Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community

Barry Sheils, Julie Walsh, Barry Sheils, Julie Walsh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319638287
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319638294
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Psychology

This book brings together the work of scholars and writer-practitioners of psychoanalysis to consider the legacy of two of Sigmund Freud's most important metapsychological papers: 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' (1914) and 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917 [1915]).  These twin papers, conceived in the context of unprecedented social and political turmoil, mark a point in Freud's metapsychological project wherein the themes of loss and of psychic violence were becoming incontrovertible facts in the story of subject formation. 

Taking as their concern the difficulty of setting apart the 'inner' and the 'outer' worlds, as well as the difficulty of preserving an image of the coherently boundaried subject, the psychoanalytic frameworks of narcissism and melancholia provide the background coordinates for the volume's contributors to analyse contemporary subjectivities in new psychosocial contexts. This collection will be of great interest to all scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies, social and cultural theory, gender and sexuality studies, politics, and psychosocial studies.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1: Introduction: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community
• 2: Narcissism and Melancholia from the Psychoanalytical Perspective of Object Relations
• 3: Narcissism Through the Digital Looking Glass
• 4: Something to Do with a Girl Named Marla Singer: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Therapeutic Discourse in David Fincher’s Fight Club
• 5: Melancholia, the Death Drive and Into the Wild
• 6: The Monster in the Mirror: Theoretical and Clinical Reflections on Primary Narcissism and Melancholia
• 7: Shame, Pain and Melancholia for the Australian Constitution
• 8: Dr Fanon on Colonial Narcissism and Anti-Colonial Melancholia
• 9: ‘This Nothing Held in Common’: Towards a Theory of Activism Beyond the Community of One
• 10: Neurotic and Paranoid Citizens
• 11: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Exhaustion of the ‘Journeying’ Subject
• Index