Michel De M'Uzan – författare

Permanent Disquiet: Psychoanalysis and the Transitional Subject comprises the first English language translation of some of Michel Émile de M’Uzan’s key writings, alongside an invaluable glossary by Murielle Gagnebin of M’Uzan’s work. Together, they give a thorough overview of his key thinking.

The first part of the book sees de M’Uzan exploring the compatibility between creativity (particularly creative writing) and psychoanalytic practice and includes an exchange with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The second part focuses on M’Uzan’s key psychoanalytic concept – "permanent disquiet". Freud stated that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to transform neurotic suffering into common unhappiness. De M’Uzan built on this idea in his career and examined what it means for the clinical process for the analyst to step back, not to try and force happiness onto the patient, but instead to accept and allow them to find for themselves their own state of ‘permanent disquiet’. Drawing on Freud and Winnicott and including an invaluable glossary of de M’Uzan’s own psychoanalytic terms, this book brings de M’Uzan’s powerful theory to the anglophone psychoanalytic world for the first time.

Permanent Disquiet: Psychoanalysis and the Transitional Subject will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists globally who are interested in French psychoanalytic thought.

Permanent Disquiet: Psychoanalysis and the Transitional Subject comprises the first English language translation of some of Michel Émile de M’Uzan’s key writings, alongside an invaluable glossary by Murielle Gagnebin of M’Uzan’s work. Together, they give a thorough overview of his key thinking.

The first part of the book sees de M’Uzan exploring the compatibility between creativity (particularly creative writing) and psychoanalytic practice and includes an exchange with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The second part focuses on M’Uzan’s key psychoanalytic concept – "permanent disquiet". Freud stated that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to transform neurotic suffering into common unhappiness. De M’Uzan built on this idea in his career and examined what it means for the clinical process for the analyst to step back, not to try and force happiness onto the patient, but instead to accept and allow them to find for themselves their own state of ‘permanent disquiet’. Drawing on Freud and Winnicott and including an invaluable glossary of de M’Uzan’s own psychoanalytic terms, this book brings de M’Uzan’s powerful theory to the anglophone psychoanalytic world for the first time.

Permanent Disquiet: Psychoanalysis and the Transitional Subject will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists globally who are interested in French psychoanalytic thought.

Michel de M''Uzan has derived several innovative notions from his clinical experience that are relevant not only for the psychoanalyst''s status of identity, which is sometimes dramatically shaken by his or her patient''s unconscious, but also for the artist who is deeply destabilized by his act of creation, as well as for the caring person who lets him/herself be caught in the nets, as it were, of someone who is dying. Such are the extreme examples of the precarious nature of the boundaries of being in which the author discerns, not necessarily a pathological disposition, but rather an opportunity for the mind to construct itself and achieve authenticity. Through this invigorating recognition of the unconscious with the emergence, at the heart of analysis, of ''paradoxical thoughts'', the experience of ''blurred frontiers'' characteristic of a vacillating sense of identity, the perception of an ''every man''s land'' in which the analytic treatment unfolds, and the elaboration of an ''original grammar'' specific to the formulation of the intervention/interpretation of the analyst during the session.

Michel de M''Uzan has derived several innovative notions from his clinical experience that are relevant not only for the psychoanalyst''s status of identity, which is sometimes dramatically shaken by his or her patient''s unconscious, but also for the artist who is deeply destabilized by his act of creation, as well as for the caring person who lets him/herself be caught in the nets, as it were, of someone who is dying. Such are the extreme examples of the precarious nature of the boundaries of being in which the author discerns, not necessarily a pathological disposition, but rather an opportunity for the mind to construct itself and achieve authenticity. Through this invigorating recognition of the unconscious with the emergence, at the heart of analysis, of ''paradoxical thoughts'', the experience of ''blurred frontiers'' characteristic of a vacillating sense of identity, the perception of an ''every man''s land'' in which the analytic treatment unfolds, and the elaboration of an ''original grammar'' specific to the formulation of the intervention/interpretation of the analyst during the session.