£21.74
A seminal work reissued with a new introduction from Judit Szekacs-Weisz and welcoming words from Ivan Ward and Carol Siegel. The book features stories of great diversity from psychoanalysts, scientists, psychotherapists, doctors and historians on working with and being a part of exiled and immigrant populations. The reflections from Eva Almassy, Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Pina Antinucci, Antal Bokay, Julia Borossa, John Clare, Ferenc Erós, Susan Haxell,Eva Hoffman, Kathleen Kelley-Lainé, Leon Kleimberg, W. Gordon Lawrence, Judit Mészáros, Gershon J. Molad, George Pick, Rachel Rosenblum, Tamara Stajner-Popovic, Riccardo Steiner, Judit Szekacs-Weisz, Judith E. Vida, Shula Wilson, and Ali Zarbafi are as relevant today as they were on first release.
| Editors | Judit Szekacs-Weisz and Ivan Ward |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9781800131194 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Page Extent | 314 |
| Publication Date | April 2022 |
| Subject Areas | Psychoanalysis, Psychosocial Studies, Psychotherapy |
Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile invites the reader to enter a territory which is not only multilingual but multidimensional: defined and shaped by history, politics, economy, and sociocultural transformations. The contributions give important insights on the psychodynamic processes involved in working with, and being part of, exiled and immigrant populations.
The majority of the stories take as their base the upheaval caused by the Second World War but their stories are still, sadly, relevant today with the ongoing plight of refugees the world over. By presenting their experiences, the contributors provide a vital record of what it means to leave your homeland behind, to make a new life in a new land, and to live and work in a second tongue. The aim was and is to provide stimulus for further thinking and research. Two contributors, Ali Zarbafi and Shula Wilson, took up that challenge and we were delighted to publish their contribution to this debate in their edited work, Mother Tongue and Other Tongues: Narratives in Multilingual Psychotherapy (2021).
Judit Szekacs-Weisz, PhD, is a bilingual psychoanalyst and psychotherapist – a double citizen both in her professional and private life. Born and educated (mostly) in Budapest, Hungary, she has taken in the way of thinking and ideas of Ferenczi, the Balints, Hermann, and Rajka as an integral part of a “professional mother tongue”. Founding Member of the Sàndor Ferenczi Society, Budapest. The experience of living and working in a totalitarian regime and the transformatory years leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall sensitised her to the social and individual aspects of trauma, identity formation and strategies of survival. In 1990, she moved to London, where, with a small group of -psychoanalysts, therapists, artists and social scientists, she founded Imago East-West and later the Multilingual Psychotherapy Centre (MLPC) to create a space where diverse experiences of living and changing context and language in different cultures can be explored and creative solutions found. In 2001 she organised, together with Kathleen Kelley-Lainé and Judith Mészáros, the Lost Childhood Conferences in Budapest, London and Paris She writes about body-and-mind, trauma, emigration, changing context and social dreaming.
Ivan Ward is the former Deputy Director and Head of Learning at the Freud Museum London, where he worked for 33 years. Born in Hackney in the mid-1950s, he is a mixed-race father of two girls and author or editor of a number of books and papers on psychoanalytic theory and the applications of psychoanalysis to social and cultural issues. He is the author of Introducing Psychoanalysis (Icon Books, 2001) and has written on such topics as psychoanalysis and ecology, race and racism, adolescent fantasies and horror films, television and psychoanalysis, Wagner’s opera Parsifal, Freud’s love of Egypt, shame and sexuality, and the importance of fathers. He was editor of Ideas in Psychoanalysis, a series of short books explaining psychoanalytic concepts in relation to the everyday world, and his latest publication is ‘Everyday Racism: Psychological Effects’ in The Trauma of Racism: Lessons from the Therapeutic Encounter edited by Beverly J. Stoute and Michael Slevin (Routledge, 2022). He is an honorary research associate at UCL Psychoanalysis Unit.
Photo by Simon King
Translator’s Note
On the New Edition
Foreword
Chapter 1, Foundations
I Hypotheses on the Genesis of the Death Drive
II From the Repetition Compulsion (Constraint) to Primal Reproduction
III The Retractable Scaffolding of Narcissism
IV The False Symmetry of Sadomasochism
V Reworkings, Advances, Transpositions
VI Conclusion: Transcendence in Freud
Note on Empedocles of Acragas
Chapter 2: The Death Drive’s Shockwave: Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Lacan and Others. Remarks on Some Clinical Structures
I Ferenczi and Mutual Analysis
II Melanie Klein and Full-Blown Destruction
III W.R. Bion and the Return to Thinking
IV D.W. Winnicott: The Environment-Individual Pair
V French Contributions from Lacan to Balier
VI Pierre Marty’s Psychosomatics
VII Disruption of Self-Preservation
VIII The Unity and Diversity of Depression
IX Pathology and Normality of Suicide(s)
X Brief Remarks on Clinical Practice
Fermata
Chapter 3: The Death Drive in the Social Field: Civilization and Its Discontents
I The Death Drive in Culture
II Primal Parricide
III Recent Discussions on Cultural Process
IV The Death Drive and Language: Laurence Kahn
Appendix: The Return to Biology: Apoptosis or Self-Programmed Natural Death
Leave-Taking, Updated
Tentative Conclusion
References
Index
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Christopher Bollas, author of ‘The Shadow of the Object’ –
‘This remarkable compendium on “loss” contains essays that are amongst the most moving and deeply reflective accounts of all the different types of loss we can undergo, whether it be the loss of one’s country, one’s mother tongue, or that loss we must all endure: the loss of our childhood. Although the book does contain essays that are for the specialist reader in psychoanalysis, its great merit resides in the diverse range of many poetically constructed essays and one hopes that Lost Childhood will reach readers outside the field of psychoanalysis as the editors have found writers for whom to write about loss is to bring out the very best in one’s reflections on life itself.’
Edith Kurzweil, writer and editor of ‘Partisan Review’ –
‘A collection of essential papers to be used as a tool not only by members of the helping professions working with people from cultures other than their own, but also by all those who need to come to grips with the multidimensional and multilingual experiences of individuals and groups in our increasingly global society – and with themselves.’
Raluca Soreanu, Director of Research, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex –
‘Lost Childhood and the Language of Exile offers a psychoanalytic journey into experiences of dislocation across space and language, and a way of making sense of the creativities of these dislocations. For psychoanalysts, this collection of essays is an important exploration of the many forms of migration and loss that have marked the twentieth century and that are constitutive of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. For cultural and literary theorists, it creates a new window into the experience of exile, by being curious about unconscious processes, traumatic loss, and ways of working-through traumas. One of the book’s vibrant themes is that of translation: what does it mean to be in-between languages and what are the psychic processes associated to this particular work in the in-between? Another key figure emerging from the book is that of the child. Here, childhood is not an age, but it stands for the possibility of a new kind of creative and plurilingual memory of exile.’