The first book-length study of the psychoanalytic memoir, this book examines key examples of the genre, including Sigmund Freud's mistitled An Autobiographical Study, Helene Deutsch's Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue, Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919, Masud Khan's The Long Wait, Sophie Freud's Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom's A Matter of Death and Life. Offering in each chapter a brief character sketch of the memoirist, the book shows how personal writing fits into their other work, often demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities in an author's life as well as discussing each author's contributions to psychoanalysis, whether positive or negative.
Psychoanalysis was her family's religion-- instead of wafers and wine, there were Seconals, Nembutals, and gin. Baptized into the faith at fourteen, Melissa Knox endured her analyst's praise of her childlike, victimized mother -- who leaned too close, ate off Melissa's plate, and thought "pedophile" meant "silly person." Gaslighted with the notions that she'd seduced her father, failed to masturbate, and betrayed her mother, Melissa shouldered the blame. Her story of a family pulled into and torn apart by psychoanalysis exposes the abuse inherent in its authoritarianism as Melissa learns, with a startling sense of humor and admirable chagrin, that divorcing Mom is sometimes the least crazy thing to do.
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem
Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Retrospective offers in-depth discussions of and conversations with six psychoanalytic writers: Christopher Bollas, Nancy Chodorow, Sander L. Gilman, Adam Phillips, and Allen and Joan Wheelis. All are genuinely interdisciplinary in their work, bridging multiple cultural and professional positions, but all are deeply rooted in the humanities. They are all also highly controversial, challenging and critiquing conventional psychoanalytic wisdom while also devoting themselves to expanding psychoanalytic knowledge. Drawing on interviews as well as his own readings, Jeffrey Berman examines the continuities and discontinuities in each writer's work while also exploring the interrelationships between psychoanalysis and the humanities. The book ultimately offers a portrait of psychoanalysis as a work in progress, a plurality of visions that might more aptly be termed psychoanalyses.
Paperback version. The first section consists of the entire text of the diaries which Bion wrote as a young man to record his experiences on the Western Front, including his photographs and diagrams. The second section comprises two essays in which he reflects on his war time experiences.
Sigmund Freud can be a polarizing figure, beloved by many and despised by some. Focusing on eight key writers and scholars who either passionately loved or gleefully loathed Freud, this book represents Freud's wide legacy, the reach of his ideas, their controversies, and their ability still to provoke, inspire, confound, outrage, and compel. The book begins by focusing on four highly prolific authors whose admiration for Freud is boundless: Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Kurt R. Eissler, and Peter Gay. Berman then explores four more writers whose aim was not simply to debunk Freud and destroy his monstrous creation but to cast both into hell: D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Szasz, and Frederick Crews. Each chapter discusses the author's involvement with Freud, exploring the continuities and discontinuities of his or her writings, as well as offering snapshots of the writers, suggesting how their personal and professional lives were inextricably related. Berman draws out some surprising commonalities between the Freudolaters and Schadenfreudians, going on to discuss the current state of psychoanalysis and the “psychoanalytic credos” by which contemporary analysts live.
Winner of the 2021 ABAPsa Book Prize Award! What would the story of analysis look like if it were told through the eyes of the analysand? How would the patient write and present the analytic experience? How would the narrative as written by the analysand differ from the analytic narrative commonly offered by the analyst? What do the actual analytic narratives written by Freud’s patients look like? This book aims to confront these intriguing questions with an innovative reading of memoirs by Freud’s patients. These patients—including Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man; the poet H. D.; and the American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner—all came to Vienna specially to meet Freud and embark with him on the intimate and thrilling journey of deciphering the unconscious and unravelling the secrets of the psyche. A broad psychoanalytic and literary-historical reading of their memoirs is offered in this new entry to the popular Routledge History of Psychoanalysis Series, with the purpose of presenting the analysands' narratives as they themselves recounted them. This makes it possible to re-examine the links among psychoanalysis, literature, and translation and sheds new light on the complex challenge of coming to know oneself through the encounter with otherness. This book is unique in its focus on multiple memoirs by patients of Freud and presents a fresh, even startling, close-up look at psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and as a rigorous discourse and offers a new vision of Freud’s strengths and, at times, defects. It will be of considerable interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and intellectual history, as well as those with a wider interest in literature and memoir.
"[This is] a book about art (and writing about art), about emptiness, breathing, ordinary language, mysticism, the body, the sexes, childhood, parenting, impersonality, God, theory, exchange, change, tact, forms of inattention, belief, scepticism ..." Adam Phillips, from the new introduction.
The classic, in-depth history of psychoanalysis, presenting over a hundred years of thought and theories Sigmund Freud's concepts have become a part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. But psychoanalytic thinking has undergone an enormous expansion and transformation since Freud's death in 1939. With Freud and Beyond, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black make the full scope of twentieth century psychoanalytic thinking-from Harry Stack Sullivan to Jacques Lacan; D.W. Winnicott to Melanie Klein-available for the first time. Richly illustrated with case examples, this lively, jargon-free introduction makes modern psychoanalytic thought accessible at last.
