This fascinating book applies social theorist Georges Bataille’s revolutionary thinking to psychotherapy, offering clinicians a new and valuable context for practicing therapy. In adding Bataille’s ideas to several different psychotherapeutic modalities, this book makes the notoriously obscure thinker more accessible while testing the validity of his far-reaching work in the treatment room. Through an in-depth examination of several clinical case studies, the book demonstrates how to balance an understanding of the social and historical contexts of participants with a therapeutic approach that offers empathy for individual distress. It also explains how Bataille’s innovative approach can be applied to work with couples, groups, institutions, and even one of Freud’s classic case studies. Both the content and form of each chapter demonstrate the therapeutic value of a reflexive, critical approach to one’s practice and exemplify how to write about it. Offering an unprecedented opportunity to imagine how Bataille’s own interest in psychoanalysis and clinical psychology might have developed, this book will be of interest to both practitioners in the field and scholars of continental philosophy and social theory.

This fascinating book applies social theorist Georges Bataille’s revolutionary thinking to psychotherapy, offering clinicians a new and valuable context for practicing therapy. In adding Bataille’s ideas to several different psychotherapeutic modalities, this book makes the notoriously obscure thinker more accessible while testing the validity of his far-reaching work in the treatment room. Through an in-depth examination of several clinical case studies, the book demonstrates how to balance an understanding of the social and historical contexts of participants with a therapeutic approach that offers empathy for individual distress. It also explains how Bataille’s innovative approach can be applied to work with couples, groups, institutions, and even one of Freud’s classic case studies. Both the content and form of each chapter demonstrate the therapeutic value of a reflexive, critical approach to one’s practice and exemplify how to write about it. Offering an unprecedented opportunity to imagine how Bataille’s own interest in psychoanalysis and clinical psychology might have developed, this book will be of interest to both practitioners in the field and scholars of continental philosophy and social theory.

Long recognized in France as a central figure in French cultural thought, the range and significance of Batille's ideas are now being grasped in the English speaking world. His influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood and Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural. And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging a

Gill examines the continuing power and influence of Bataille's work. By bringing together international specialists on Bataille from philosophy to art history, this collection is able to explore the many facets of his writing.Georges Bataille's powerful writings have fascinated many readers, enmeshed as they are with the themes of sex and death. His emotive discourse of excess, transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred has had a profound and notable influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva. Bataille: Writing the Sacred examines the continuing power and influence of his work.The full extent of Bataille's subversive and influential writings has only been made available to an English-speaking audience in recent years. By bringing together international specialists on Bataille from philosophy and literature to art history, this collection is able to explore the many facets of his writings.

Contributing to the conversation regarding Angela Carter's problematic relationship with what she viewed as the interrelated traditions of surrealism and psychoanalysis, Scott Dimovitz explores the intricate connections between Carter's private life and her public writing. He begins with Carter's assertion that it was through her "sexual and emotional life" that she was radicalized, drawing extensively on the British Library's recently archived collection of Carter's private papers, journals, and letters to show how that radicalization happened and what it meant both for her worldview and for her writings. Through close textual analysis and a detailed study of her papers, Dimovitz analyzes the ways in which this second-wave feminist's explorations of sexuality merged with her investigations into surrealism and psychoanalysis, an engagement that ultimately led to the explosively surreal allegories of Carter's later, more complex, and more accomplished work. His study not only offers a new way to view Carter's oeuvre, but also makes the case for the importance of Angela Carter's vision in understanding the transformations in feminist thinking from the postwar to the postfeminist generation.

Art of indigenous peoples.

Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.