Violence, trauma and subjectivity: compromise formations of survival in the novels of Rawi Hage and Mischa Hiller

The main protagonists of three recently published novels, Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game (2006) and Cockroach (2008) and Mischa Hiller’s Sabra Zoo (2010) are young men negotiating their coming of age under conditions of extreme social disintegration, finding their faltering way to adulthood after repeatedly witnessing and/or perpetrating acts of violence during the Lebanese War. With reference to a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma, this essay shows via a close engagement with these three novels, the extent to which psychic, as opposed to physical survival is dependent on a creative re-fashioning of social bonds. Hage and Hiller offer the reader strikingly different literary resolutions to the problem of continuing to live with the unbearable, and the juxtaposition of their work serves to illustrate the extent to which resilience depends on a widened sense of being with others. This does not, however, preclude the need for a pragmatic effort of attentiveness to each unique case of suffering encountered

Mothering, deprivation and the formation of child psychoanalysis in Britain

[Book summary:] 'Growing up with risk' provides a critical analysis of ways in which risk assessment and management - now a pervasive element of contemporary policy and professional practice - are defined and applied in policy, theory and practice in relation to children and young people. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from across the social sciences, the book examines contrasting perspectives on risk that occur in different policy domains and professional and lay discourses, discussing the dilemmas of response that arise from these sometimes contested viewpoints - from playground safety to risks associated with youthful substance use. The contributors address issues of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status which impact on definitions and responses to risk, and consider related concepts, such as 'risk-resilience', care-control' and 'dependence-autonomy'. Written in an accessible manner, each chapter provides a specific policy case study to illustrate the cross-cutting themes and issues that will make it a key text for researchers and students. It also offers policy makers and practitioners a valuable insight into the complexities of balancing responsibility for protecting the young with the benefits of risk taking and the need to allow young people to experiment

Stories of Masud Khan: Linda Hopkins, False Self: The Life of Masud Khan, and Roger Willoughby, Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality.

A substantial review essay which problematises the proliferation of biographic literature surrounding the figure of the controverial emigre psychoanalyst Masud Khan

Languages of loss: languages of connectedness.

The work which forms the basis of this essay was first presented at an international conference co-organised by the Freud Museum and the Multilingual Psychotherapy Association in 2001, related themes formed part of a paper given at the University of California, San Marcos, ‘Travel, Exile and the Ego Ideal' (2003). The ideas presented here on language, estrangement and the working through to connectedness, now form an integral part of my research on the horizons of possibility of psychoanalysis as a cultural, clinical and political discourse. The particular use of the memoir and the imaginative narrative as expressive of theoretical concerns has proved particularly fruitful and has elements in common with art writing as practiced by Adrian Rifkin and others

Therapeutic relationships: Sándor Ferenczi and the British Independent School

This collection proposes that using Winnicott's work to think about themes of importance to practitioners now is also a way of thinking about some of the present preoccupations of psychoanalysis. How certain themes assume an importance and develop at certain times often resonates with debates of the past and to encounter them in the present almost always offer something new. Theoretical and clinical ideas are produced in particular conditions and often also in response to, or as part of, a certain intellectual and socio-cultural context; how they have come to be understood and how they have their effect also involves that wider world and its interests

Narcissistic wounds, race, racism: a comment on Franz Fanon's critical engagement with psychoanalysis

I was invited to participate in this collection on the concept of narcissism, taken in an interdisciplinary perspective. My contribution forms part of a long term project on the potential transformations of psychoanalysis and will form part of a chapter in the forthcoming monograph mentioned above. I presented this work, together with Azzedine Haddour and Mark Nash at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in March 2007, in the context of a seminar where we also screened and discussed Isaac Julien's film on Fanon

The extensibility of psychoanalysis in Ahmed Alaidy's Being Abbas el Abd and Bahaa Taher's Love in Exile

Whilst key Freudian texts have long been translated into Arabic and explicitly psychoanalytic themes have circulated in Arab literary, medical and journalistic discourse at least since the 1940s, there seems to have been very little expansion of psychoanalysis as a practice in the Middle East. This article discusses the question of psychoanalysis's extensibility beyond its western roots and its potentiality as a discourse addressing human suffering in non-Eurocentric ways. The question of literature's hospitality to psychoanalysis is raised in parallel, via a discussion of two recent Eguptian novles: Ahmed Alaidy's Being Abbas el Abd and Bahaa Taher's Love in Exile. The analysis turns on the themes of authority and freedom, which for psychoanalysis are deeply bound up with the constraining power of the superego

The extensions of psychoanalysis: colonialism, post-colonialism and hospitality

Using a theoretical framework informed by post-colonial theory and psychoanalysis, this essay addresses the vicissitudes of the deployment of psychoanalysis beyond a Western context. Who or what may be marginalised within the international psychoanalytic movement and why? What are the limits of the hospitality of psychoanalysis? To illustrate these concerns, the essay turns to the figure of the psychoanalyst Masud Khan. His life and transgressive career, as well as the stories generated around him, are used to raise the question of psychoanlaysis' theoretical resistance in allowing a space for racial or cultural difference

Love of the Soldier: citizenship, belonging and exclusion in 'Beau Travail'

This article arose out of an interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues from the University of Kent, the University of London and the BFI. We initially came together around Claire Denis' work at a symposium hosted by the Film department of the University of Kent. Some of these papers and other contributions formed part of a special issue of the JES edited by Caroline Rooney (Kent ) and Rob White (BFI). In addition to my article, I contributed translations of two interviews with Claire Denis and of an article by Jean-Luc Nancy. Since then I have been developing research on cultural and psychoanalytic representations of leadership, which will form part of a forthcoming monograph with Polity Press. This paper examines belonging and non-belonging as set out in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, in the context of the Enlightenment ideal of citizenship and the historical development of the Foreign Legion. Inclusion and exclusion are also treated in terms of the Oedipal family formation of psychoanalysis, in order to further question just who it is that belongs and why. The characters of Galoup, Sentain and Forestier are used to illustrate the ambiguities that arise from such questioning