Main description:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: Psychoanalysis is not what you think

1 Science: Avoiding analysis of the mind

2 Sex: Avoiding analysis of the body

3 Schisms: Avoiding analytic politics

4 Teaching: Avoiding analytic practice

5 Society: Engaging with the British Tradition

6 Conversations: Taking care of health

7 Therapy: Closer encounters

8 Research: Studying and experiencing

9 Training: In Group Analysis

10 Personal: Training analysis

11 Diagnosis: Clinical structures

12 Supervision: Confession and confidentiality

13 Enlightenment: Second nature in Brazil

14 Trauma: Truth and reconciliation

15 Theory: Zizek, culture and the clinic

16 Identification: Laibach and the state

17 Japan: A limit case for analysis

18 Queer: From Russia with love

19 Islam: Faith in Freud

20 Transference: Ethics in action

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index