In this book, Prophecy Coles traces the existential history of the unwanted child with particular attention to the illegitimate child, linking myth, literature and clinical practice in the historical and legal context of adoption. From the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century the lives of such children were short-lived. The Adoption Act of 1926 did much to change the moral climate and the fate of the illegitimate child. It provided the child with a legal family and a name. There follows some unexpected difficulties that emerged after World War Two. Adopted children did not necessarily thrive, and young mothers who had been forced to give up a child born out of wedlock revealed their suffering. The sealed records of the illegitimate child’s origins became an issue. Attachment theory and the development of neuroscience underpin the theoretical approach of this book. Today, the children who are available for adoption are older and may be distressed by several years in care. Fundamental to helping these adopted children and their families there needs to be a multi-disciplined therapeutic approach to try and mitigate the damage that has often been done to the early infant brain through trauma. This book brings to life some of the adoption issues through the study of personal memoirs. Each chapter considers adoption from a different angle: the adopted child, the birth mother, the birth father, foster parents and adopting parents. The final chapter discusses some of the problems around adoption that have arisen again with reproductive technology and surrogate mothering. This book will be of interest to all those who have been involved in or affected by adoption. It will be of special interest to those adopting parents who have not been properly prepared or supported in their magnificent work of taking on some of the most troubled children in our society.

This book explores the interpersonal world of sibling relationships, explaining how these relationships are central to the development of the psyche of the individual, of the group, of society and of the organisation. Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice considers four key areas: sibling relations, sibling trauma, the law of the mother and the horizontal axis. The contributors journey through examples from the psychological, philosophical, organisational, social and cultural realms, giving a new perspective on the psychic world and the importance of sibling relationships as an empowering and therapeutic component for building relationships. While we are used to looking at the individual, the group and at society through the vertical, hierarchical relationship that results from parent–child relationships, this book discusses and reveals the impact of the horizontal axis. Sibling Relations and the Horizontal Axis in Theory and Practice will be important reading for psychoanalysts, group analysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and in training.

Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

Affect is a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis, but there has long been a misperception that Lacan neglected affect in his writings. We encounter affect at the beginning of any analysis in the form of subjective suffering that the patient hopes to alleviate. How can psychoanalysis alleviate such suffering when analytic practice itself gives rise to a wide range of affects in the patient’s relationship to the analyst? Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, is the first book to explore Lacan’s theory of affect and its implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In it, Colette Soler discusses affects as diverse as the pain of existence, hatred, ignorance, mourning, sadness, "joyful knowledge," boredom, moroseness, anger, shame, and enthusiasm. Soler’s discussion culminates in a highlighting of so-called enigmatic affects: anguish, love, and the satisfaction related to the end of an analysis. Lacanian Affects provides a unique and compelling account of affect that will prove to be an essential text for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers.

Today many view Sigmund Freud as an elitist whose psychoanalytic treatment was reserved for the intellectually and financially advantaged. However, in this new work Elizabeth Ann Danto presents a strikingly different picture of Freud and the early psychoanalytic movement. Danto recovers the neglected history of Freud and other analysts' intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes. Danto's narrative begins in the years following the end of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Joining with the social democratic and artistic movements that were sweeping across Central and Western Europe, analysts such as Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Helene Deutsch envisioned a new role for psychoanalysis. These psychoanalysts saw themselves as brokers of social change and viewed psychoanalysis as a challenge to conventional political and social traditions. Between 1920 and 1938 and in ten different cities, they created outpatient centers that provided free mental health care. They believed that psychoanalysis would share in the transformation of civil society and that these new outpatient centers would help restore people to their inherently good and productive selves. Drawing on oral histories and new archival material, Danto offers vivid portraits of the movement's central figures and their beliefs. She explores the successes, failures, and challenges faced by free institutes such as the Berlin Poliklinik, the Vienna Ambulatorium, and Alfred Adler's child-guidance clinics. She also describes the efforts of Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol, a fusion of psychoanalysis and left-wing politics, which provided free counseling and sex education and aimed to end public repression of private sexuality. In addition to situating the efforts of psychoanalysts in the political and cultural contexts of Weimar Germany and Red Vienna, Danto also discusses the important treatments and methods developed during this period, including child analysis, short-term therapy, crisis intervention, task-centered treatment, active therapy, and clinical case presentations. Her work illuminates the importance of the social environment and the idea of community to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

This book describes different instances of trauma that may have occurred several generations ago. It explores the work of several psychoanalysts who have written on the negative effect that unknown or unremembered grandparents can have upon the life of their grandchildren.

Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world's foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child's behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to "the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.