Rajiv Gulati – författare

Our relationship with ‘home’ includes many psychosomatic realms: perception, imagination, fantasy, projection, separateness, boundaries, smells, and sounds. Our very first home is our mother’s womb; our very last, an urn or coffin. In between, we have our childhood home, deeply incorporated into our psyche, which persists, throughout life, as (hopefully) a fond prototype, an object of nostalgia, and a source of ego-replenishment, college dorms, shared housing, apartments, marital and family homes, downsized residences of late middle age, retirement homes, nursing homes, and hospices. Far apart from a world of linear progression are traumatizing homes, foster homes, and orphanages where searingly painful as well as defiantly triumphant scenarios of growth and development may unfold. Also, monasteries, which embody the human desire for detachment, silence, and contemplation, away from earthly relations to seek spirituality and transcendence.The contributions from Aisha Abbasi, Salman Akhtar, Rajiv Gulati, M. Nasir Ilahi, Gurmeet S. Kanwal, Murad Khan, Milan Patel, Sarita Singh, and Nidhi Tewari seek to demonstrate that at each step in the life span, our dwellings both impact upon and reflect our intrapsychic goings-on. As well as examinations of the kinds of home mentioned above, the abstract nature of home is also explored, looking at its function, the search for a sense of home, homesickness, absence, nostalgia, and the development of a stable internalized home. There’s no place like home and Attics and Basements shows us why.

With contributions from distinguished scholars and clinicians who view human erotic desire from modern developmental, relational, societal, and cross-cultural perspectives, Eroticism: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms offers a multifaceted and up-to-date glimpse into what we find sexually attractive and why. While psychoanalysis has unshackled itself from the narrow confines of instinct theory to include ego psychology, object relations theory, self psychology, and the contemporary relational paradigm, such heuristic and clinical advance is sorely needed to further our grasp of human eroticism and love. Accommodation also needs to be made for the cultural changes that have occurred over the last five or six decades. These include the feminist corrective to the phallocentrism of ‘classical’ psychoanalysis, the new insights into human subjectivity and personality development provided by the gay and lesbian movement, the contemporary de-centering of the essentialist and binary gender formulations, and the post-colonial voices of the non-Western people. By providing theoretically anchored clinical guidelines, Eroticism provides not only an update on the early analytic understanding of human eroticism but advances clinical praxis as well.