Psychoanalysis

In 2017 a key trend in psychoanalytic scholarship coalesced around radical rethinkings of people, places, things, and theories whose status within the field had for some time been taken for granted or significantly overlooked. As such, this year’s review is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Psychoanalysis and Space (exploring Joanne Morra’s reappraisal of the Freud Museums as spaces which are uniquely psychoanalytically and culturally invested); 3. Thinking the Thing: Psychoanalysis and the Couch (examining a recontextualizing of the psychoanalytic couch as a historical and cultural object); 4. Psychoanalysis and its Practitioners: Rereading Sabina Spielrein (assessing Angela Sells’s exposure of the misrepresentations of Spielrein’s life and legacy which have characterized her presence within the scholarship thus far); 5. Psychoanalysis and the Fetish: Renewing the Theory (looking at the ways in which Freud’s theory of the fetish can be contextualized historically and philosophically to give rise to new insights for clinical practice).