This historical and scientific study of psychoanalysis and its founding group brings together Luciano Mecacci's own work and existing material, and presents the reading public with a story that is not only fascinating and terrible but also essential and thought-provoking, given the enormous influence of Freud's ideas on European art, writing and wider culture throughout most of the twentieth century. It is important to distinguish between Freud the scientist and Freud the creative thinker. The former often lacked rigor and allowed his ideas to run audaciously ahead of the evidence he had collected. The latter, on the other hand, was brilliant, innovative and prolific, but the material produced was untested, as Mecacci demonstrates convincingly, and therefore unsuitable for clinical application. Freud's psychoanalytical therapy established a movement and set in train a series of often tragic events, which were almost always ignored at the time of their occurrence. Mecacci argues that there was nothing casual about these, and their roots are to be found in the manner in which the psychoanalytical movement was born and the historical context - dark times of war, economic crisis and xenophobia.

Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis from the Wolf Man to Marilyn Monroe

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mecacci, Luciano

Psychology & Counseling

Vagabond Voices

<p>How well do we know other people - even when we all belong to a small ex-pat community in a foreign capital? Allan Massie's edgy and disturbing study of English-speaking alcoholics living in Rome examines this great literary theme - and does much more besides. The broken people who inhabit this stark and inventive novel live their intense and meaningful relationships a few steps removed from the noise and bustle of the host community that surrounds them - a sympathetically portrayed backdrop, whose "noises off" remind the reader of a steadier, less isolated world beyond the central characters, whose obsessions we follow through a vibrant, fast-paced and compelling dialogue. The words and thoughts of these characters in most cases reveal not so much self-interest as the total isolation of the human self, but the author's acute analysis is mitigated by moments of tenderness and humor.</p>

Surviving (Vagabond)

Literature & Fiction

MASSIE, ALLAN

Literary

Presbyopia: Selected Poems

Cameron, Allan

Poetry

The elusive and unstable realities of Gorbachev's Russia prove to be fertile ground for Alessandro Barbero's great skills as a storyteller, and this masterpiece, The Anonymous Novel, is full of many varied characters and the discussion of endless themes concerning not only the Soviet Union and it final days but also, dare one say it, the human condition in any age and any country. It is very much the complete novel, doing everything a novel can and should do, and doing it in a masterly fashion. One surprising element of the book, which is also an opportunity for the author to express very subtly his admiration for Russian literature and culture, is the authenticity of the narration. The Western reader may feel that this is a sleight of hand, but Russian readers of the Italian original and the English translation can confirm its accuracy, which is based on careful historical research into journalistic and literary records, as well as some other sources. This book is a compelling read, but it is also a wonderful mix of the profound and the witty.

The Anonymous Novel: Sensing the Future Torments

Barbero, Alessandro

In The Nocturnal Library, we have the maniacal that we all know from our own dreams: a dreamer's lack of control and a dreamer's dogged acceptance of the absurd. Here we have the dream as paranoia and the vain struggle to understand the rules that govern life. Here we have the dream as a bizarre library in which the fragility of human knowledge is emphasized again and again. Jerome, who perhaps represents the archetypal man of learning, is bound up in his world of books and suffers from crippling insomnia. He has to study for an exam, and his troubles are compounded by bad toothache, or at least these are the dominating themes of his dream. The reality of wakefulness only appears in the last paragraph of the last chapter. But this is not only a book about dreams. Amongst other things, it is a book about the arrogance and illogicality of power and bureaucracy, and the relationship between the world of intellectual order and the chaos of nature, dominated as it is by mutual disregard and the latter's inevitable victory in the long term. Above all, this is a book in which fantasy reigns for its own sake and goes wherever the author's creative impulse takes it.

