Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book and its companion, edited collections of essays on 'ghostliness' and demonic prescences in psychoanalytic and cultural life, emerged from the collective work of a group of analysts. Both collaboratively and individually, struck by the way uncanny and spectral presence, or absent presence, entered minds, bodies, and consulting rooms. Ghosts emerge in and as unwitnessed silences, and surely, from actual deaths. The body may be the absorber and also the communicator of ghosts. The book draws on the term 'ghosts' to capture the sense of objects that are neither internal nor external solely, that may disturb the atmosphere, the soma, the mind, temporality, and the surrounding fields. It explores the actual and psychic legacy of loss, of violence, phobic hatreds, and migrations that bear so heavily on the lives, minds, and bodies of contemporary patients.