Books published by Atropos Press

In these seven letters, practising psychiatrist Vincenzo Di Nicola offers wisdom to a young therapist from 25 years of experience conducting relational therapy. Ranging from what to read and how to begin therapy, the letters cover therapeutic temperaments and technique, how to create a relational dialogue, the myths of individual psychology and the need for relational psychology, the evolution of therapy in the past century and when therapy is over-all the while looking forward to the relational practices of the coming community. This book complements Di Nicola's model of working with families presented in A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy (New York and London: W.W. Norton). -- It's a beautiful idea, this project of turning to young people... The relational dialogue offers an important new direction of study to discover the deep basis of the therapeutic alliance, in order to understand the still too-little known phenomenon of "change"... This is what you have brought together in your book: the search for the whole regarding the person and, at the same time, the network of primary affective relationships that we call the family and of social relationships ... -from the Foreword by Maurizio Andolfi, MD, Director of the Academy of Family Psychotherapy, Professor of Psychology, University of Rome Author description: Vincenzo Di Nicola, M.D. is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and relational therapist in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. After studies in clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, Di Nicola trained and collaborated in family therapy with Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Maurizio Andolfi and more recently in global mental health with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma. He has held clinical and teaching appointments at the universities of Ottawa, Queen's and McGill and is an Honorary Professor of Law in Minas Gerais, Brazil and a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Di Nicola is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal and a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School.

What Edmund Burke identifies as the sublime in human experience, the arts, and science has been“overthrown” by a new cult-like religion of Scientism. As a secular religion, this new cult structures itselfon the old framework of the Christian religion, in particularly Roman Catholicism, which it attempts todisplace. While it does indeed depend upon the discoveries and advances of science to evangelize itsmessage, it relies chiefly on belief, manipulation, and coercion as much as did its predecessor, but withentertainment and consumerism rather than great art and holy ritual as its expression. It is supported bya lesser cult: The Cult of Mediocrity, represented by the creators of entertainment content, theeducation system, government, and the financial industry. Its basis is largely commercial, as its financeneeds are infinite. However, to create the right environment for its infinite expansion, it must workclosely with government and the banking system in various effective ways to achieve its end: which isthe creation of the Apex Consumer, the super-consumer helplessly indebted while equally helplesslyaddicted to the mediocre and toxic distractions the amnion offers in place of the Sublime. The collectiveresult is the “amnion,” matrix, or technosphere. It is a de facto false world that strives to be “more real”than reality to the consumer. Consequently, the mass of consumers have already begun to eschew the“real” world of cause and effect, human relations and action, and nature and the sublime. Instead, theyhave elected to adopt the amnion’s doctrine that everything good comes “in the future” – includingmedical immortality -- if they can only keep up with the monthly payments on the debt they have takenon, fatally, through the instrument of the promissory note. The exegesis of this work relies on what itdefines as the “world-historic” culture of the collective voices of those who valued the sublime above allelse. These voices include the literary work of European and American Romantic authors, French andGerman philosophers, artists, scientists, mathematicians, logicians, and, to a significant degree, thephilosophical and semiotic work of American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist CharlesS. Peirce.

Letters to John Berger is a collection of letters written to John Berger in the year following his death. While John was alive, Amber and John sent each other drawings and ideas in the mail. When John died, Amber continued. But where does one send letters to the dead? John believed that the dead are still with us. Amber is looking for John.

Emotional Permaculture is a philosophy of relation focused on the sense of Being With. At once poetic, narrative, and conceptual, Emotional Permaculture blends the realms of art, philosophy, and psychology in order to shed light on the general dynamics of relation - that which influences perception, communication, and action - in the private sphere, as well as the shared world. Loosely based upon the conceptual framework of Permaculture as articulated by ecologists Mollison and Holmgren, Emotional Permaculture acts as a lens through which to view the relational landscape, shifting the perception of personal ecology to reveal all interactions as imbedded within the active meditation of a shared world. Cultivating relationships that create energy, rather than drain it, opens pathways for sustainable collective evolution, as well as profound personal development. This labor of love is a humbling but rewarding endeavor, a living beating heart of truth. For while this is a metaphor of a garden, it is also one that is alive and growing, evidence of both the trials and beauties that come to pass in the garden of relation.

Queerness has always been the Arab world’s secret pleasure growing in privacy and secrecy as institutionalized heterosexism has marginalized it and made it forbidden to exist.Yet it still grows forcing a wave of consciousness-raising within Arab culture.Queer Arab Martyr explores the violence, secrets and fetishes unique to the Arab world unveiling the intersectionality of identity and body politics, religion and ethnicity. The book collects short emotional ethnographies to describe the sexualities, body politics, and of course, the sex of queer sexual minorities in the Arab world. The book also accompanies these short stories with beautiful illustrations by the author himself.Access to queer representation and language through global online networks and dating apps has created a new wave of urbanized Arab queers that are negotiating their visibility and sexual orientation with the older, more conventional Arab generation, exasperating an already abysmal generational gap.

