Rethinking the Relation between Women and Psychoanalysis: Loss, Mourning, and the Feminine uses contemporary psychoanalytic views to resituate women as desiring subjects within the psychoanalytic narrative. Contributors to this edited collection explore the various configurations of mourning, pain, regret, and grieving in diverse societies and cultures in order to reconstruct the role of women in modern psychoanalysis. They raise questions about the status of women in culture and society and contend with themes that psychoanalysts have associated with women since the late nineteenth century, such as loss and mourning, femininity and motherhood, and desire and sexuality. This book is recommended for students and scholars of psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, literature, and philosophy.

This text brings together the contributions of psychoanalytic theory and sociological analysis to explore the interrelationship between the inner and outer worlds which impact on a woman's identity.

In this book, Sheila Greene presents a challenging new perspective on the psychological development of girls and women which emphasises the central role of time in human development. She critically reviews traditional and contemporary theoretical approaches - ranging from orthodox psychoanalysis to relational and post-modern theories - and argues that even those claiming to be focused on development have presented a view of women's lives as fixed and determined by their nature or their past. These theories, she believes, should be rejected because of their inherent lack of validity and their frequently oppressive implications for women. Greene's approach places primary importance on temporality itself and on the competing discourses on time, age and development which play an active role in the construction of the lives of girls and women. Essential but often neglected insights from the more compelling developmental and feminist theories are woven together within a theoretical framework that emphasises temporality, emergence and human agency. The result is a liberating theory of women's psychological development as constantly emerging and changing in time rather than as static and fixed by their nature, socio-cultural context and personal history. The Psychological Development of Girls and Women will be essential reading for students and researchers in the psychology of women, developmental psychology and women's studies.

Counterpractice highlights a generation of women who used art to define a culture of experimental thought and practice during the period of the French women’s movement or Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (1970–81). It considers women’s art in relation to some of the most exciting thinkers to have emerged from the French literature and philosophy of the 1970s – Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – forcing a timely reconsideration of the full spectrum of revolutionary practices by women in the years following the events of May ’68. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 images, the book also features an illuminating foreword by art historian Griselda Pollock.

Shalini Masih grew up in a stimulating environment of priests and healers, witnessing firsthand states of spirit possession and exorcism. In adulthood, she revisited these experiences, motivating her to extend psychoanalysis outside the clinic's realms into spaces of traditional healing. The outcome of her detailed exploration acknowledges the hugely productive interface between cultural manifestations and concerns of psychoanalysis without reducing the phenomenon of spirit possession to something formulaic. Instead, Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness highlights the intrinsic beauty of this complex experience, illustrating relevant themes through culturally sensitive psychoanalytic conversations with participants who felt haunted and possessed by ghosts. The author's journey reveals the ghosts of her own inner world. She draws upon her reveries, dreams, and nightmares to make sense of the unconscious processes in her informant's testimonies, journeys that are so often undertaken from one grotesque ghost to another until these ghastly beings reappear as broken part-selves in search of the glue of spiritual meaning.

In this landmark collection of original essays, outstanding feminist critics in Britain, France, and the United States present new perspectives on feminism and psychoanalysis, opening out deadlocked debates. The discussion ranges widely, with contributions from feminists identified with different, often opposed views on psychoanalytic criticism. The contributors reassess the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism, and explore the significance of its institutional context. They write against the received views on 'French feminism' and essentialism. A remarkable restatement of current positions within psychoanalysis and feminism, the volume as a whole will change the terms of existing debates, and make its arguments and concerns more generally accessible.

Beginning in 1989, more than 8,000 men disappeared in Kashmir. These disappearances were publicly denied, leaving mourners to grapple with unrecognized grief. Drawn from ten years of psycho-historical research in Kashmir, Shifa Haq reflects on the bereaved families’ intricate experiences of mourning. Haq expands the psychoanalytic understanding of loss and argues for a mourning that includes porous affective links with the political.