ABSTRACT

A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On the Body examines the importance of the body in everyday psychoanalytic practice and beyond. Written by world leading clinicians and international scholars, this important book aims to relocate the psychoanalytic body in the modern, more challenging world. Bringing together perspectives from across the range of psychoanalytic schools of thought, it covers essential analytic topics such as family and parenting, sex and gender, illness and psychosomatics, and concepts of the body in infancy.

Though in Freud’s writing the intertwining of body and psyche is fundamental, psychoanalytic thought has sometimes downplayed or ignored this idea. This book returns the body to its rightful place in psychoanalysis, and brings the body into the contemporary world of technology and change, offering fresh insight into the sick body, the sexual body, the speaking body, the body of the changing family in which the traditional gendered labels no longer fit seamlessly, gender dynamics and much more.

A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World gives renewed and increased emphasis to an essential tenant of psychoanalysis. With contributions from some of the most important modern psychoanalysts, this book will prove an essential work for both psychotherapists and academics.

chapter |12 pages

General introduction

part I|47 pages

The body in our changing world

chapter 1|2 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|11 pages

Empathy machines

Forgetting the body

chapter 3|14 pages

Changing attitudes about sex

A dual inheritance perspective

chapter 4|18 pages

Modern gender flexibility

Pronoun changes and the body’s activities

part II|39 pages

The body in the changing family

part III|39 pages

The sexual body, the speaking body and the sick body

chapter 10|2 pages

Introduction

chapter 12|10 pages

Somatic ailment and death drive

Dangerous liaisons

chapter 13|10 pages

What is alive in the ill body?

Affect and representation in psychosomatics

part IV|48 pages

Sex, gender and infantile sexuality

chapter 14|3 pages

Introduction

chapter 15|13 pages

Foreign bodies

The body-psyche and its phantoms

chapter 16|15 pages

Botched bodies

Inventing gender and constructing sex

chapter 18|2 pages

Concluding remarks