Public Humanities from the Consulting Room to the Street: Politics, Scholarship, and Psychoanalysis
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Literature in the Humanities".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 June 2025 | Viewed by 484
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Much has been said by psychoanalysts, from Freud to the present day, about both advocacy for and resistance to sociopolitical enhancements of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and education. But there is no comparable body of writing by humanities scholars on the sociopolitical contents and therapeutic achievements of their own analytic relationships as such. This collection provides a space for such writing. All fourteen of the scholar-contributors either are or have been analysts or analysands themselves (in many cases, both). They have each been asked to consider how their most important socio-political concerns (e.g., in relation to class, race, gender, sexuality, governance, religion, war, social welfare, education, security, immigration, and the environment) have been welcomed or avoided in their psychoanalytically informed relationships—from the consulting room to the classroom to the street. How are sociopolitical concerns and commitments communicated, and do they contribute to or impede the therapeutic alliance? What sorts of psychic defenses are activated by material traditionally thought to distract from psychotherapeutic work on the “intrapsychic” and intimate familial/social spheres? The contributors seek to show how therapeutic achievements can be facilitated by greater openness to broader sociopolitical and cultural forces—including in the service of civic and cultural engagement, whether through broader-based treatment, education, cultural engagement, advocacy, or activism? Each contributor shows how individual psychotherapeutic achievements can be brought to bear on their sociopolitical and cultural interventions as clinicians and as scholars and teachers in the humanities and how the institutional politics of psychoanalysis itself might be transformed in the process.
Dr. Max Cavitch
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- psychoanalysts
- Freud
- sociopolitical contents
- therapeutic achievements
- public humanities
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