Stephen Frosh New Release - Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions

Despite the evocative title, Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions is not about the supernatural world which the movie, television, and fiction industries seem so preoccupied with of late.  Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions utilizes the notion of ghosts and haunting to show how the present is troubled by the past and by the future.  Frosh uses the image of haunting as a metaphor to explore psychoanalytically how identities, beliefs, intimacies and hatreds are transmitted across generations and between people. This book deals with the secrets that we inherit, the 'pull' of the past, and the way emotions, thoughts and impulses enter into us from others as a kind of immaterial yet real communication, both individually and collectively. The book demonstrates how past oppressions return, demanding acknowledgement and reparation, and explores how recognition and forgiveness can arise from this. Rooted in psychoanalysis, postcolonial, philosophical and psychosocial studies, Frosh addresses the question of what passes through and between human subjects and how these things structure social and psycho-political life.  Frosh addresses these issues in chapters titled: 1) Psychoanalysis as a Ghostly System, 2) Facing the Truth about Ourselves, 3) Ghostly Psychoanalysis, 4) The Evil Eye, 5) Telepathy, 6) Transmission, and 7) Forgiveness.

 

Being familiar with Frosh's work from previous publications, this book delivers again with crisp, insightful writing that is a rewarding read.  Hauntings is thought provoking for the practicing analyst or psychoanalytic therapist but also for the reader who is interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis and culture as well as those interested in what insights a socio-political-cultural perspective can bring to psychoanalysis.

 

STEPHEN FROSH is Pro-Vice-Master and Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis, including Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic, Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis, For and Against Psychoanalysis, After Words, The Politics of Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference and Identity Crisis. His most recent books are Feelings and A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory.

 

Published January 25th, 2013 by Palgrave MacMillan. 

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