psychoanalytic field, and explore how the metapsychological developments arising from the implementation of that method open up new horizons for the psychoanalytic reading of other texts and oeuvres in the cultural domain. The volume comprises essays by Laplanche as well as by clinicians and scholars whose work takes inspiration from his research. Authors variously establish, develop or consolidate Laplanche's critical methodology as such, or work through aspects of his major theoretical innovations as points of departure for the reading of cultural works of different kinds: fiction, drama, painting, visual and sound installations, and film. These theoretical innovations cover a breadth of topics including seduction, sublimation, gender, femininity, the functions of binding and unbinding, masochism and the role of the enigmatic. In their range, the texts brought together here are a testament to the vitality and fertility of Laplanche's theoretical endeavour, for anyone concerned with the re-reading of Freud or with continuing to recalibrate and advance the parameters of critical interpretation in light of Freud's legacy.

Download or read book Finding Winnicott written by Fadi Abou-Rihan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-03 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Finding Winnicott: Philosophical Encounters with the Psychoanalytic, Fadi Abou-Rihan expands upon Winnicott’s category of the found object and argues that a genuine understanding of the analyst’s own thought requires that it be considered in relation to that of another. The essays in this collection are in dialogue with the work of Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Laplanche, Bonaventure, Ibn Al-’Arabi, and Huizinga; these encounters showcase some of Winnicott’s yet unexplored contributions to the questions of subjectivity, time, and language. They weave psychoanalytic theory, clinical vignette and key moments from the history of ideas in order to shed light on our findings regarding, and indeed findings of, desire, on some of the playful but no less compelling ways in which the subject lives, suffers, understands, questions and/or normalizes desire. Chapters span a range of topics including rationales, findings and spaces, and highlight the subject as not only that which finds but that which is found. With clinical vignettes throughout, this book is vital reading for practicing analysts, as well as analysts in training and students of both philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Download or read book Feminisms Technology and Depth Psychology written by Leslie Gardner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminisms, Technology and Depth Psychology explores the intersection of a variety of feminist thought with technology through the lens of depth psychology, and investigates how current approaches to technology impact female life globally – from internet use, to biotechnology, to how female creators imagine life. This thought‐provoking collection is a discussion on changing female capacities and creativity. It questions whether female oppression is becoming more easily enabled within the context of technology use, touching on topics of manipulation, ecological awareness, female decision making, and more. Part One is a three‐chapter investigation on queer history, birthing, and reproductive technologies in science fiction novels. Part Two explores images of females and technology in a variety of cultural products ranging from science fiction films to contemporary TV dramas and novels. Part Three looks at the political impact of technology on female worlds, and Part Four examines perspectives on the creative process behind writing science fiction and fantasy. Feminisms, Technology and Depth Psychology will appeal to Jungian analysts and psychotherapists, and analytical psychologists. It also offers insightful perspectives to academics and students of psychology, gender studies, and politics.

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis written by Jeremy Tambling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature's influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

Download or read book Seductions in Narrative written by Gemma López and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seductions in Narrative is a highly original, academic study which provides a critical discourse in which desire, narrative, and subjectivity are explored. Through the critical reading of two novels by contemporary English authors, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, the book cleverly assesses the ways in which desire allows the subject to imagine an alternative, utopian location where a narrative of the self, in all its multiplicity and ambiguity, can be effected. This book is unique as general studies on these issues tend to focus on the literature produced over the nineteenth century, but not on contemporary literature. The pieces which examine desire and narrative in contemporary novels tend to do so in the work of post-colonial authors. Specific works on the production of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson also tend to focus on a somewhat close reading of their novels, but do not make use of their fiction in order to debate specific, poststructuralist issues, as this book successfully undertakes.

Download or read book Reading Hilary Mantel written by Lucy Arnold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the ghosts which reside in Midlands council houses in Every Day is Mother's Day to the resurrected historical dead of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the writings of Hilary Mantel are often haunted by supernatural figures. One of the first book-length studies of the writer's work, Reading Hilary Mantel explores the importance of ghosts in the full range of her fiction and non-fiction writing and their political, social and ethical resonances. Combining material from original interviews with the author herself with psychoanalytic, historicist and deconstructivist critical perspectives, Reading Hilary Mantel is a landmark study of this important and popular contemporary novelist.

Download or read book Leo Bersani written by Mikko Tuhkanen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”-the questions that we find and refind-in Bersani's extensive oeuvre across the decades. The chapters explore Bersani's engagement with psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Laplanche, Klein, Lacan), French and American modernist fiction (Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, James, Beckett), poststructuralist theory (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot), queer theory (Butler, Edelman), and the visual arts (Caravaggio, Almodóvar, Pasolini, Malick, Dumont). This first introduction to Bersani's work provides a chronological overview of his thought and details his contributions to literary studies and critical theory.

Download or read book Psychoanalysis Gender and Sexualities written by Patricia Gherovici and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Introducing Contemporary Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy the Art and Science of the Unconscious written by Alistair Ross and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Alistair Ross is a University of Oxford academic whose previous work has been described by Ruby Wax as ‘very, very smart’. This new introductory book strikes an easy balance between theory and practice. It takes the reader from the field’s Freudian roots to its contemporary applications, skills and insights. Over the last 30 years, important new theoretical ideas, skills and clinical practices have emerged in counselling and psychotherapy. While key Freudian concepts like transference, counter-transference and the influence of the past on the present remain vital to psychodynamic work, research drawn from infant development, neuroscience, the role of the sacred, and intersubjective approaches to relationships has changed the way therapists understand and work with clients. Either in its own right or as part of an integrative approach, psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy have an important role to play in developments to come. The book’s features include: • A re-discovery of the importance and relevance of Freud for present-day therapeutic relationships. • An encounter with the breadth and depth of our understanding about, and experience of, the unconscious. • An introduction to research that has evolved after Freud, revealing new ways of applying his ideas. • A contemporary perspective on traditional counselling and psychotherapy skills, illustrated by vignettes and personal insights from Alistair Ross’s professional practice. • An encouragement to develop new skills for relating at depth with our clients’ past, present and future, motivated by revealing how life-changing therapy can be. This book is a must-read for trainee and practising (psychodynamic or integrative) therapists who want an overview of new thinking and practice or might benefit from greater insight into psychodynamic practice, applying Freud’s theoretical world to improving the lives of real people today. ‘It is good to see Alistair, a valued student of mine and now an equally valued colleague, taking up the torch for psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy for a new generation. He has written a book that collates much of the valuable writing to date and at the same time adds new dimensions that should not be overlooked.’ Michael Jacobs, Visiting Professor, University of Leeds and Bournemouth University, UK

Download or read book From Fiction to Psychoanalysis written by Rosemary Rizq and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can reading literary fiction shed light on the way we speak ourselves within psychoanalysis? Rather than offering psychoanalytic insights into literature, Rosemary Rizq, a practicing psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, explores what literary fiction can bring to psychoanalysis. In this fascinating collection of essays, she draws on stories written by authors ranging from Henry James to Kazuo Ishiguro and Colm Tóibín. By investigating the possibilities for ‘fruitful encounter and dynamic exchange’ between psychoanalysis and literature, Rizq sets out to offer a fresh perspective on theoretical ideas that are often presented within the psychoanalytic literature in abstract, overly technical ways. In a remarkably fresh approach, this book explores how fiction can inform, illuminate and even transform our understanding of psychoanalysis. Written for practicing clinicians, academics and students as well as for the wider public, this book offers an original and revealing perspective on the overlapping knowledge-claims and concerns of both literary fiction and psychoanalysis.

