The Poetics Of Psychoanalysis

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein explores the literary aspects of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. Focusing on Melanie Klein's legacy to psychoanalysis between the 1930s and 1970s, it deals with major figures such as Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner, and Bion, as well as Klein's contemporary, Ella Sharpe. Mary Jacobus breaks new ground by giving a central place to the literary and aesthetic concerns of the British Object Relations tradition. Paying close attention to writing that is often side-lined by literary critics and theorists, she makes fruitful connections with particular works of literature and art, along with pressing contemporary issues. The three sections focus on the transitions, mediations, and transformations that took place in British Object Relations psychoanalysis as Klein's ideas were developed and transformed. Situating Kleinian thought in relation to later developments and differences, while making it accessible to non-psychoanalytic readers, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis argues against the separation of British and continental traditions and for the continuing links between psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Rather than applying psychoanalytic ideas to literature and aesthetics, the book traces the British Object Relations tradition as a form of proto-modernist discourse in its own right. Linked by a common thread of ideas and structured to reflect a roughly chronological trajectory, individual chapters can also be read as free-standing critical essays. Aimed at literary readers, this book will also be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners and cultural theorists.

'The Poetics of Psychoanalysis' explores the literary aspects of the 20th century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. It focuses on the writing of Klein, Sharpe, Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner and Bion.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet’s imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2,000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.

Sabina Spielrein, who has been mostly known for her relation with her analyst Carl Jung, came to the attention of the wider public following the discovery and publication of some of her diaries and personal letters some 40 years ago. The focus on her relationship with Jung and her personal story have consequently led to a neglect of her writings, with many of her crucial texts even remaining untranslated into English. Sabina Spielrein and the Poetry of Psychoanalysis seeks to re-address this distortion of her legacy by examining her original contribution to the field, such as her early analytical work with children. Spielrein referred to moments of intimacy between herself and Jung as "poetry". Indeed, as a response to what can be considered the inevitable failure in her relationship to Jung, Spielrein wrote poetry and songs, notes, and theoretical papers. These writings are examined here as her means of finishing her own analysis. She was the first person to become an psychoanalyst through her own psychoanalysis, a path that would later be recognised as a necessary part of the training for any analyst. The book traces the poetry of Sabina Spielrein’s writing through both its content and style, examining the effect of these writings upon psychoanalysis and inserting them into a lineage of what Lacan would later call the passe: a device that is open for the analysand to finish his or her analysis and accede to the place of psychoanalyst. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis and other clinicians, including those who work with children, those interested in the early history of psychoanalysis, and those concerned with women’s writing more generally.

Conflating deconstructive theory with psychoanalysis, Rowlinson (English, Dartmouth College) proposes an analytic formalism as the appropriate model for reading Tennyson, and demonstrates the utility of the approach with close readings of fragments and poems written from 1824 to 1833, focusing on the nature of place the structuring of desire. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book explores some of the ways in which an understanding of poetry, and the poetic impulse, can be fruitfully informed by psychoanalytic ideas. It could be argued that there is a particular affinity between poetry and psychoanalysis, in that both pay close attention to the precise meanings of linguistic expression, and both, though in different ways, are centrally concerned with unconscious processes. The contributors to this volume, nearly all of them clinicians with a strong interest in literature, explore this connection in a variety of ways, focusing on the work of particular poets, from the prophet Ezekiel to Seamus Heaney.Part of the Tavistock Clinic Series.

"[Bachelard] is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Satre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with a proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. To define him as briefly as possible – he is a philosopher, with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination ..." – J.G. Weightman, The New York Times Review of Books