“This brilliant collection of incisive and powerfully interdisciplinary essays is the outcome of scholarly retreats, organized through the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Hospital in Stockbridge, Mass. What is striking is how deeply the presence of the hospital, its bucolic setting, its work with patients, and its commitment to psychoanalysis inspired these writers, who come from many different practices and disciplines to immerse themselves in the psychoanalytical and rehabilitative world of Riggs and its patients. Each scholar finds a way to revisit and reinhabit his or her discipline with an exciting grounding in psychoanalytic theory and treatment.”-- Adrienne Harris, PhD, Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

“The Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center is a unique place within a unique place.  Since 1985, its Scholar-in-Residence program has given more than 50 academics and clinicians the double gift of extended time to write while participating in the life of an in-patient therapeutic community.  If, as Erikson once said, what he had to offer was above all ‘a way of looking at things,’ the essays by Erikson scholars collected by Elise Miller in this volume teach and delight the reader with 12 interdisciplinary perspectives that together add up to an inspiring vision of the creative power and critical possibilities of psychoanalysis.”— Peter L. Rudnytsky, Head, Department of Academic and Professional Affairs, American Psychoanalytic Association.

“This splendid collection of essays by former Erikson Scholars represents interdisciplinary work at its best and testifies to the importance of the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Center, which was its generative source.  This volume demonstrates compellingly how knowledge gained through clinical work contributes to our understanding of the wider world in which the clinical is embedded.  It also grounds more theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences in actual clinical practice, that is, in lived human experience.”--Thomas Kohut is the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History at Williams College, a member of the Council of Scholars of the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center, and the President of the Freud Foundation, US.

Foreword: The Institute in the 21^st Century

Jane Tillman

Preface:  The Erikson Institute: A Personal History

M. Gerard Fromm

Prologue: The Hospital as Setting

Elise Miller

Introduction

Elise Miller

MEMORY AND FORGETTING

Chapter 1       Writing and Reverie at Austen Riggs

Elise Miller

Chapter 2       History Beyond Trauma

                        Françoise Davoine & the late Jean-Max Gaudillière

Chapter 3       On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious                 

Diane O’Donoghue

Chapter 4       Too Young to Understand

Ellen Handler Spitz

Chapter 5       A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

Lewis Hyde

LOST HISTORIES

Chapter 6       Emotion, Embodiment and Context

Ann Marie Plane

Chapter 7       Remembering Dorothy May Bradford’s Death and Reframing “Depression” in Colonial New England

Stacey Dearing

Chapter 8       Encounters with a Ghastly, Enigmatic Other

Annie G. Rogers

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE SOCIAL WORLD

Chapter 9       Guilty Minds

Anne C. Dailey

Chapter 10     The Hero’s Personality

Mark Lipton

Chapter 11     Wooden Ships: Cultural Cohesion and Continuity in Freud and Erikson

Daniel Burston

Chapter 12     Psychoanalytic Reflections on Limitation: Aging, Dying, Generativity,

and Renewal

            Nancy McWilliams

Elise Miller is Adjunct Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California and a clinician in private practice. She has published articles in literary journals and in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, winning the American Psychoanalytic Association Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture two years in a row for her work on the writing process.