Free Association Books – förlag

Donna Haraway analyses accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs (cybernetic components); showing how deeply cultural assumptions penetrate into allegedly value-neutral medical research.

In this book, the case histories of Melanie Klein and her followers are scrutinised, to examine both what the clinicians were noticing in their patients, and how they conceptualized those processes.

A sequel to "Stress, Appraisal and Coping", this volume explores the latest findings and trends in research and theory. It focuses on the rationale for a cognitive-mediational approach to stress and the emotions, and distinguishes between social, physiological and psychological stress. Topics include: work and family stress; chronic stress; traumatic stress disorders; crisis theory and management; stress in special groups such as ageing and the aged; children and adolescents; the stress of dislocation and immigration; stress and infections; the role of the nervous system; author's view of the recent changes in psychotherapy. This book is essential for all practitioners in the field of stress, appraisal, and coping, and of value to students of psychology, graduate students, academics, and professionals in related fields.

Psychoanalysis has continuously been applied to the exploration of creativity and artistic genius, but up to now, this has not produced its own systematic body of knowledge. The traditional psychoanalytic approach to art is to attempt to decode it, in order to capture its hidden meaning. But in this book, the author explains that it is through the arts, we discover important aspects of ourselves. Antonio Di Benedetto argues for a completely new approach.. By employing analytic receptivity to listen to the aesthetic object and what it has to say, art becomes the interpretative key instead. Furthermore, the author shows how the arts can inspire psychoanalysis, helping it to recover its intuitive and poetic roots and providing forms, images and sounds to best represent fleeting introspective moments and pre-verbal insight. To illustrate these pre-symbolic aspects of introspection, the author examines well-known aesthetic masterpieces; the frescoes of the Loggia of Psyche in Rome, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and Six Characters in Search of an Author, by L. Pirandello.Of these, Di Benedetto considers music to be the artistic form best suited to refine the analyst's capacity to listen to the affective component of unconscious communication.

In Cultivating the Soul Luigi Zoja argues that the soul's 'cultivation' underpins all cultural phenomena. The author examines the mythopoetic function in human beings by locating Psychoanalysis within the history of the Western world and firmly rooting it in the classical tradition. When for example, Zoja links psychoanalytic narration with the epic-tragic narration in Greek civilization, he is establishing a remarkable kind of continuity, one which transcends centuries of economic, political and social change to insist on the timeless human need to tell a life story with passion in order to make sense of it. Zoja's masterful knowledge of the classical world is here used dialectically, to understand and explicate our modern-day predicaments. Whether employing classical notions, like hubris, (to analyze the modern phenomenon of arrogant acquisitiveness), or deploying a contemporary perspective on antiquity (to examine, for instance Homer's own technique of "mass communication"), Zoja's words fall like a sword cutting through to the core of what he sees as the inertia of much contemporary thinking.The author explores what he sees as the failure in the formation of a contemporary European identity. Lacking formative myths, with psyches mutilated by the failure of the mythopoetic function, today's citizens are left with little other than an economic reality called "Europe" to orient them. It is in such a context that Zoja claims a crucial role for Psychoanalysis in elucidating cultural, social and political phenomena. In these eighteen essays, spanning ten years and grappling with thinkers from Plato to Hillman, Bloch to Ortega, Michelangelo to Rilke, and Nietzsche to Freud and Jung, Luigi Zoja consolidates his position as one of Europe's most erudite, skillful, and genuinely helpful thinkers.

This work is now widely recognised as one of the founding texts in a new approach to analyzing the links between political power, expertise and the self. This "governmentality" perspective has had important implications for a range of academic disciplines including criminology, political theory, sociology and psychology and has generated much theoretical innovation and empirical investigation. This second edition adds a new introduction setting out the methodological and conceptual bases of this approach and a new final chapter that considers some of the implications of recent developments in the government of subjectivity.

This book contains 13 main entries on the basic Kleinian concepts - splitting, paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, projective identification, envy, internal objects - along with numerous entries on subsidiary concepts and the main post-Kleinian writers - Bion, Segal, Rosenfeld, Joseph and Meltzer.

The Land of Remorse (La Terra del Rimorso, first Italian edition 1961) is a classic work by Ernesto De Martino, the founding figure of Italian cultural anthropology and ethnopsychiatry. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Salentine peninsula of Southern Italy in 1959, the study deals with the phenomenon of Apulian tarantism, a form of possession related to the belief in the bite of a mythical tarantula and its ritual cure in the tarantella dance. De Martino draws together the contributions of various specialists who participated in the fieldwork, including a psychologist, a psychiatrist, an ethnomusicologist and a social anthropologist. As both an ethnologist and classically-trained religious historian, the author reviews the fieldwork data through the lens of tarantism's historical analysis. Never losing sight of his own relationship to the subjects of his study, he is able to restore the connection between the "history-less" peasants of the Salentine and the elites who wrote about tarantism in learned treatises from the Middle Ages on.The result is a compassionate and compelling account of tarantism, which no longer appears as mere mental illness or as a "survival" of shamanistic irrationality, but as a product of a cultural history defined from above, endowed with its own forms of rationality. The Land of Remorse offers an excellent introduction to Ernesto De Martino's theoretical and methodological perspective. It will be of interest to a wide range of academic fields, including cultural anthropology, folklore, medical anthropology, ethnopsychiatry, ethnomusicology, semiotics, classics, religious studies and the history of philosophy and science. Along with appendices featuring essays on tarantism by specialist members of De Martino's research team, this annotated edition includes the fieldwork photographs of those afflicted by tarantism as they perform the ritual exorcism, an example of the author's early use of visual methods in ethnographic research.

