Clinical Fictions: Psychoanalytic Novelists and Short Story Writers is the first book to explore works of fiction written by prominent psychoanalysts.Broken down into thematic sections, the book traces the literary output of pioneering psychoanalysts such as Julia Kristeva, Bruce Fink, Thomas Odgen, and Gregorio Kohon, among others. Berman looks at works of historical fiction, detective fiction, and the short story, and shows how recurring themes typical of these genres ca...

Sigmund Freud can be a polarizing figure, beloved by many and despised by some. Focusing on eight key writers and scholars who either passionately loved or gleefully loathed Freud, this book represents Freud's wide legacy, the reach of his ideas, their controversies, and their ability still to provoke, inspire, confound, outrage, and compel.The book begins by focusing on four highly prolific authors whose admiration for Freud is boundless: Lionel Trilling, Harold B...

Explores Yalom's profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature.A distinguished psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Irvin D. Yalom is also the United States' most well-known author of psychotherapy tales. His first volume of essays, Love's Executioner, became an immediate best seller, and his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept, continues to enjoy critical and popular success. Yalom has created a subgenre of literature, the "therapy story," whe...

Assesses the contributions of six major psychoanalytic thinkers in the light of current academic and clinical trends in psychoanalysis.Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Retrospective offers in-depth discussions of and conversations with six psychoanalytic writers: Christopher Bollas, Nancy Chodorow, Sander L. Gilman, Adam Phillips, and Allen and Joan Wheelis. All are genuinely interdisciplinary in their work, bridging multiple cultural and professional ...

Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have be...

The first book-length study of the psychoanalytic memoir, this book examines key examples of the genre, including Sigmund Freud's mistitled An Autobiographical Study, Helene Deutsch's Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue, Wilfred Bion's War Memoirs 1917-1919, Masud Khan's The Long Wait, Sophie Freud's Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom's A Matter of Death and Life.Offering in each c...

Bringing together the human story of care with its representation in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human decline.Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton a...

Mental illness can often be the driving force behind creativity. This relationship is never more apparent than in the memoirs of writers who have lived, worked and created with a mental illness. Mad Muse examines and unpicks this fascinating relationship, demonstrating that mental illness is often intergenerational while the story of mental illness is intertextual.The study begins with William Styron's iconic memoir Darkness Visible, moving through a succession of mental illness me...

Explores how memoirs of widowhood can help us understand the reality of bereavement and the critical role of writing and reading in recovery.The death of a beloved spouse after a lifetime of companionship is a life-changing experience. To help understand the reality of bereavement, Jeffrey Berman focuses on five extraordinary American writers-Joan Didion, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Godwin, Kay Redfield Jamison, and Joyce Carol Oates-each of whom has written a memoir of s...

Death is often encountered in English courses—Hamlet’s death, celebrity death, death from the terrorist attacks on 9/11—but students rarely have the opportunity to write about their own experiences with death. In Death Education in the Writing Classroom, Jeffrey Berman shows how college students can write safely about dying, death, and bereavement. The book is based on an undergraduate course on love and loss that Berman taught at the University at Albany in 2008. Part 1, “Diaries,” is org...

Freud promised his patients absolute confidentiality, regardless of what they revealed, but privacy in psychotherapy began to erode a half-century ago. Psychotherapists now seem to serve as “double agents” with a dual and often conflicting allegiance to patient and society. Some therapists even go so far as to issue Miranda-type warnings, advising patients that what they say in therapy may be used against them.Confidentiality and Its Discontents explores the human stories arising f...

Since its inception, psychoanalysis has been hailed as a revolutionary theory of how the mind works, whilst some of its ideas such as the Oedipus complex have become part of everyday conversation. In Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, Daniel Pick offers a lucid, lively, and wide-ranging survey of psychoanalysis. This book offers the reader a flavour of what it might be like to enter treatment, and suggests the possible surprises that can await both analyst and patient, as ...