Muriel Dimen

"This volume breaks new ground. It introduces six brilliant young psychoanalytic writers, who have grown up with both psychoanalysis and critical social theory 'in their bones.' From this perspective, they are able to take up the longstanding problem of integrating a social perspective into psychoanalytic clinical work at the most fundamental level: They organize their treatments around the core concepts of the critical social theories of Foucault, Althusser, Butler, and others who map the ways that culture expropriates individuals, integrating them with contemporary intersubjectivist analysis. Further, they reveal themselves in the same complex psychosocial fields, with a full view of how they too, as analysts, are implicated in the very same processes. Thus, the social dimensions of their analyses are not tacked on, but essential, and the vivid possibilities of this radical reorientation are not only suggested, but often realized. This is a rare achievement." - Stephen Seligman, DMH, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Infant-Parent Program, UCSF

"This is an extraordinary collection. In just a few pages of clinical case material, each author remarkably manages to shatter any illusions one might hold that the psychic and the social are separable. The writing is powerful and each vignette movingly explores the complex psychosocial interdependence of patient and therapist. Seamlessly blending high theory with experience-near clinical encounters, this book is a major contribution to a non-normative psychoanalysis." - Lynne Layton, Ph.D., Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society