Books in the Psychoanalytic Horizons series

An Independent Book of the MonthPenises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. This book examines how one thing that some people do to penises-remove the foreskin-has become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. While most contemporary work on the subject is concerned with whether circumcision is right or wrong, safe or harmful, Circumcision on the Couch takes as its starting point that the significance of male circumcision exceeds anatomical and juridical considerations. Deploying a feminist Lacanian framework, while drawing from a wide range of archival sources and critical thought, Jordan Osserman asks: How can psychoanalysis help us shed light on the ideologies, discourses, and fantasies surrounding circumcision and the impassioned stances for and against it? And how might the history of circumcision, in turn, allow us to re-assess and clarify how we understand the split (or "snipped") subject of psychoanalysis?

"The Racist Fantasy lays out the fundamental fantasy structure that underlies a racist psyche as it develops in capitalist modernity"--

"Critically examines and revises many of Freud's seminal ideas about culture from the perspective of contemporary anthropology, psychoanalysis, evolutionary theory, and literature and the arts"--

"The first biography of Julia Kristeva-one of the most important intellectuals of the last 100 years. It connects her personal journey with the history of her ideas, clarifies her legacy within the context of postwar European thought, and demonstrates her crucial importance for the future of interdisciplinary thought"--