The First Thermodynamic Law states that energy neither goes out of being nor comes into being. Consciousness is not dependent on the existence of matter, space, or time, although it interacts with these variables. As a fundamental force, dark energy would retain its form regardless of space or time. Inspired by Knud Ejler Løgstrup's approach of looking at the whole of nature, cosmophenomenology integrates cosmology and quantum physics to examine the hard problem of consciousness, the problem in quantum physics of why a wave changes to a particle, the alterity and harmony of consciousness as dark energy, and the necessary relation quantum physics has to multiple worlds-topics phenomenology alone is inadequate to examine. The Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff holds that consciousness continues in a quantum state after death. This theory is compared to Leibniz's Monadology and Deleuzian multiplicity, and Blanchot's neuter. The view of death as a liminal state is discussed.

This treatise offers a novel and comprehensive approach to re-reading Heinrich von Kleist's works, with an in-depth focus on the eight dramas. It unravels his texts' overt textual fabric and isolates and de-codifies the covert thematic strands of which they are shown to be systematically composed. It demonstrates that these individual textual strands express and embody their author's main political and personal life pursuits and that his works function as his vehicles and mechanisms for the active pursuit of his agendas, thereby establishing them as being not only auto-biographical but indeed eminently auto-, as well as hetero-, poÏetical. This treatise demonstrates that it is always possible in principle, and usually in practice, to eliminate those ambivalences, dissonances and incommensurabilities that apparently mar Kleist's texts and that have long preoccupied and puzzled the Kleist-Forschung, showing them to comprise mere textual surface phenomena brought about by his intricate interweaving, within a single textual fabric, of multiple heterogenous thematic threads. In rigorously unravelling these threads and thus decrypting the texts, this book demystifies Kleist and confirms him to have been among that exceedingly rare breed of writers of whom he himself once wrote that they master both metaphor and formula in equal measure.

What do you fear about the future? Is it robots? Is it our inability to keep up with emerging technologies? Within a few decades, we could see technological changes never before witnessed-ageless societies, software-based immortal humans, cybernetic organisms, and means of transport at lightning speed. Can we coexist with machines that will be smarter, faster, and wiser than humans? Will we blend with technology, or will a new dimension of "humans" emerge? What are the implications of human intervention in evolution, and can we do it responsibly? Ultimately, should ethics play a role? If yes, how? Ethics must keep up with the exponential progress of technology. Ethics should leapfrog and facilitate public debates, not only among rulers but also among influential contemporary thinkers, philosophers, scientists, engineers, and prominent science fiction authors. Students should also be empowered to reflect before creating new disruptive innovations. We don't want to slow down progress; we want to befriend it. This coming decade will be the most pioneering decade in history, and exponential technologies will lead to exponential innovation. We should strive to take this journey, conscious of the risks we are facing, and raise a call to action for openly discussing the social repercussions these technologies could have if left only to their "makers"-a call to action in pursuit of exponential ethics.

Long the province of connoisseurs, collectors, hipsters, and eccentrics, the music and art of the margins has begun to find its way into the mainstream. Kurt Cobain took to wearing Daniel Johnston t-shirts before his death; Sufjan Stevens organized a concept album based on the work of Royal Robertson; an illustration by Henry Darger recently sold at auction for more than half a million dollars; The Shaggs' story was turned into a Broadway play. But aside from the ways in which the boundaries of the artworld, music criticism, and even popular taste are being redrawn, it is becoming increasingly clear that the creations of artists and musicians working on the margins may be invested with a particular kind of philosophical significance as well. American Idiots is neither a book of traditional art or music criticism nor an encomiastic work written from the uncritical perspective of a fan. Rather, it argues that outsider art and music pose significant philosophical problems concerning the nature and meaning of incompetence in the arts. It argues specifically that particular tokens of incompetent outsider art may be regarded as staging important aesthetic and ethical problems with regard to the phenomenon of responsibility. Drawing upon figures such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Simon Critchley, American Idiots examines the work of prominent outsider artists and musicians/composers, exploring how in each case their work is invested with a philosophical significance that is tied directly to its deficiencies and shortcomings. In each instance the incompetence on display provides us with key clues regarding the phenomenological structure of obligation and answerability.

Abduction Topology: The Psycholinguistics of Discourse examines and explores the psychological and linguistic mechanisms of discourse. Using the psychology of Lacan and Vygotsky, and the work of philosophers from Plato to Agamben, this book exposes the workings of thought and language in individual psychology and the social Zeitgeist as they relate to early childhood development, social architecture, and propaganda. The topology of the process of social abduction during the Lacanian mirror stage of psycho-emotional development is described, then is brought to the threshold of revolution in Hegel''s Second Negation and the birth of what Schirmacher calls "Homo Generator."