The Nocturnal Library

Cavazzoni, Ermanno

Humor & Satire

<p>Klaus, the novella that opens and, to some extent, dominates this collection, tells the story of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, and in spite of the long shadow of so famous a father, an important novelist and political activist in his own right. His struggle against Nazism gave him a focus, but its demise and what he perceived as Germany's inability to change led to depression and an early death. Massie succeeds in evoking that period of courage and hypocrisy, intellectual fidelity and clever changeability, sacrifice and impunity, personified by the tragic Klaus and the mercurial and indestructible Gustaf Grundgens, his former brother-in-law and ex-lover. Between these two lie not only those broken relationships but also a novel - Klaus's novel Mephisto, a thinly disguised attack on Grundgens that for many years could not be published in West Germany. Massie's subtle prose merely suggests some intriguing aspects of this network of relationships and the self-destructive nature of literary inspiration.</p>

Klaus and Other Stories

Genre Fiction

Campbell Aaronson, one of the scientists who worked on the American bomb at Los Alamos, is now a pacifist composer living in a remote community on the west coast of Scotland. He is replanting ancient woodland and his artist friend is creating a vast site-specific artwork in a cave, but a magnate has other plans for their sacred hill. He wishes to blow it apart and turn it into aggregate for building motorways. How is the community to react? Jon Armour, a Glasgow arts journalist, is enticed into their plot and, following his own professional and personal interests, he blunders into a conflict he is incapable of understanding, with disastrous results for all involved. The main plot is mirrored in the plot of a parallel story that projects the localism of the Calltain community onto a global and historical plane. Les Wilson's novel tells not just of rivalries, jealousies and murder, but also of an inherent incompatibility between the ecology of our planet and the logic of Western capitalism, which is played out over and over again - relentlessly. None of the characters are saints or demons. This is human tragedy that is beyond solution or even understanding. The fate of the Calltain community is perhaps a premonition of our own, resulting as it does from an inability to search out rational compromise - and throughout, the story is dominated by the reflective Aaronson and his intransigent daughter.

Fire in the Head (Vagabond (Paperback))

Wilson, Les

Whence the condemnation of loitering? Why this aversion to what is, after all, the definitive metaphor for the human condition""? To loiter: to remain in an area for no obvious reason"" (Merriam-Webster). And this is a book for loitering and loiterers. You can ramble through, or simply dip in at will. It says something about our times that the aphorism has almost but not quite disappeared from contemporary English literature, and the reason must, at least in part, be our contemporary attitude to time. Renzo Llorente's aphorisms challenge the accepted faith in the free market without adopting another form of blind dogmatism, and like many writers of aphorisms, Llorente does not provide absolutes but encourages readers to think for themselves.

Beyond the Pale

Llorente, Renzo

History & Criticism

Allan Cameron's intriguing novel is set in a near future where the predictions of the US theorist Francis Fukuyama have been taken to their logical conclusions. Fukuyama declared that, with the collapse of the USSR and the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, history has come to an end. In Cameron's book, history has indeed been halted by decree and the citizens live in a permanent present of spurious consumer choice and endless material consumption, their bovine lives ruled by the embedding of Rational Consumer Implant Cards in their brains. A cardless underclass exists in the Fukuyama Theme Parks, vast squalid concentration camps on the outskirts of cities. At the pinnacle of this society sit those lucky individuals who, because of their dedicated pursuit of stupendous wealth, are awarded the Plutocratic Social Gratitude Award, popularly nicknamed the Berlusconi Bonus as it effectively puts the recipient beyond the law. The book takes the form of a confession by Adolphus Hibbert, a recent beneficiary of the Berlusconi Bonus, who is recruited by the sinister secret police officer Captain Younce to spy on dissident elements. Adolphus embarks on a dizzying journey among the clandestine opposition, in which he finds love, betrayal and violence; discovering terrifying truths about himself and his society.

The Berlusconi Bonus: The First Draft of Adolphus Hibbert's Confession

These short stories tentatively look at different themes such as compassion, passivity and their opposites, which are not, of course, original themes, as none exist. The stories are told in different keys, and some characters appear in more than one story. The subject matter also shifts from the social to the political, and the tone becomes increasingly pessimistic. An Algerian immigrant worker in Italy invents a novel way to redistribute wealth; a female academic finds the path to success to be less difficult than she expected; a high-flyer in the financial markets perceives the glories of a selfish existence; a dying writer considers how he abandoned relationships to follow his art; a dead man rejects the tediousness of heaven; a thug is haunted by his selfish instincts; an essayist pronounces, and an author kills off his character. The plot in one short story distinguishes it from all the others: ""A Dream of Justice"" is the scenario for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine, and examines how this might play out. This, it is suggested, is not just a ""least worst"" solution; it is also the only one in which people can go through the process of rediscovering their common humanity, albeit a process that is long and generational.

Can the Gods Cry?

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