ABSTRACT

Memories and Monsters explores the nature of the monstrous or uncanny, and the way psychological trauma relates to memory and narration. This interdisciplinary book works on the borderland between psychology and philosophy, drawing from scholars in both fields who have helped mould the bourgeoning field of relational psychoanalysis and phenomenological and existential psychology. The editors have sought out contributions to this field that speak to the pressing question: how are we to attend to and contend with our monsters?

The authors in this volume examine the ways in which we might best relate to our monsters, and how the legacies of ancient traumas and anxieties continue to affect our current stories, memories and everyday practices. Covering such manifestations of the monstrous as racism, crimes against humanity, trauma as portrayed in music and art, and the Holocaust, this book explores the impact the uncanny has on our individual and collective psyches.

By focusing on a very specific theme, and one that excites the imagination, Memories and Monsters stokes the flames of an important current movement in relational psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professionals in psychology and graduate school students and tutors in the fields of both psychology and philosophy.

chapter 1|12 pages

Apocalyptic exceptionalism and existential particularity

The rise in popularity of dystopian myths and our immortal “other”

chapter 2|20 pages

The Golem must live, the Golem must die

On the moral imperative of writing critical cultural histories of psychology

chapter 4|27 pages

Is loyalty really a virtue?

Shame and the monstrous Other

chapter 6|18 pages

Living in the shadows of the past

German memory, trauma, and legacies of perpetration 1

chapter 7|22 pages

Haunting and historicity

chapter 9|24 pages

Positioning self and other

How psychiatric patients, psychiatric inmates, and mental health care professionals construct discursively their relationship to total institutions

chapter 10|25 pages

“I am not myself, but I am not an other”

Self-dissolution narrative in medical rehabilitation psychotherapy

chapter 11|15 pages

The idealized “other”

A reparative fiction

chapter 13|13 pages

Beautiful troubling alterity

An intersubjective response to Nabokov’s Lolita

chapter 14|19 pages

The music knows

Grieving existential trauma in art, music, and psychoanalysis