Since his first publications in the late 1950s, Leo Bersani's work has influenced numerous scholarly fields, from studies of French modernism and realist fiction to psychoanalytic criticism and film theory. It has occasionally helped precipitate the emergence of new disciplinary fields, such as queer theory in the late 1980s. The Essentialist Villain is the first book-length study of this impressively rich oeuvre. Mikko Tuhkanen tracks the unfolding of Bersani's onto-ethics/aesthetics, paying particular attention to his persistent references to "essence," a concept central to classical speculative philosophy, which has fallen into distinct disfavor since the emergence of deconstructive thought. Because of his early influences—particularly Gilles Deleuze's philosophy—Bersani remains an ontologist through decades when deconstruction seems to have all but disallowed any thought of being. Tuhkanen also locates Bersani's thought amidst numerous literary, artistic, and philosophical interlocutors, including Deleuze, Freud, Proust, Laplanche, Beckett, Baudelaire, Genet, Leibniz, and others.

This book presents the importance of subversion in psychotherapy and revaluates the positive role of desire as an integrating force in the individual and collective psyche. The text provides a solid philosophical frame which helps to expand the scope of contemporary psychotherapy at a time when it is being curtailed by a reductionist neoliberal zeitgeist. The latter emphasizes cognition over motivation, behaviour over emotion, consciousness over the unconscious, the self over the organism, and tends to reframe psychotherapeutic practice as a reprogramming of individuals. In response, this book outlines concerted acts of "soft subversion" which can undermine the status quo and open new possibilities of individual and collective transformation. The author also retraces and reassesses some of the more inspiringly subversive legacies in psychoanalysis, with a view to sketching a life-affirming psychology wedded to broadminded political engagement. Covering psychotherapy, politics, art and literature, and social and cultural theory, this book will appeal to anyone interested in understanding how psychotherapy and philosophy can be more radical and subversive endeavours.

In a career spanning more than five decades the distinguished French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) elaborated a distinctive methodology for the reading of Freud's corpus and evolved, in connection with it, a radical new metapsychology - one that critically recast Freud's early 'seduction' theory of trauma and placed at the heart of psychic life a particular model of 'enigmatic signification.' Seductions and Enigmas is a volume dedicated to the implications of Laplanche's thought for reading and interpretation. It collects papers that elaborate Laplanche's unique method for the interpretation of Freud, with its attention to the decentering and recentering movements of thought that structure the psychoanalytic field, and explore how the metapsychological developments arising from the implementation of that method open up new horizons for the psychoanalytic reading of other texts and oeuvres in the cultural domain. The volume comprises essays by Laplanche as well as by clinicians and scholars whose work takes inspiration from his research. Authors variously establish, develop or consolidate Laplanche's critical methodology as such, or work through aspects of his major theoretical innovations as points of departure for the reading of cultural works of different kinds: fiction, drama, painting, visual and sound installations, and film. These theoretical innovations cover a breadth of topics including seduction, sublimation, gender, femininity, the functions of binding and unbinding, masochism and the role of the enigmatic. In their range, the texts brought together here are a testament to the vitality and fertility of Laplanche's theoretical endeavour, for anyone concerned with the re-reading of Freud or with continuing to recalibrate and advance the parameters of critical interpretation in light of Freud's legacy.

In Finding Winnicott: Philosophical Encounters with the Psychoanalytic, Fadi Abou-Rihan expands upon Winnicott’s category of the found object and argues that a genuine understanding of the analyst’s own thought requires that it be considered in relation to that of another. The essays in this collection are in dialogue with the work of Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Laplanche, Bonaventure, Ibn Al-’Arabi, and Huizinga; these encounters showcase some of Winnicott’s yet unexplored contributions to the questions of subjectivity, time, and language. They weave psychoanalytic theory, clinical vignette and key moments from the history of ideas in order to shed light on our findings regarding, and indeed findings of, desire, on some of the playful but no less compelling ways in which the subject lives, suffers, understands, questions and/or normalizes desire. Chapters span a range of topics including rationales, findings and spaces, and highlight the subject as not only that which finds but that which is found. With clinical vignettes throughout, this book is vital reading for practicing analysts, as well as analysts in training and students of both philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Feminisms, Technology and Depth Psychology explores the intersection of a variety of feminist thought with technology through the lens of depth psychology, and investigates how current approaches to technology impact female life globally – from internet use, to biotechnology, to how female creators imagine life. This thought‐provoking collection is a discussion on changing female capacities and creativity. It questions whether female oppression is becoming more easily enabled within the context of technology use, touching on topics of manipulation, ecological awareness, female decision making, and more. Part One is a three‐chapter investigation on queer history, birthing, and reproductive technologies in science fiction novels. Part Two explores images of females and technology in a variety of cultural products ranging from science fiction films to contemporary TV dramas and novels. Part Three looks at the political impact of technology on female worlds, and Part Four examines perspectives on the creative process behind writing science fiction and fantasy. Feminisms, Technology and Depth Psychology will appeal to Jungian analysts and psychotherapists, and analytical psychologists. It also offers insightful perspectives to academics and students of psychology, gender studies, and politics.

Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature's influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

Seductions in Narrative is a highly original, academic study which provides a critical discourse in which desire, narrative, and subjectivity are explored. Through the critical reading of two novels by contemporary English authors, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, the book cleverly assesses the ways in which desire allows the subject to imagine an alternative, utopian location where a narrative of the self, in all its multiplicity and ambiguity, can be effected. This book is unique as general studies on these issues tend to focus on the literature produced over the nineteenth century, but not on contemporary literature. The pieces which examine desire and narrative in contemporary novels tend to do so in the work of post-colonial authors. Specific works on the production of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson also tend to focus on a somewhat close reading of their novels, but do not make use of their fiction in order to debate specific, poststructuralist issues, as this book successfully undertakes.