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Christopher Gibson has written an innovative and heartfelt book about psychoanalytic concepts and theories in the form of short stories of ordinary people and their ordinary, as well as sometimes quite exceptional interactions and inner lives. Drawing upon his experience as psychoanalyst and teacher of psychoanalysis, he succeeds in illustrating psychoanalytic key concepts in a witty and, for the most part, easy to grasp fashion. Tales from the unconscious addresses a broad audience of students, teachers, and practitioners of psychoanalysis, as well as other readers interested in learning about psychoanalysis in a more playful fashion than your typical introductory book.
The book consists of three broad themes: Expectations, Provocations and Audacities. Expectations concerns itself with topics like transference and countertransference and how our lives are influenced by relational fantasies of longing, love and hate, and the compulsion to enact our unconscious expectations and infantile desires. Provocations includes stories about provoking emotions in others and illustrates concepts like projection and projective identification. The third theme, called Audacities, is a collection of stories about the manifoldness of suicide and its aftermath, and the sorrow, sadism, murderousness, guilt, and ambivalence that so often encompass suicidal ideations.
Christopher Gibson’s short stories are sometimes personal and memory-like, such as the story of a little boy that doesn’t really have the words for his suicidality, yet. Sometimes, they are comical, like the paranoid fantasy of a boundaryless therapist eating pizza during a session or the joke about two psychoanalysts fighting by throwing psychoanalytic classic volumes at each other, and making their neighbours (collectors of psychoanalytic publications themselves) happy in the process. At other times, they are absurd exaggerations of human experience, not shying away from the obscene and blasphemous, like in stories about p