Darian Leader – författare

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Why Can''t We Sleep by Darian Leader. One in four adults sleeps badly. Sleeping pill prescriptions have increased dramatically over the last three decades and our bookshelves and browser histories are littered with experts promising to ''fix'' our insomnia. But is this so-called sleep crisis anything new? Our relationship to sleep has always been irregular and changeable, variously shaped by social conventions, commercial imperatives and personal psychologies. Look beneath the headlines and it seems that there is no such thing as a perfect night''s sleep.Here Darian Leader reveals the history and pathology of sleeplessness - from the industrial revolution to Freudian dream analysis to the fears around blue light on our phones. Along the way, he dispels the pervasive myths and anxieties around this most universal human experience.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Hands, written and read by Darian Leader. A fresh, thought-provoking and wide-ranging study of how mankind uses its handsWhy do zombies walk with their arms outstretched? How can newborn babies grip an adult finger tightly enough to dangle unsupported from it? And why is everyone constantly texting, tapping and scrolling?For anyone curious about how human beings work, the answers are hidden in plain sight: in our hands. From early tools to machinery -- from fists to knives to guns -- from papyrus to QWERTY to a swipeable screen -- the history of civilization is a history of what humans do with their hands. We have always kept our hands occupied, and if mankind''s story is marked out by profound changes in how we use our hands, it is also marked by underlying patterns that never change. And as much as the things we do with our hands reflect our psychological state, they can also change that state profoundly...Drawing examples from popular culture, art history, psychoanalysis, modern technology and clinical research, Darian Leader presents a unique and fascinating odyssey through the history of what human beings do with their hands - and why.

Brought to you by Penguin.A delightfully thought-provoking study of why we have sex, from award-winning psychoanalyst Darian Leader‘It was just sex…’It’s a familiar claim. But it’s also an impossibility, as Darian Leader shows in this delightfully thought-provoking study.Our bodies aren’t just sticks that make fire when you rub them together, and our minds don’t simply stand by – as we can see from the pain, heartache and regret that so often accompany the highs of sexual excitement.As acclaimed psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, with his trademark clarity, energy and wit, sex is always about so much more than itself – it’s about phantasy, anxiety, guilt, revenge, violence, love. Drawing on his long analytic experience, historical research and case studies to explore their importance to every aspect of our sexual lives, Leader brilliantly reveals what we are really thinking about when we think about sex – and what we are really doing when we do it.‘Insanely readable! I loved it’ Slavoj Žižek''A thoroughly engaging and ever-illuminating read'' iNews''One of our most important contemporary thinkers'' Guardian''Leader is as much a philosopher as a psychoanalyst and his ideas are engrossing and enlightening'' Metro©2023 Darian Leader (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Although the term ''jouissance'' is common currency in psychoanalysis today, how much does it really tell us? While often taken to designate a fusion of sexuality, suffering and satisfaction, the term has fallen into a purely descriptive use that closes down more questions than it opens up. Although assumed to explain the coalescence of pleasure and pain, it tends to cover a range of quite different issues that should be distinguished rather than conflated.

By returning to some of the sources of the concept in Freud, and their elaborations in Lacan, this book hopes to stimulate a debate around the relations of pleasure to pain, autoerotism, the links of satisfaction to arousal, the effects of repression, and the place of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Leader aims to provide context for Lacan''s work and encourage dialogue with other analytic traditions.