Why War?

Over the past decade, psychoanalysis has been at the centre of debates within the humanities, crucial to new ways of reading literature and a focus of continuing controversy for feminism. In these essays, Jacqueline Rose draws on these concerns while arguing that a shift of attention is now needed, from desire, sexuality and writing, to the place of the unconscious in the furthest reaches of our cultural and political lives. With essays on war, Margaret Thatcher and the dispute over seduction in relation to Freud, she offers new forms of potential psychopolitical understanding. Finally, in two extended essays on Melanie Klein and the earliest controversies over her theories, she suggests that it is time for a radical re-reading of her work.