Many people seek help because they feel dragged down by a sense of inner deadness that persists in an otherwise full and meaningful life. These individuals somehow remain untouched by their own inner experiences; a deadness persists that can cripple their entire life or part of it. This book shows what is involved in enduring and working with psychic deadness in a day-to-day, session-by-session basis.

This important book features collected essays on the distinguished psychoanalyst Dr Michael Eigen, who is an influential innovator within and beyond psychoanalysis. Drawing on the ideas of Bion, Winnicott, Kabbalah, and artists, Eigen’s work is noted for fusing spirituality with psychoanalysis and his extraordinary creativity. The book begins with Dr Eigen’s new essay "Rebirth: It’s been around a long time." The other essays feature a rich array of subjects and reflections, with many clinical examples and applications to domains beyond psychotherapy and include such titles as "Healing longing in the midst of damage: Eigen's psychoanalytic vision" and "Breakdown and recovery: Going Berserk and other rhythmic concerns." Dr Eigen is one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the current era and this collection of essays provides insightful discussion on his ideas. This celebration of Michael Eigen will fascinate any psychoanalyst interested in his work.

Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton assembles a collection of essays on the compelling topic of death in two monumental representatives of the early modern canon, Edmund Spenser and John Milton. The volume draws its impetus from the conviction that death is a central, yet curiously understudied, preoccupation for Spenser and Milton, contending that death - in all its early modern reformations and deformations - is an indispensable backdrop for any attempt to articulate the relationship between Spenser and Milton.

The Metaphysics of Night acknowledges a post-secular philosophy, one that puts philosophy into serious dialogue with religion, rather than considering religion a thing of the past. Matthew Del Nevo deals with the cultural unconscious, inseparable from religious consciousness, and draws on psychoanalysis and literature as well as philosophy. The metaphysics of the night is Del Nevo's metaphor for the deep and mysterious expanse of the soul. Philosophically, the book is critical of Enlightenment presumptions about knowledge and truth and overly spiritualizing tendencies in religion. Its critical edge cuts against materialist and historicist tendencies in the humanities and abstract intellectualism in philosophy. Arguing for strong aesthetic values, Del Nevo defends and explains soul and soulful experience, the creation of depth, the ineffable, real presence, beauty, and saving words, noting that the sources of all these are in us, but often are blocked. Each of the five parts of this book testify to what the author notes may be forgotten, but which ought not to be forgotten. It is necessary for life as socially, religiously, and educationally instituted within culture and as constitutive for culture. Del Nevo deals with sensibility as a form of wisdom and instinct that is not cognitive or knowledge/information based. He argues for a shift of emphasis in culture from intellect to intuition. This well-written work, filled with Catholic, philosophic, and artistic thought will be of interest to all philosophers, theologians, and students of culture.

Dr James Grotstein (1925-2015) was the foremost Bion scholar, and one of the most noted and honoured psychoanalysts in the world. His prolific writings and generous encouragement to other analysts has had an enormous impact. He was among the first to examine Bion's most controversial concept - O - in particular the mystical aspects of O. The title of this book, Of Things Invisible To Mortal Sight: A Celebration of the Work of James S. Grotstein, inspired by a line from Milton's Paradise Lost (Book III), reflects Grotstein's decades-long examination of the most profound aspects of the human mind. Dr James Grotstein's erudition and depth of understanding made him one of the most revered psychoanalysts throughout the psychoanalytic world. He was well known and appreciated for his prolific writings, so it was only fitting to honour him through writing, and the fifteen articles in Of Things Invisible To Mortal Sight are written by esteemed analysts from Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Israel, and throughout the United States.

In the post-9/11 moments, months, and years, America has come to develop a new mortality awareness. Death, and our understanding that it can be sudden and is certainly inevitable, is being talked about more than ever before. As the team in this volume shows through groundbreaking research, surveys, interviews, and vignettes, death awareness has grown strong, and has changed the way we think and act, not only in relation to ourselves and our loved ones, but in relation to society overall. Those changes include nuances from increases in the number and size of college courses focused on death, rapid growth of death books, death photography, television shows dealing with death, as well as the recording and dissemination of death videos from those that show family members dying peacefully to the execution of terrorists or their captives. Impromptu street creations to memorialize common people who have died have emerged, as have new ways to dispose of dead bodies, including blasting ashes into space or placing them under the sea or giving them a green resting place in a natural forest. Our means of grieving, coping, and beliefs about afterlife have been altered, too. This work also includes a look at cosmologists and physicists who have revised their theories on humanity's legacy when our world meets a fateful end, who propose a means by which mankind's achievements might survive indefinitely, transporting from one universe to another without violating the known laws of physics. This book will intrigue all with an interest in considering not only death and how 9/11 changed America's views on and beliefs about it, but also considering what could lie beyond that end for all of us.

The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "marriage of Marx and Freud," psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "foundation stone" of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation. Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance.