Merav Roth

What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious psychic processes and development involved in reading. The author listens to the 'free associations' of various literary characters, in numerous scenarios where the characters are themselves reading literature, thus revealing the mysterious ways in which reading literature helps us and contributes to our development. The book offers an introduction both to classic literature (Poe, Proust, Sartre, Semprún, Pessoa, Agnon and more) and to the major psychoanalytic concepts that can be used in reading it – all described and widely explained before being used as tools for interpreting the literary illustrations. The book thus offers a rich lexical psychoanalytic source, alongside its main aim in analysing the reader’s psychological mechanisms and development. Psychoanalytic interpretation of those literary readers opens three main avenues to the reader’s experience: the transference relations toward the literary characters; the literary work as means to transcend beyond the reader’s self-identity and existential boundaries; and mobilization of internal dialectic tensions towards new integration and psychic equilibrium. An Epilogue concludes by emphasising the transformational power embedded in reading literature. The fascinating dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis illuminates hitherto concealed aspects of each discipline and contributes to new insights in both fields. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature will be of great interest not only to psychoanalytic-psychotherapists and literature scholars, but also to a wider readership beyond these areas of study.

Reading the Reader

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature

Robert D. Stolorow

Nancy McWilliams

Hilda Catz

The book concerns contemporary psychoanalysis dealing with recent discontents due to pandemic and climate change. After the foreword written by Robert D. Stolorow, "Planet Earth. Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion", and the introduction written by the editor, Giuseppe Leo, the section "Psychoanalysis in Pandemic Times" (writings by Nancy McWilliams, Anna Ferruta, Hilda Catz, Giuseppe Riefolo, Merav Roth, and Cosimo Schinaia) concerns how to applyanalysis to the Covid-19 crisis (psychoanalysis as a tool for interpretation of the pandemic crisis at various levels, individual, social, political) but also how to practice analysis under the Covid-19 pandemic (dealing with the conditions under which the practise of psychoanalysis is possible in such an unprecedented global context). The section "When the psychoanalyst is the patient" contains the memoir written by Pietro Roberto Goisis, a Milan-based psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who survived the coronavirus. In this pandemic both analyst and patient have to deal with a dangerous external reality, with the supplementary task for therapist of helping the patient face his/her internal jeopardy. Finally in the section "Psychoanalysis and Climate Change" there is the chapter written by Marco Francesconi and Daniela Scotto di Fasano.

Merav Roth

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