Main description:

This collection of short stories and essays call into question the medical-scientific narrative, its understandings of psychoanalysis and madness, and the identity, purpose and ethics that flow from and sustain its narrative. These stories are gathered from meetings with people on in-patient units and in private practice. Emphasis is placed on the centrality of the Freudian unconscious in the process of listening, understanding and responding in the analytic discourse. Collectively, they reintroduce the identity of the analytic practitioner as the shaman of contemporary times, a mind-poet who sees the world through a magical -as opposed to a scientific- visionary experience.

Contents:

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Stories From the Bog: On the Underworld, the Underconsciousness, and the Undertaking
The Dead Poets Society: Ventures into a Radioactive Psychoanalytic Space
Frankenstein's Genie-ology: The Magical Visionary Experience and the Associative Method
An Ethic of Free Association: Questioning a Uniform and Coercive Code of Ethics
Wang Fo and an Ethic of Free Association: Poetic Imagination, Mythical Stories, and Moral Philosophy
The Dramatic Meaning of Madness in Psycho(analy)sis: The Ear-Rationality of Treating Illusion as Reality
Escaping the Phantom's Ghostly Grasp: On Psychoanalysis as a Performance Art in the Spirit World
A Fractured Fairy Tale: The Story of Our Professional Lives in the Kingdom of Positivism
Developing Competency in the Destruction of Psychoanalysis: An Other Approach
How Will Bodies of Knowledge(s) Speak the Psychoanalytic Practitioner of the 21st Century? On Madness, Shamans and the Psychoanalytic Arts