1st Edition
Psychotherapy Under the Influence of Georges Bataille From Social Theory to Clinical Practice
This fascinating book applies social theorist Georges Bataille’s revolutionary thinking to psychotherapy, offering clinicians a new and valuable context for practicing therapy.
In adding Bataille’s ideas to several different psychotherapeutic modalities, this book makes the notoriously obscure thinker more accessible while testing the validity of his far-reaching work in the treatment room. Through an in-depth examination of several clinical case studies, the book demonstrates how to balance an understanding of the social and historical contexts of participants with a therapeutic approach that offers empathy for individual distress. It also explains how Bataille’s innovative approach can be applied to work with couples, groups, institutions, and even one of Freud’s classic case studies. Both the content and form of each chapter demonstrate the therapeutic value of a reflexive, critical approach to one’s practice and exemplify how to write about it.
Offering an unprecedented opportunity to imagine how Bataille’s own interest in psychoanalysis and clinical psychology might have developed, this book will be of interest to both practitioners in the field and scholars of continental philosophy and social theory.
Part I: Psychotherapy with Individuals 1. Searching for a Sign: Listening, Looking, Touching, Way-finding 2. The Distance Between Spending and Spent: On Manic Consuming, Hoarding, Expending, and Other Visions of Excess 3. The Other Kind of Laughter 4. Recovery 5. Excremental Journey 6. The Accursed Child Part II: Psychotherapy with Couples 7. Sexual Disgust Redux Part III: Psychotherapy with Groups 8. The Acephalic Stage Part IV: Psychotherapy with Communities 9. Triple Fugue: A Dialogical Exploration of Sovereign Experience Part V: The End(s) of Psychotherapy 10. Do No Harm/Please Harm Me
Biography
William Buse, PhD, completed his anthropological training (Columbia University) and his psychoanalytic training (Postgraduate Center for Mental Health) in New York City. He currently serves as Director of Counseling at The Juilliard School and maintains a psychotherapy practice on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
"A bombshell and intellectual delight, immensely readable and searingly original, this momentously important book reconfigures not only Bataille but psychotherapy itself in these beleaguered times. A tour de force."
—Michael T. Taussig, Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, Columbia University, US, author of Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (2020)
