Off the Couch

The privileged link of psychoanalysis to spoken language does not necessarily facilitate communication among analysts and psychotherapists of different mother tongues. "The Journal of European Psychoanalysis" - published since 1995 - has long sought to overcome these linguistic barriers. Traditionally, it has introduced English readers to important European authors, as well as to authors of Latin American countries whose paradigms are close to European "styles." Freed of the editorial and political constraints that often govern the "official" organs of schools and institutions, "The Journal of European Psychoanalysis" has, for many years, regularly featured conversations with some of the most prominent and brilliant figures in contemporary psychoanalysis: highlighting debates and trends within psychoanalysis and related fields while remaining ever-sensitive to the practical, ethical, and theoretical implications of clinical practice.
"Off the Couch" collects some of the most engaging and provocative of these conversations, thus tracing not only a recent history of psychoanalysis in Europe, but also evidencing the discipline's vital and vibrant connections with the fields of politics and social policy, science and philosophy, cultural studies and the social sciences. Here convened, in a longstanding international forum at the frontiers of psychoanalytic inquiry, are thinkers and clinicians as esteemed and diverse as Cornelius Castoriadis, Johannes Cremerius, Francoise Dolto, Rene Girard, Otto Kernberg, Julia Kristeva, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Christopher Bollas, Diego Napolitani, Michel Henry Elvio Fachinelli, and Isabelle Stengers: researchers whose controversial perspectives and practices look to link and transform the contemporary proliferation of partial understandings that all-too-often relegate psychoanalysis at the margins of scientific discourse. In the spirit of the encounters of Molino's earlier "Freely Associated", the conversations in "Off the Couch" mark an ongoing celebration of the promise and freedom that inheres in any genuine psychoanalytic enterprise.