This book looks at the social problems encountered by those involved in the adoption and fostering of children who have been sexually abused. Drawing on interviews with families who have had direct experience of the problems, this book includes chapters on recognizing the signs of sexual abuse, helping children talk about their experiences, the impact on other children in the family, the trauma of allegations, support services and the appropriateness or otherwise of psychotherapy. This book is designed to be of interest to both social workers and substitute parents.

There have been many expositions of psychoanalysis, but none so deeply rooted in clinical practice - both as it affects the patient, and even more as it affects the analyst. Neville Symington lectured to mental health professionals seconded to the Tavistock Centre; this book is the result of these lectures.

The author works through the psychoanalytic concepts which bear on what happens in groups. His examples are drawn from many years of experience in therapeutic communities, but are relevant to any sort of group. Author of the Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, Hinshelwood draws on the ideas of Jacques, Bion and Menzies Lyth.

The ideas of Donald Winnicott are scattered through numerous clinical papers and short, popular expositions. He made only one attempt to write and overview of his ideas, and this is it. It remained unfinished at his death in 1971. It is an ambitious work. The chapters offer his perspective on most of the main issues in psychoanalytic theory - for example, psychosomatics; the Oedipus complex; infantile sexuality; the unconscious; the depressive position; manic defence; transitional objects; aggression. Winnicott has here made a major synthetic effort, one which is regarded as the best of his posthumous works. D. W. Winnicottcan be said to be the most influential native-born British psychoanalyst and - with Klein and Fairbairn - the founder of the object relations perspective. His writings are among the most moving and evocative int he whole literature of psychoanalysis.

Isabel Menzies Lyth has formulated a way of thinking about social structures as forms of defence - as ways of avoiding experiences of anxiety, guilt, doubt and uncertainty - that is as challenging as it is persuasive. She believes that the individual is engaged in a lifelong struggle against primitive anxiety. A psychoanalyst writing in the tradition of Klein and Bion, her writings span more than thirty years of research in applied psychoanalysis and are here collected in the first of two volumes. In her classical paper on nursing, she writes: "By the nature of her profession the nurse is at considerable risk of being flooded by intense and unmanageable anxiety." The organisation and bureaucracy of the nursing profession have failed to contain the high levels of anxiety and stress that nurses experience, attempting instead to take practical steps to enhance recruitment and stem job wastage. The 'real nature' of the problem remains untouched. This is a controversial collection, which makes available to a wider public an important part of the research tradition of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.The author extends her analytic range to cover themes of children in long-stay hospitals and day-care institutions, and the maternal role today. All the essays combine her two main professional interests: the dynamics of the individual in his or her own right and the psychodynamics of the social world.

The author presents a passionate argument for a therapeutic practice based on the physician's love for the deeply deprived patient. Ian Suttie, a psychiatrist of the Tavistock clinic in the 1930s, advocates a more optimistic view of human nature than traditional Freudian psychology.

In this account of their research, the authors describe the anxiety, loneliness and despair of young children in hospital, foster homes and institutions in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. This is a history of a couple in the field of child health, who pioneered research into the effects of separation from the mother when a child went into hospital.

McDougall looks at people who react to psychological distress through somatic manifestations, and at the psychosomatic potential of individuals in those moments when habitual psychological ways of coping are overwhelmed, and the body pantomimes the mind's distress.

This pioneering study shows that it is possible to establish a dialogue with a psychotic child and that schizophrenia in small children in treatable.

Winner of the Prix Femina and considered a masterpiece of autobiography, this is J. B. Pontalis' lyrical meditation on his own life. One of France's pre-eminent psychoanalysts, he is co-author of the classic The Language of Psychoanalysis and he has also been a member of the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes. Love of Beginnings is a reverie on his personal trajectory and ponders especially his 'love and hatred of words' - language's limits and abuse and the impirialistic claims made on its behalf, in their different ways, by Satre and Lacan. It is also as essay that instantiates aspects of Pontalis' life, including his experience as a pupil of Sartre at a Paris lycee in 1941 and as a student of Lacan in 1954.

This is Joyce McDougall's most comprehensive clinical and theoretical book. Its title conveys her tolerant stance toward human differences and forms of deviance. It is among the wisest and best-loved psychoanalytic works ever written.

In a synthesis of historical narrative and theoretical exposition, Eric Rayner provides an account of the Independent Group of British psychoanalysts. His discussion of the development and work of the Group includes succinct accounts of the contribution of Winnicott, Fairbairn, Balint, Khan, Jones, Bowlby, Rycroft and Bollas.

Nina Coltart is a member of the Independent Group. In her essays she explores the parameters of psychoanalysis against a background of broader cultural issues. The title essay is justly famous - an account of an apparently hopeless analysis, in which Dr Coltart's intervention produced remarkable results.