1st Edition
Psychoanalysis as Radical Hospitality Six Perspectives on Turning-to versus Turning-Away
This book focuses on different forms of turning-to versus turning-away from speech across a range of experiences in clinical treatment and general life.
The chapters of this volume deal with the entrapment involved in exile from mother tongue, the parasitic language that uses the other's language as a linguistic prosthesis, the language of blank mourning which separates the mourner from their mourning, the adhesive identification of the voice and the psychotic split between voice and meaning, the mental hypotonia associated with an internalized object that turns away, and the spectrum between revenge and forgiveness. Each chapter sheds light on a different angle of the psyche's ability to spot its own leverage point and use it to transcend the infinite varieties of helpless victimhood: from the position of the victim to the position of the witness, from being the object of the narrative to being its subject, and from the position of righteousness to the willingness to forgive and be forgiven.
This book is a must read for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and literary scholars, as well as philosophers of language and of the mind.
1. The Language of Exile: Reflections on Jean Améry’s Essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” 2. Parasitic Language 3. The Bereaved Survivor: Trauma Survivors and Blank Mourning 4. The Experience of Voice in Analytic Listening 5. From 'Turning Away' to 'Turning To': Adoption as Radical Hospitality 6. On Forgiveness
Biography
Dana Amir is a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst at the Israel psychoanalytic society, professor, vice dean for research and head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in psychoanalysis at Haifa University, editor in chief of Maarag–the Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis, poetess and literature researcher. She is the author of six poetry books, three memoirs in prose and four psychoanalytic non-fiction books. She is the winner of many literary as well as academic prizes, including five international psychoanalytic awards.
'Psychoanalyst and researcher Dana Amir's book "Psychoanalysis as Radical Hospitality" is another layer in her groundbreaking thinking on the interface between language and the human psyche. The book describes in an extraordinary way deep and complex clinical material and human phenomena, extracting original and crystal-clear insights, which in combination with the wide cultural range on which Amir relies and her poetic articulation - presents a unique, exciting, and cautionary reading of mental-linguistic psychopathology.'
Prof. Merav Roth, psychoanalyst and cultural researcher, the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society; University of Haifa; Former chair of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy program, Tel-Aviv university.
'The present book fits well with the central principle in Amir's thought. In the unique psychoanalytic type that she developed, which can be called "scientific-poetic," she examines what enables psychic movement versus what blocks, fetters, and limits it. Hence the main goal of the psychoanalytic treatment: enable the creation of a space where broad waves exist over large surfaces of sound and rhythm, rich in possibilities and meanings.'
Prof. Aner Govrin, Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Bar-Ilan University
'Dana Amir brings together music, poetry, photography, inter alia to psychoanalysis to deepen what I would like to think of as the "lyrical school of psychoanalysis."'
Nilofer Kaul, PhD. Indian Psychoanalytic Society, Delhi, India; The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2023
