Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an acclaimed filmmaker and theorist. Her current work focuses on post-colonial relationships in Zimbabwe. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film; Black and White: Cinema, politics and the arts in Zimbabwe and the editor of Embodied Encounters: New approaches to psychoanalysis and cinema (all Routledge). She is a Reader in Film at the University of Bedfordshire. Ben Tyrer teaches Film Studies at King’s College London. He has published widely on psychoanalysis and cinema. Piotrowska and Tyrer together run Psychoanalysis in Our Time, an international research network funded by the Nordic Summer University.

‘This anthology sets out to 'do the impossible' in interrogating the paradoxes of unrepresentable and unspeakable experience. Drawing together an impressive array of writers from diverse fields including those of clinical practice, film and literary studies, post-colonial theory and cultural analysis, it weaves a complex matrix of ideas grounded in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers as diverse as Freud, Lacan, Bion, Malabou, Winnicott and Meltzer. The essays are lively and compelling, offering new perspectives on themes such as trauma and embodiment, silence and invisibility in the digital age of media, the psychodynamics of touch, voice, gesture, love, grief, adoption, and anxiety. A wide range of textual material embracing literature, cinema, poetry, language, meta psychology and metaphysics, provides the basis for philosophical and psychological commentary that is often astute, and the daring inclusion of creative work premised on personal experience acts as an emotional coup de foudre. Piotrowska and Tyrer have curated a cracking compendium, one that seduces and challenges in equal measure, and one that will surely become essential reading for anyone interested in the riches of psychoanalytic enquiry.’ - Caroline Bainbridge, Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis, University of Roehampton, UK'This is an important collection that speaks to contemporary events with compassion and poignancy. Piotrowska and Tyrer’s Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic is simultaneously wound and suture. It both opens and seeks to comprehend the cultural fault lines that exist around trauma, abuse, race, image and language itself. These diverse, and at times provocative essays, allow for an outpouring of the unconscious and the experience of pain and anxiety. It is the inability to speak with the inability to be silent that suffuses this radical collection and yet it is these same tensions in this book that serve to heal the cultural body.' – Luke Hockley, Professor of Media Analysis, University of Bedfordshire, UK and author of Somatic Cinema (2014)

• Introduction: Representing the Unrepresentable 1. The Body Locked by a Lack of Meaning 2. Trauma without a Subject: On Malabou, Psychoanalysis and Amour 3. A Possible Way to Represent the Un-representable in Clinical Trauma 4. (Un)Representing the Real: Seeing Sounds and Hearing Images 5. On Touching and Speaking in (Post) (de) Colonial discourse: from Lessing to Marechera and Veit-Wild 6. Pointing at the Other 7. Is poetics a fiction about truth – in a poem? Some remarks about Paul Celan 8. Presenting The Unrepresentable In Presentable Ways 9. Duras and the Art of the Impossible 10. Representation without Language: Freud and the Problem of the Image 11. Understanding Without Words 12. Rethinking the Primal Wound, Trauma and the Fantasy of Completeness: Adopted Women’s Experiences of Meeting their Biological Fathers in Adulthood 13. Embodying Traumatic Griefscapes 14. Suture and Gus Van Sant’s Milk 15. Unnameable 16. Each Day at a Time 17. The Scent of Philosophy Index