Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This chapter discusses four major works of scholarship—three monographs and an edited volume—from 2021 that stage fresh and highly topical encounters between psychoanalysis, politics, and aesthetics, with transformative consequences for each. It is organized into four sections: 1. Introduction: Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch; 2. Reframing the Clinic (I): A Travelling Psychoanalysis for the Urban Poor, on Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor; 3. Reframing the Clinic (II): Cultural Objects and/as Psychic Objects, on Noreen Giffney’s The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic; and finally, 4. Literature and Psychoanalysis: Whither Now?, on Naomi Wynter-Vincent’s Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism and Vera J. Camden’s edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis.