Psychoanalysis is a strange and mysterious practice. In his new book, Ian Parker offers insights into his own experiences, first as trainee then as analyst, the common assumptions about psychoanalysis which can be so misleading, as well as a map of the key debates in the field today. Beginning with his own history, at first avoiding psychoanalysis before training as a Lacanian, Parker moves on to explore the wider historical development of clinical practice, making an argument for the importance of language, culture and history in this process. The book offers commentary on the key schools of thought, and how they manifest in the practice of psychoanalysis in different regions around the world. Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context will be of great value to practitioners and social theorists who want to know how psychoanalytic ideas play out in training and the clinic, for trainees and students of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and for the general reader who wants to know what psychoanalysis is and how it works.

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.

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 volume ofPsychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China continues the tradition we began last year of featuring cultural issues that confront analysts and therapists as they apply psychoanalytic thinking to their work with Chinese patients and students. Therapy and work with institutions is embedded in the civilization in which we work, so the issues facing China and its people confront us every day that we conduct therapy,consultation, and training there.

In 1995, Neil Altman did what few psychoanalysts did or even dared to do: He brought the theory and practice of psychoanalysis out of the cozy confines of the consulting room and into the realms of the marginalized, to the very individuals whom this theory and practice often overlooked. In doing so, he brought together psychoanalytic and social theory, and examined how divisions of race, class and culture reflect and influence splits in the developing self, more often than not leading to a negative self image of the "other" in an increasingly polarized society. Much like the original, this second edition of The Analyst in the Inner City opens up with updated, detailed clinical vignettes and case presentations, which illustrate the challenges of working within this clinical milieu. Altman greatly expands his section on race, both in the psychoanalytic and the larger social world, including a focus on "whiteness" which, he argues, is socially constructed in relation to "blackness." However, he admits the inadequacy of such categorizations and proffers a more fluid view of the structure of race. A brand new section, "Thinking Systemically and Psychoanalytically at the Same Time," examines the impact of the socio-political context in which psychotherapy takes place, whether local or global, on the clinical work itself and the socio-economic categories of its patients, and vice-versa. Topics in this section include the APA’s relationship to CIA interrogation practices, group dynamics in child and adolescent psychotherapeutic interventions, and psychoanalytic views on suicide bombing. Ranging from the day-to-day work in a public clinic in the South Bronx to considerations of global events far outside the clinic’s doors (but closer than one might think), this book is a timely revision of a groundbreaking work in psychoanalytic literature, expanding the import of psychoanalysis from the centers of analytical thought to the margins of clinical need.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Desire of Psychoanalysis proposes that recognizing how certain theoretical and institutional problems in Lacanian psychoanalysis are grounded in the historical conditions of Lacan’s own thinking might allow us to overcome these impasses. In order to accomplish this, Gabriel Tupinambá analyzes the socioeconomic practices that underlie the current institutional existence of the Lacanian community—its political position as well as its institutional history—in relation to theoretical production. By focusing on the underlying dynamic that binds clinical practice, theoretical work, and institutional security in Lacanian psychoanalysis today, Tupinambá is able to locate sites for conceptual innovation that have been ignored by the discipline, such as the understanding of the role of money in clinical practice, the place of analysands in the transformation of psychoanalytic theory, and ideological dead-ends that have become common sense in the Lacanian field. The Desire of Psychoanalysis thus suggests ways of opening up psychoanalysis to new concepts and clinical practices and calls for a transformation of how psychoanalysis is understood as an institution.