Download or read book The Practice of Folklore written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Chicago Folklore Prize CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Despite predictions that commercial mass culture would displace customs of the past, traditions firmly abound, often characterized as folklore. In The Practice of Folklore: Essays toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life. Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior. Thinking with practice, particularly in a digital world, forces redefinitions of folklore and a reorientation toward interpreting everyday life. More than performance or enactment in social theory, practice connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that “this is the way we do things around here.” Practice refers to the way those things are analyzed as part of, rather than apart from, theory, thus inviting the study of studying. “The way we do things” invokes the social basis of “doing” in practice as cultural and instrumental. Building on previous studies of tradition in relation to creativity, Bronner presents an overview of practice theory and the ways it might be used in folklore and folklife studies. Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional frames of action and address issues of our times: referring to the boogieman; connecting “wild child” beliefs to school shootings; deciphering the offensive chants of sports fans; and explicating male bravado in bawdy singing. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered “folk societies” such as the Amish. He further unpacks the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming. He interprets the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world and assesses how the folklorists' terms and actions affect how people think about tradition.

Download or read book Literary Seductions written by Frances Wilson and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have all surrendered ourselves to the world that writing creates. Eudora Welty once observed that her mother read the works of Charles Dickens in the same spirit with which she would have eloped with him. Some of us remember our first novel with more pleasurable vividness than our first kiss. Many of us go to on-line chat rooms, looking for love with our keyboard. And most of us have tried to seduce with words--reciting that Shakespeare sonnet or composing that Valentine's Day poem with tremulous hope. All writing seeks to ensnare the reader in its embrace. As Frances Wilson also proves in this engaging, enlightening, and provocative new book, writing can also ensnare the writers themselves. Highlighting the lives and loves of celebrated literary couples, Literary Seductions reveals the depth of their passion for language--their own as well as their partner's. Taking as a point of departure the legendary courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, a courtship conceived on the printed page, Wilson explores how easily, how seductively, literary desire becomes sexual desire and vice versa. "Literary seductions," she writes, are "violent, extreme, and irreversible." Not all reading seduces, not all writing inflames. But when they do, what is written ceases to be merely an arrangement of symbols on a page. The word has been made flesh. Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Osip and Nadzheda Mandelstam, W. B. and Georgie Yeats were all in the grip of a compulsion for writing and reading, enmeshed in words. Miller called his relationship with Nin, a "literary fuck-fest"; for Riding and Graves, it took on the self-destructive (and self-conscious) melodrama of a Russian novel; for the Mandelstams, it was a life-giving (if self-sacrificing) bond in a precarious world; for George and W. B. Yeats, it offered sexual stimulus. The couplings of verbs and nouns do more than precede coupling; they comprise it. Literary Seductions is itself a seductive book. The elegant power of Wilson's arguments, the rigor of her research, and the delights of her prose enthrall the reader. Here is intellectual engagement and readerly pleasure rolled into one.

Download or read book Divine Enticement Theological Seductions written by Karmen Mackendrick and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divine Enticement argues for a reconception of theology and it subject matter as modes of seduction, of both body and mind. Theological language as evocation opens onto rereadings of faith, sacrament, ethics, prayer and scripture. The conclusion argues for a sense of theology as calling upon infinite possibility.

Download or read book Essays on Otherness written by Jean Laplanche and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-20 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the death of Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche is now considered to be one of the worlds foremost psychoanalytic thinkers. In spite of the influence of his work over the last thirty years, remarkably little has been available in English. Essays On Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his thinking. It offers an introduction to many of the key themes that characterise his work: seduction, persecution, revelation, masochism, transference and mourning. Such themes have been increasingly both in psychoanalytic thought and in continental philosophy, social and cultural theory, and literature making Essays On Otherness indispensable reading for all those concerned with the implications of psychoanalytic theory today.

Download or read book The Seductions of Darwin written by Matthew Rampley and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect. Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas about its origins, the basis of aesthetic experience, and the nature of research into art and the humanities. Rampley’s inquiry examines models of artistic development, the theories and development of aesthetic response, and ideas about brain processes underlying creative work. He considers the validity of the arguments put forward by advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis, as well as its value as a way of understanding art and culture. With the goal of bridging the divide between science and culture, Rampley advocates for wider recognition of the human motivations that drive inquiry of all types, and he argues that our engagement with art can never be encapsulated in a single notion of scientific knowledge. Engaging and compelling, The Seductions of Darwin is a rewarding look at the identity and development of art history and its complicated ties to the world of scientific thought.