The Psychotic Wavelength: A Psychoanalytic Perspective for Psychiatry    Richard Lucas    Routledge    $75

n this book Richard Lucas suggests that when clinicians are faced with psychotic patients, the primary concern should be to make sense of what is happening during their breakdown. He refers to this as tuning into the psychotic wavelength, a process that allows clinicians to distinguish between, and appropriately address, the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality. He argues that if clinicians can find and identify the psychotic wavelength, they can more effectively help the patient to come to terms with the realities of living with a psychotic disorder.

Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian cyborg ontology   
Andre Nusselder    MIT Press    $34.95

Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore
we need to take a psychological approach to understand our
experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder
uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our
relationship to computers and digital technology.


Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process: Selected Papers of Michael Feldman    Michael Feldman    Routledge    $75

In this profound and subtle study, a practising psychoanalyst explores the dynamics of the interaction between the patient and the analyst. Michael Feldman draws the reader into experiencing how the clinical interaction unfolds within a session. In doing so, he develops some of the implications of the important pioneering work of such analysts as Klein, Rosenfeld and Joseph, showing in fine detail some of the ways in which the patient feels driven to communicate to the analyst, not only in order to be understood by him, but also in order to affect him.

The Embedded Self: An Integrative Psychodynamic and Systemic Perspective on Couples and Family Therapy  
Mary-Joan Gerson    Routledge    $75

First published in 1996, The Embedded Self was lauded as "a brilliant and long overdue rapprochement between psychoanalysis and family therapy conceived by a practitioner trained and experienced in both modalities of treatment." From a new and revised perspective on the possibilities of integration, Gerson covers the latest research in neuroscience and the transmission of affect within intimate relationships, with a new chapter on attachment theory and emotionally focused therapy. Sections on narrative therapy and psychoanalytically-oriented family therapy are expanded as well. The Embedded Self was a sterling introduction to family systems theory and therapy, and enhanced the work of analysts and family and couples therapists alike.

Our Dark SIde    Elisabeth Roudinesco    Polity    $42.95

Where does perversion begin? Who is perverse? Ever since the word first appeared in the Middle Ages, anyone who delights in evil and in the destruction of the self or others has been described as perverse. But while the experience of perversion is universal, every era has seen it and dealt with it in its own way. The history of perversion in the West is told here through a study of great emblematic figures from the Middle Ages (Gilles de Rais, the mystics and the flagellants), the eighteenth century (Sade), the nineteenth century (the masturbating child, the male homosexual and the hysterical woman) to modern times (Nazism in the twentieth century, and the complementary figures of the paedophile and the terrorist in the twenty-first).

Growing Old: A Journey of Self-Discovery    Danielle Quinodoz    Routledge    $48

People react very differently to the process of ageing. Some people shy away from old age for as long as they can and eventually spend it reflecting on times when they were physically and mentally stronger and more independent. For others old age is embraced as a new adventure and something to look forward to. In this book psychoanalyst Danielle Quinodoz highlights the value of old age and the fact that although many elderly people have suffered losses, either of their own good health or through bereavement, most have managed to retain the most important thing € their sense of self. Quinodoz argues that growing old provides us with the opportunity to learn more about ourselves and instead of facing it with dread, it should be celebrated. Divided into accessible chapters this book covers topics including: the internal life-history remembering phases of life anxiety about death being a psychoanalyst and growing old. Throughout Growing Old the author draws on both her clinical experience of working with the elderly, and her own personal experience of growing old.

On Behalf of the Mystical Fool: Jung on the Religious Situation    John Dourley    Routledge    $74

Jung's explanation of the religious tendency of the psyche addresses many sides of the contemporary debate on religion and the role that it has in individual and social life. This book discusses the emergence of a new mythic consciousness and details ways in which this consciousness supersedes traditional concepts of religion to provide a spirituality of more universal inclusion. On Behalf of the Mystical Fool examines Jung's critique of traditional western religion, demonstrating the negative consequences of religious and political collective unconsciousness, and their consequent social irresponsibility in today's culture.


The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens    Neil Altman    Routledge    $70

It was predicted that The Analyst in the Inner City would become a classic when first published in 1995. It has. In this second edition, Neil Altman expands his exploration of the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and race, class, gender, and community as these are shaped by broad social and political forces. The book expresses a rare combination of experience at the coal face, highly sophisticated theoretical analysis, scholarly research, and thoughtful, ethical reflections on the challenges to psychoanalysis of otherness and similarity. Altman's focus on a three-person psychology promotes a lived practice in the clinic that takes account of diversity while holding the analytic frame as universally relevant. He hereby brings the social and the political into the clinic as illustrated by cogent case examples. In his astute analysis of suicide bombings and torture informed by Klein, object relations, and intersubjectivity, Altman reciprocally brings the analytic to bear on the political.

Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis: New papers on psychoanalysis    Roy Schafer    Karnac    $50.95

This is a collection of published and unpublished papers on clinical, theoretical and applied aspects of psychoanalysis that take up various aspects of unconscious mental processes and
conflicts and their expression in the clinical transference and countertransference. These expressions are evidenced in frustration, gratitude and benevolence, competing feelings of being cared for and coerced, disturbed and expanded bodily pleasure, cruelty and forgiveness. Included in this book is a brief history of the author’s odyssey through several major  contributions regarding the language of psychoanalysis and its narrativity, and the convergence of these with contemporary Kleinian modes of thought.

Footbinding: A Jungian Engagement with Chinese Culture and Psychology    Shirley See Yan Ma    Routeldge    $74

In this book Shirley See Yan Ma provides a Jungian perspective on the Chinese tradition of footbinding and considers how it can be used as a metaphor for the suffering of women and the repression of the feminine, as well as a symbol for hope, creativity and spiritual transformation. Drawing on personal history, popular myths, literature, and work with patients, Footbinding discusses how modern women still symbolically find their feet bound through this ancient practice. Detailed case studies from Western and Asian women demonstrate how Jungian analysis can loosen these psychological bindings allowing the client to reconnect with the feminine archetype, discover their own identity and take control of their own destiny.

Primitive Mental States: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Origins of Meaning    Van Buren/Alhanati    Routledge    $74

Traditional psychoanalysis relies on the presence of certain meaning-making capacities in the patient for its effectiveness. Primitive Mental States examines how particular capacities including those for symbolising, fantasising, dreaming, experiencing and finding meanings in those experiences, can be taken for granted. Many of us lack these capacities in certain dimensions of our minds making traditional psychoanalysis ineffective. In this book, international contributors are brought together to consider a radical evolution in contemporary psychoanalytic theory developed from a combination of ultrasound studies, infant analysis, and observation of mothers and babies. These findings demonstrate how much mental life exists even before birth and considers unevolved, unborn and barely born aspects of the self such as the birth of emotion and the birth of alpha functioning.