This chapter considers H.D.’s translation of Euripides’s Ion (1937). H.D.’s Ion crystallizes her approach to Greek, redefining the practice of translation in the process; allows her to propose an alternative theory of psychic development contra Freud; and, finally, in its specific (mis)reading of the Euripidean play, foreshadows Pound’s treatment of Sophocles in Women of Trachis by making a strong case for the poetic and cultural relevance of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century. Pushing beyond accounts of the play available to her in the 1930s, H.D.’s interpretation of Euripides’ poetic strategies aligns with more recent scholarly accounts of his plays. Deploying differently the elements of commentary and translation in her multigeneric work, H.D. dramatizes both her own desire to believe in a triumphant narrative that would bind ancient and modern culture and would make poetry the cure or compensation for trauma, and the contingency or constructedness of such a position. The analysis of Ion is bookended by examinations of “Murex” (1926), and Trilogy (1944–46) that show the germination and evolution of the questions, ideas, and techniques that went into the translation of the play.

This chapter describes families of relationship- and emotion-focused therapies, whose members include psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and humanistic treatments. It begins with Freud’s traditional psychoanalysis, which stresses the need for clients to develop insight into their primitive drives, unconscious conflicts, and patterns of relating. It next covers other psychodynamic approaches that share ideas with traditional psychoanalysis, including interpersonal therapy. It also describes humanistic treatments, including person-centered, Gestalt, and existential therapies, all of which emphasize each client’s unique way of experiencing the world. Psychodynamic and humanistic treatments are considered relational approaches because they place strong emphasis on the role of the therapeutic relationship in treatment. The chapter also describes other treatments such as motivational interviewing and emotion-focused therapy that emphasize the role of emotion and interpersonal relationships in helping clients overcome psychological problems.

This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

This contribution brings racial affect theory to bear on the literary representation of Roman manumission, in the process developing new critical tools for the history of Roman slavery as a mechanism for racialization. Through a close reading of the freed man Hermeros’ diatribe in the Cena Trimalchionis, I argue for the centrality of racial melancholy to the discursive and social forms by which manumission came to be experienced and figured. The operation of this racial melancholy in Petronius’ text is decomposable into two distinct, but complementary, sentimental performances: paranoia on the one hand, and compulsion into (evasive) autobiographical confession on the other. The interlinking of these performances within Hermeros’ speech generates a melancholic affect, which I conceptualize as a disposition for managing and negotiating the grief of enslavement and manumission. In formulating and grounding this claim, I hope to clear a space for mutually enriching exchange among historians of Roman slavery, historians of premodern race, and those literary critics and cultural theorists who have been influential in setting the terms for the “affective turn.”

This chapter develops the concerns of Chapter 4 by discussing the relation between Freud’s concept of the symptom and Darwin’s reading of defunctioned and residual structures as evidence of species identity and affinity. Freud’s unconscious emerges in this analysis as emerging from the nineteenth century crisis of the species concept.

This chapter discusses psychoanalytic definitions of psychic pain (Freud, Bion, Pontalis) in relation to two European realist texts which represent the tradition pre and post Freudian psychoanalysis: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) and Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002), which latter novel intertextually invokes Tolstoy’s work of classic realism published almost a century and a half before. The chapter argues that, while modernist literary forms, and the body of criticism spawned by the latter, are most closely associated with the idea and depiction of psychic dissolution, psychological realism anticipated both the concerns and procedures of psychoanalysis and might be regarded as providing an adjunct to modern-day therapeutic practices.

Psychoanalytic work is always under threat of degradation; for example, understanding is replaced by education, or subtle pressure on the patient to function in a different way (that is getting him to think or behave differently, give up his symptoms etc.). One of the most important locations of this degradation of growth-promoting thought takes place at the site of the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The supervisee is on the one hand being taught and at the same time needs to discover for herself a way of doing things that truly belongs to her. This chapter discusses these tensions giving illustrative examples suggesting that supervising must join the list of the impossible professions.

2. With the benefit of hindsight, Serge Moscovici tried to reflect on what had motivated him to develop the theory of social representations. Socio-political and intellectual resources that underlay his thinking were complex. They were determined by events during the War and its aftermath, as well as by his personal and interpersonal experiences. In contrast to social psychological studies in the 1950s which were preoccupied with the study of attitudes and small groups, Moscovici was interested in urgent global issues such as the impact of science and technology on historical changes in society, the role of masses, conflicts, and the construction of social knowledge. He believed that social psychology would be able to respond to these challenges.

The two masters who had a tremendous impact on Moscovici’s career during the first years of his research in Paris were the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache and the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré. They re-orientated Serge Moscovici’s life and he called them his two fathers.

Moscovici’s choice to study social representations of psychoanalysis was inspired by several intellectual reasons and coincidences. Above all, he thought that psychoanalysis would be suitable subject matter to explore the transformation of ‘scientific’ or professional knowledge into daily knowledge.

This chapter describes pseudoscience and questionable ideas related to psychosis and the schizophrenia spectrum. The chapter opens by discussing diagnostic confusion and questionable assessment practices such as projective tests. The chapter also considers myths that influence treatment. Dubious treatments include homeopathy, psychoanalysis, vitamin therapy, lobotomy, insulin coma therapy, and exorcism. The chapter closes by reviewing research-supported approaches.

This chapter reviews the history of fads and fallacies in psychiatry. It discusses examples ranging from psychoanalysis to frontal lobotomy. It also describes the uses of electroconvulsive therapy that are evidence based, and explains how a fad for indiscriminate use of this treatment became prominent. These issues set the scene for an examination of current fads in the field, and how they attempt to fill gaps in our knowledge but often lack empirical support.

This chapter describes pseudoscience and questionable ideas related to antisocial personality disorder. The chapter opens by considering diagnostic controversies such as the construct of psychopathy. Questionable assessment practices and myths that influence treatment are also addressed. Dubious treatments include psychedelics, psychoanalysis, and punishment-based interventions. The chapter closes by reviewing research-supported approaches.

This chapter describes pseudoscience and questionable ideas related to personality disorders with a primary emphasis on borderline personality disorder. The chapter opens by discussing diagnostic controversies and myths that influence treatment. For example, the chapter debunks the myth that diagnoses should be avoided in order to decrease the likelihood of stigma. Psychoanalysis is described as a dubious treatment. The chapter closes by reviewing research-supported approaches.

In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.

At the beginning of this period, psychiatry and psychology still dominated the management of epilepsy. Psychometry was widely used in epilepsy colonies, laws were passed restricting the rights of those with mental handicap, and psychoanalytical theories of seizures, conceived as symptoms of infantile regression, and also of the epileptic personality were widely held. Diverse theories of heritability were postulated. The rise of eugenics, as well as of psychoanalytical theories, greatly worsened the stigma of epilepsy. Eugenic measures were introduced which included involuntary sterilisation in some countries, and ‘mercy killings’ by the Nazi regime. In the later years, the science of epilepsy advanced with studies of neurochemistry, neuropathology and neurophysiology, and in the late 1930s EEG burst into the clinical arena. Treatment also made progress with the introduction of the ketogenic diet and then Phenytoin. The two world wars resulted in new interest in the surgical treatment of post-traumatic seizures. Attitudes to epilepsy remained largely hostile and the condition featured in the works of well-known authors including Thomas Mann, Agatha Christie, Joseph Roth and John Cowper Powis, who had epilepsy but never revealed this publicly. The ILAE ceased to function in 1914 but was resuscitated in 1937.