This edited volume provides a critical history of psychoanalysis in Brazil. Written mainly by Brazilian historians and practitioners of psychoanalysis, the chapters address some central questions about psychoanalysis’ social role. How did psychoanalysis develop and flourish in a society in which modernisation was accompanied by inequality, authoritarianism and violence? How did psychoanalysis survive in Brazil alongside censorship and repression? Through a variety of lenses, the contributors demonstrate how psychoanalysis in Brazil presented itself as progressive and transformative and...

This book explores post-communist thresholds as materializations of a specific crisis of modern European identity that was caused by the existence and sudden breakdown of Soviet-type communism. It shows how post-communist thresholds emerge where relics from the communist experience continue disrupting the routines and rhythms of a modern life and confront Europeans with cultural experiences, affects and material realities of the ‘enlightened world’ which they usually seek to repress or ignore. In exploring and writing through art projects which engage with the psychosocial fabric of...

This book presents an existential and psychosocial interpretation of the experiences of mental health care practitioners whose work involves use of coercion. Through in-depth case studies carried out in Norway, and theoretical discussions, it examines how the use of coercion is not merely directed by laws and regulations, but also by the situated subjectivities of the practitioners, and the wider contexts informing them. It demonstrates how the inner and outer worlds, the psychic and the social, and the existential and the cultural, all impact the professionals' experience and capacity to...

In this book, Benjamin Strosberg explores difficulties and anxieties inherent in studying, defining, and defending against anti-Semitism by tracing a concurrent difficulty in thinking about Jewishness, which has historically served as a limit case for central social categories such as outsider, religion, race, gender, and nation. Dr. Strosberg draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of proteophobia—the anxious fear of what doesn’t fit into clear-cut categories—to think more carefully about anti-Semitism as response to the complex-realities of ambivalence and otherness. The book proposes...

Thinking and doing through a diverse set of theories, methodologies and writing registers, this edited collection explores the potential of creative disruption as psychosocial praxis. Moments of disruption – planned and unplanned – are everywhere in the fragile terrain of society, from micro-level gestures of resistance and refusal at the local scale to globally disruptive phenomena such as climate and ecological breakdown and pandemics. The authors of this collection ask instead: how might the disruption we encounter open up junctures for creative and ethical psychosocial...