No Lost Certainties To Be Recovered

Gregorio Kohon is a Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and works in London in private practice. He edited 'The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition', and 'The Dead Mother: The Work of Andre Green'. He also published 'No Lost Certainties to be Recovered'; 'Love and its Vicissitudes' (co-authored with Andre Green), and 'Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny' (2015). He is also a poet and a writer. His new book, 'British Psychoanalysis - An Independent Tradition' is to be published in 2018.

'Gregorio Kohon's long awaited book is a fitting end-of-century celebration of the true virtues of the psychoanalytic passion. In uncertainty one finds many lenses through which to seek truths, and the project proposed by Freud not only accepts the anxiety of this position, it asks that its participants embrace a procedure that shall only ever deliver disquieting knowledge. A writer and poet, Kohon writes in order to know what he thinks and the reader will be deeply rewarded by joining him in his questioning, which he delivers with rare intelligence. A wonderful book.'- Christopher Bollas'Gregorio Kohon has written a new book of great importance. No Lost Certainties to be Recovered masterfully a wide range of psychoanalytic subjects. Kohon does not presume to explain; he considers, questions, speaks to, inquires into. He does not seek refuge in the impossibility of certainty in psychoanalytical thinking and practice. Instead, he energetically, "libidinally" creates and plays with possibilities. No Lost Certainties to be Recovered goes a long way toward achieving what all good writing and literature aspires to: it does not simply tell us what it means. Kohon invites us to have a creative dialogue with what we are reading, bringing psychoanalysis to life in the experience of our engagement with the text. The final chapter alone justifies the book.'- Thomas H. Ogden'What Kohon's reader will find.is an invigorating meeting of the challenge with which psychoanalysis presents this acutely self-aware yet inhibited writer. While never shying clear of theory, Kohon always balances it with the knotty and absorbing detail of the work in the consulting room. Most saliently, both theory and clinical narrative have time to breathe in-first, room to breathe for patients, we learn, and, in that recapitulation of the founding of analysis with which psychoanalysis must begin, the claiming of room to breathe by their analyst, and, as a consequence, room also for the reader.'- John Forrester, from his Foreword

• Foreword -- Sexuality -- Hysteria -- Fetishism -- Obscure objects of desire -- Creativity -- Dreams, acting out, and symbolic impoverishment -- From the analysis of an artist -- Stephen King’s Misery—the horrors of writing -- History -- The Aztecs, Masada, and the compulsion to repeat -- Knowledge -- Knowledge and its vicissitudes