An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis is a book of transpositions, collecting together the author's clinical vignettes, enigmatic objects, stray thoughts, projects, images, notes from readings, and musings; but also remarks on films and exhibitions, memories, episodes from daily life, summaries of papers to write, questions, doubts and obsessions - all of which have shaped the author's understanding of psychoanalysis.
Born from moments in which the author has sensed a solution for problems encountered in daily work or for obscure but exciting points of the theory, the entries are ordered in an apocryphal manner, offering a personal and challenging view of psychoanalysis. Like small epiphanies in which there is always an emotion - be it that of amusement, astonishment, gratitude, sadness, joy - they express the style of the analyst and of the person in treating mental suffering and give a glimpse into the imaginary which nurtures it. Ideas for psychoanalysis are outlined where at centre stage is the ability to wait, to be surprised; to operate from the place of the unconscious, which by definition is a place of negativity, and to exercise a form of soft scepticism - ultimately, a mode of hospitality.
An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis will be of great use to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
About the Author: Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD, is a training and supervising analyst (SPI, APsaA, IPA). He lives in Pavia, Italy. His books include The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field; The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis; Truth and the Unconscious; and Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis.
