Wild Analysis

Reviews / Votes

'The question of what psychoanalysis can be, or do, outside the clinic haunts Freud's thinking from the beginning of his discovery of the life of the unconscious mind. Responding to the potential of psychoanalysis to intervene in the world "beyond the couch", the essays collected here generate some unexpected, even counter-intuitive, readings on the cusp between psychoanalysis, history and politics. The provocation issued by a range of critical and cultural texts is vital to that encounter opening up a space, within this volume, to listen to what can very easily remain unheard. Equally, there is a sustained commitment here to take psychoanalysis outside its "comfort zones". In so doing, this collection breaks new ground, demonstrating how, by working at its limits, psychoanalysis can be used to generate new forms of thinking about the very real disturbances in our political and social worlds.'
Vicky Lebeau, University of Sussex

'Tracing the shifting ground between psychoanalysis, history, politics, and culture, Wild Analysis collects together contributions from some of the most interesting established and emerging figures in the field. By working across multiple disciplines, this fascinating collection maps out the dangers, pleasures, and value of using psychoanalytic thinking to enter and understand the terrain of the wild.'
Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, Dept. of English and Film, University of Exeter 'The question of what psychoanalysis can be, or do, outside the clinic haunts Freud's thinking from the beginning of his discovery of the life of the unconscious mind. Responding to the potential of psychoanalysis to intervene in the world "beyond the couch", the essays collected here generate some unexpected, even counter-intuitive, readings on the cusp between psychoanalysis, history and politics. The provocation issued by a range of critical and cultural texts is vital to that encounter opening up a space, within this volume, to listen to what can very easily remain unheard. Equally, there is a sustained commitment here to take psychoanalysis outside its "comfort zones". In so doing, this collection breaks new ground, demonstrating how, by working at its limits, psychoanalysis can be used to generate new forms of thinking about the very real disturbances in our political and social worlds.'
Vicky Lebeau, Professor of English, University of Sussex

'Tracing the shifting ground between psychoanalysis, history, politics, and culture, Wild Analysis collects together contributions from some of the most interesting established and emerging figures in the field. By working across multiple disciplines, this fascinating collection maps out the dangers, pleasures, and value of using psychoanalytic thinking to enter and understand the terrain of the wild.'
Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter

'As the cumulative evidence of the book builds, its own shifting shape functions in an increasingly layered way. From the early chapters - an explication of how psychoanalysis grants us tools for reading and seeing in the broadest senses of these terms - through attentive case studies of how groups retreat into disavowed thinking when faced with perceived threat, to the increasingly compelling focus on the great harm which an unexamined societal consciousness may do to its own members, this volume offers multiple, nuanced ways to think about the value and the necessity of psychoanalytic thinking in cultural and socio-political life.'

Harriet Barratt, senior research associate, Converge Evaluation Project. To read this review in full, please see the following: 'Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life', Textual Practice, (May, 2022) DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2022.2076326

'To think of its wildness is to take psychoanalysis off the couch and out of the neat, middle-class, isolated preserve in which it has been presumed to reside. This is frequently framed as thinking of psychoanalysis at its own limit, a phrase I often use though one that risks a little abstraction. But the edited collection is invested in the workings-indeed the life-of psychoanalysis, raising questions about the relationship between psychoanalysis and history and psychoanalysis and literature, and what kind of communities psychoanalysis might generate, especially as it attends to the gendered and racial formations in which it is complicit.'

Jess Cotton, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK. To read this review in full, please see the following: 'Shaul Bar-Haim, Elizabeth Sarah Coles and Helen Tyson (eds), Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life', Psychoanalysis and History, Volume 25, Issue 2, Page 227-230, ISSN 1460-8235. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.2023.0471.