Books in the Studies in the Psychosocial series

This book considers psychoanalysis as an ethical enterprise, both on the level of the individual in analytic psychotherapy, and on the level of society in the global struggle for human and civil rights. Hadar examines the struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lives from a Lacanian psychoanalytical perspective.

The Psychosocial Imaginaries of Defence Nationalism interrogates the emergence of far-right nationalist 'defence leagues' in Australia and the UK.

This book examines the use of myth in contemporary popular and high culture, and proposes that the aporetic subject, the individual that ¿does not know¿, is the ideal contemporary subject. Using several contemporary novels, films and theatrical plays that illustrate aporia ¿ such as Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Riordan, 2007), Tron Legacy (Koninski, 2010), Welcome to Thebes (Buffini, 2010), The Photographers (Koundouros, 1998), Prometheus (2012) and Prometheus Retrogressing (Sfikas, 1998) ¿ Angie Voela introduces common ground between Lacanian psychoanalysis and some of Freud¿s most ardent critics, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, as well as the cultural philosopher Bernard Stiegler. These unprecedented systematic comparisons broaden the scope and impact of Lacanian psychoanalysis in inter-disciplinary debates of philosophy and culture and Voela argues that apart from dealing with the past, psychoanalysis must also deal more explicitly with the present and the future. She presents a unique inquiry into modern subjectivity that will be of great interest to scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film, literature and contemporary culture.

This book develops a performative and relational approach to gendered and sexualised bodies conceived as distinct from the more limited individualistic idea of sexual identity and orientation that is at play within notions of progress in contemporary transnational sexual politics.

This book draws on recent developments across a range of perspectives including psychoanalysis, narrative studies, social practice theory, posthumanism and trans-species psychology, to establish a radical psychosocial alternative to mainstream understanding of 'environmental problems'.

Time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. She traces a careful temporal trail through Freud's published works and his daunting Nachlass, and provides a compelling reason as to why Freud kept his remarkable thoughts about time to himself.

Offering a uniquely 'psycho-cultural' take on the emotional dynamics of UK political culture this book uses theories and research in psychoanalysis, cultural and media studies and political sociology. It explores the cultural and emotional processes that shape our relationship to politics in a media age, referencing Joanna Lumley to Nigel Farage.

Psychosocial studies challenges the traditions of psychology and sociology from a genuinely transdisciplinary perspective. The book reflects this agenda in its varied theoretical and empirical strands, producing a newly contextualised and restless body of understanding of how 'psychic' and 'social' processes intertwine.

Most people have, at some point, experienced powerful, often strange and disconcerting, responses to films and television programmes of which they cannot always make sense. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, this book argues that the seemingly mundane and everyday activity of film and television viewing in the home is in fact extraordinary.

Leading authors within organization studies and also from broader social science disciplines present the state of the art in the rapidly developing field of psychosocial approaches to organization studies and critical management studies.

A collection of 18 contributions by well-known scholars in and outside the US, The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis shows how sociology has much to gain from incorporating rather than overlooking or marginalizing psychoanalysis and psychosocial approaches to a wide range of social topics.

The book applies a unique mix of psychosocial methods to understand the complexity of emotional, cognitive and ideological responses to human rights violations and examines the banal quality of the everyday vocabularies that people use to make sense of human rights and their violations, and justify not intervening.

This book explores how the present is troubled by the past and the future. It uses the idea of haunting to explore how identities, beliefs, intimacies and hatreds are transmitted across generations and between people and how these things structure psychosocial and psychopolitical life.

(Post)apartheid Conditions: Psychoanalysis and Social Formation advances a series of psychoanalytic perspectives on contemporary South Africa, exploring key psychosocial topics such as space-identity, social fantasy, the body, whiteness, memory and nostalgia.

How do women experience the identity changes involved in becoming mothers for the first time? Throughout in depth case examples, Wendy Hollway demonstrates how a different research methodology, underpinned by a psychoanalytically informed epistemology, can transform our understanding of the early foundations of maternal identity.

This book explores how, in encounters with the terminally ill and dying, there is something existentially at stake for the professional, not only the patient. It connects the professional and personal lives of the interviewees, a range of professionals working in palliative and intensive care.

This book examines how people cannot escape being tainted, whether actively engaged or not, by violence in its countless manifestations. Four themes are addressed: violence of speech, violence and domination, repetition and violence, and the possibility of reparation or renewal.

Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis draws on a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism. The book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people living in apartheid South Africa.

These 'New Voices in Psychosocial Studies' offer a coherent yet wide-ranging account of research that has taken place in one 'dialect' of the new terrain of psychosocial studies and an agenda-setting manifesto for some of the kinds of work that might ensure the continued creativity of psychosocial studies into the next generation.

This book investigates the psycho-social phenomenon which is society's failure to respond to climate change.

It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts interested in collective phenomena, psychosocial studies scholars and social theorists working on theories of recognition and theories of trauma.

It is sometimes assumed that fantasizing stands in contrast to activism. This book, however, argues that fantasy plays a central role in social movements. Drawing on psychoanalysis and psychosocial theories, Fantasy and Social Movements examines the relationships between fantasy, reality, action, the unconscious and the collective.

Narcissism and Its Discontents challenges the received wisdom that narcissism is only destructive of good social relations. By building on insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory it puts forward a theorisation of narcissistic sociability which redeems Narcissus from his position as the subject of negative critique.

This book examines how people cannot escape being tainted, whether actively engaged or not, by violence in its countless manifestations. Four themes are addressed: violence of speech, violence and domination, repetition and violence, and the possibility of reparation or renewal.

This book explores the psychosocial significance of loss and exclusion in the lives of many Iranian immigrants living in London since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

With a foreword by Slavoj Zizek, this book explores the Father Function in the East in the process of 'Modernisation', arguing that 'Modernisation' and 'Westernisation' are euphemisms for the advent of capitalism in Asiatic and African societies which lead to fatal transformations of the cultural and political incarnatations of the Oriental Father.

Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis draws on a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism. The book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people living in apartheid South Africa.

He illustrates how social dreaming can link dreams together into a collage of images, and compares this to the rhizome, where clusters of emotional intensity - which emerge from the dream images - weave and interconnect with other clusters, forming a web of interlinked dream images and emotions.

This book offers a psychosocial perspective on political violence, employing a strong current of psychoanalytic thinking.