On a Darkling Plain - Journeys into the Unconscious
UK £16.99,
UK Publication February 1998
ISBN 9781840463439
Hardback
Buy: | Waterstones| Book Depository
Introduction by Oliver James
Freud's discovery of the dynamic unconscious was revolutionary. Psychoanalysis shocked the world of his contemporaries - it is still controversial today - but it was inextricably part of the grand, ambitious project of modernity.
No detail of his patients' lives, however banal, was irrelevant to diagnosis; yet psychoanalysis could be employed in the most sweeping comments on culture or politics. From family relations and sexual dysfunction to the mass hysteria of dictatorship, psychoanalysis had something to say.
Today that vision is often forgotten. Analysis is seen too easily as the vain pursuit of a bourgeois élite, a symptom of our increasingly self-centred, atomistic society.
On a Darkling Plain seeks to reinstate psychoanalysis as a valid, exciting and original language with which to comprehend our troubled and unstable world.
Each of the ten essays included here takes as a keynote a psychoanalytic term, exploring its relevance in clinical practice but also its contribution to the understanding of our culture.
Using a kaleidoscopic array of examples from art, music, popular culture and everyday experience, the authors remind us that Freud's perennially intriguing ideas are still invaluable tools in navigating the maze of ourselves and our environment.
Oliver James worked for six years as a clinical psychologist before becoming a TV producer / presenter and journalist. He is a regular contributor to many national newspapers and is the author of the best-selling Britain on the Couch (1997).
Ivan Ward is Director of Education at the Freud Museum, London, the editor of the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series and the author of Introducing Psychoanalysis (2000).
352pp 222 x 138mm hardback
This title is not currently available in the US.
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Ivan Ward has a background in social sciences and anthropology. He is a lecturer at the London Guildhall University and the Director of Education at the Freud Museum, London.
See more books by: Ivan Ward
