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Published as part of the Tavistock Clinic Series, home of seminal works such as Giana William's Internal Landscapes and Foreign Bodies: Eating Disorders and Other Pathologies and Caroline Garland's Understanding Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach among many others, Exploring Psychoanalytic Concepts Through Culture, the Arts, and Contemporary Life is a surprising volume. Rather than zeroing in on a specific clinical area, as one has come to expect from the series, this compilation of essays is strictly non-clinical, focusing instead on applied aspects of psychoanalytic theory, with each writer using psychoanalytic concepts and ideas to examine works of visual and performing arts, literature and even psychosocial phenomena such as littering.
If the book's remit sounds broad, it is because most of the participating authors are, or have been at one point, involved in the Tavistock's Masters in Psychoanalytic Studies (also known as M16), some as teaching staff but most of them as students. In fact, the majority of texts stem from final dissertations, for which students are encouraged to write about a theme they feel strongly about and which fits the criteria. While the course, led by the book's editors Margaret Lush and Kate Robertson (who sadly passed away in 2023 as the volume was being prepared), is non-clinical, it remarkably features an Infant Observation component as part of its mission to encourage learning from experience, free-floating attention and negative capability. The book has thus been divided into four sections replicating the structure of the course: Learning through infant observation, Poetry, Literature and the performing arts, and Contemporary life.
As I read the book, I felt that a more unifying and satisfying thematic cohesiveness may have been willingly given up for the sake of fostering openness and curiosity; however, what has certainly been achieved is a vivid communication of excitement and enthusiasm about looking at the world through a psychoan