Danielle Knafo

Rocco Lo Bosco

We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us. The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.

Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture

The Age of Perversion

Michael Selzer

As a clear and user-friendly guide for clinicians who work with patients affected by psychosis, this book challenges the false notion that psychosis is untreatable through talk therapy.

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis

From Breakdown to Breakthrough

women's self-representation in twentieth-century art

In her own image

Dustin Kahoud

In Sex, Drugs, and Creativity: The Search for Magic in a Disenchanted World, Kahoud and Knafo take a close look at omnipotent fantasies in three domains: sex, drugs, and creativity. They demonstrate how these fantasies emerge and how artists draw on them both to create and destroy—sometimes simultaneously – and how understanding this can help psychoanalysts work more effectively with these individuals. Using the personal statements of influential artists and entertainers, in addition to clinical material, the authors examine the omnipotence of self-destruction as it contends with that of creative artists. The authors argue that creative artists use omnipotent fantasies to imagine the world differently - this enables them to produce their art, but also leaves these artists vulnerable to addiction. Chapters devoted to Stephen King and Anne Sexton demonstrate the ways these authors used drugs and alcohol to fuel imagination and inspire creative output while simultaneously doing harm to themselves. A detailed case study also demonstrates successful clinical work with a creative substance user. Sex, Drugs, and Creativity will appeal to anyone interested in the links between creativity and substance use, and will be of great use to psychoanalysts and mental health practitioners working with these challenging clients.

Searching for Magic in a Disenchanted World

Sex, Drugs and Creativity

Terrorism and war have engendered a special set of people with distinctive and uniquely contemporary therapeutic needs. How do we cope with the personal experience of political violence? Living with Terror, Working with Trauma addresses the ways that mental health practitioners can assist survivors of terrorism. Drawing upon the experience of leading practitioners and renowned experts throughout the world, this edited volume explores the most innovative methods currently employed to help people heal--and even grow--from traumatic experiences. It argues for a multi-dimensional approach to understanding and treating the effects of terror-related trauma. Comprehensive in scope, Living with Terror, Working with Trauma covers psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, existential, and neuro-physiological techniques for working with individuals and groups, children and adults, both in the clinic and in the field. The contributors share their personal and clinical experiences in Hiroshima, Cambodia, the Middle East, Vietnam, and other sites of mass violence and terror, including the Holocaust. A special section is devoted to the September 11th. As it addresses the basic existential challenge of finding meaning and creatively transforming one's experience of terror and trauma, this volume explores the territory, identifies the key problems, and presents effective therapeutic solutions.

A Clinician's Handbook

Living with Terror, Working with Trauma

American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.

Rocco LoBosco

The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis

The haunting work of turn-of-the-century artist Egon Schiele continues to compel and shock viewers today. Living and painting in Austria during the decline of the Habsburg Empire and in the twilight of World War I, Schiele's image of man portrays the alienation and insecurity experienced at a time of decay and transition. Like his contemporary Sigmund Freud, Schiele probed the depths of human nature, and his graphic work is beginning to earn recognition as a major force in the evolution of modern art. As the first psychoanalytic book of Schiele's self-portraits, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation represents an important contribution to the available literature on this fascinating artist. Dr. Danielle Knafo provides valuable new insights into Schiele's countless anguished self-images, and convincingly demonstrates how childhood traumas were both exhibited and mastered in his art. She also helps us understand the aesthetic appeal the spectator experiences in viewing Schiele's personal struggle and emotional turmoil. Dr. Knafo reconstructs the formative events in Schiele's early life by carefully studying his art, diaries, and correspondence, illustrating those events that were to become the primary determinants of the content and form of his art. She explains how a failed mirroring experience with his mother and family deaths, including that of his father from syphilis, profoundly influenced Schiele's body image and subsequent self-representation. He depicted his relationships to both parents in his art: reviving his father from the dead, he simultaneously killed his mother. Schiele wrote in 1911, "I want to tear into myself, so that I may create again, a new thing which I, in spite of myself, have perceived," Repeatedly and compulsively creating his artistic double, Schiele not only developed an unusually personal - even autobiographical - art form, but he also transformed his canvas into a mirror where he worked at defining himself. He used his self-portraits not only to express himself but also to create a self. Despite the continuous nature of his self-obsession, Dr. Knafo demonstrates that Schiele's self-portraits changed over time, reflecting alterations that took place in his psychic organization, particularly regarding the development of his sense of self and his object relationships. His self-portraits, therefore, display the emergence of an evolving self. They reveal his transformation from a solitary adolescent tormented by his sexuality and morbid fears of body damage and psychic dissolution into a man with an integrated character structure. An unfolding of his personality as well as an increasing maturity in his work is evident over time. Although Schiele's career was brutally truncated by his premature death at the age of twenty-eight, his oeuvre retains a sense of completeness and resolution, for it demonstrates his triumphant use of art for mastery in the quest for identity.

A Self in Creation : a Psychoanalytic Study of the Artist's Self-portraits

Egon Schiele

In writing and lecturing over the past two decades on the relationship between psychoanalysis and art, Danielle Knafo has demonstrated the many ways in which these two disciplines inform and illuminate each other. This book continues that discussion, emphasizing how the creative process in psychoanalysis and art utilizes the unconscious in a quest for transformation and healing. Part one of the book presents case studies to show how free association, transference, dream work, regression, altered states of consciousness, trauma, and solitude function as creative tools for analyst, patient, and artist. Knafo uses the metaphor of dance to describe therapeutic action, the back-and-forth movement between therapist and patient, past and present, containment and release, and conscious and unconscious thought. The analytic couple is both artist and medium, and the dance they do together is a dynamic representation of the boundless creativity of the unconscious mind. Part two of the book offers in-depth studies of several artists to illustrate how they employ various media for self-expression and self-creation. Knafo shows how artists, though mostly creating in solitude, are frequently engaged in significant relational proceses that attempt rapprochement with internalized objects and repair of psychic injury. Dancing with the Unconscious expands the theoretical dimension of psychoanalysis while offering the clinician ways to realize greater creativity in work with patients.

Danielle Knafo

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