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In American literature, a traumatic scene of racial and sexual awakening - frequently involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing - often precipitates a character's "discovery" of racial identity. Similarly, in the annals of psychoanalysis, notions of self and sexual identity often arise from visual trauma such as the mirror stage and primal scene. Noting this parallel between specular births of racial and sexual subjectivity, Gwen Bergner uses a comparative analysis of psychoanalytic theory and American literature to develop a theory of racialization - the process through which individuals assume an identity as black or white. Examining the primal scenes of double consciousness in works by Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison, among others, alongside the formative visual traumas of psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Freud, Taboo Subjects reveals how literature disrupts psychoanalysis's conventional models of race and gender identification, forcing a reconfiguration of many foundational psychoanalytic texts. And from psychoanalysis Bergner derives a critical vocabulary for theorizing racialization as it intersects with sex and gender, for both black and white Americans.

Peter Homans offers a new understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis and relates the psychoanalytic project as a whole to the sweep of Western culture, past and present. He argues that Freud's fundamental goal was the interpretation of culture and that, therefore, psychoanalysis is fundamentally a humanistic social science. To establish this claim, Homans looks back at Freud's self-analysis in light of the crucial years from 1906 to 1914 when the psychoanalytic movement was formed and shows how these experiences culminated in Freud's cultural texts. By exploring the "culture of psychoanalysis," Homans seeks a better understanding of what a "psychoanalysis of culture" might be.

Psychoanalysis, Homans shows, originated as a creative response to the withering away of traditional communities and their symbols in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The loss of these attachments played a crucial role in the lives of the founders of psychoanalysis, especially Sigmund Freud but also Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Ernest Jones. The personal, political, and religious losses that these figures experienced, the introspection that followed, and the psychological discovery that resulted are what Homans calls "the ability to mourn."

Homans expands this historical analysis to construct a general model of psychological discovery: the loss of shared ideals and symbols can produce a deeper sense of self (psychological structure-building, or individuation) and can then lead to the creation of new forms of meaning and self-understanding. He shows how Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts began to extend their introspection outward, reinterpreting the meanings of Western art, history, and religion. In conclusion, Homans evaluates Freud's theory of culture and discusses the role that psychoanalysis might play in social and cultural criticism.

Throughout the book, Homans makes use of the many histories, biographies, and psychobiographies that have been written about the origins of psychoanalysis, drawing them into a comprehensive sociocultural model. Rich in insights and highly original in approach, this work will interest psychoanalysts and students of Freud, sociologists concerned with modernity and psychoanalysis, and cultural critics in the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and social history.

"This work is of importance for psychoanalysts and scholars of the psychology of religion. Kakar makes a scholarly and significant contribution to the objectification of what psychoanalysis and Hindu mystical tradition have in common."—Ana Maria Rizzuto, Tufts University

Archetypal Process is a pioneering study linking the ideas of process philosophy, as developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, with the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung and James Hillman. This is the first work to examine the interconnections of these two modes of thought.

Archetypal Process examines the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground archetypal psychology in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought, and finally, it adds a much-needed feminist perspective to the debate.

When it was first published in 1968, Michael Balint's The Basic Fault laid the groundwork for a far-ranging reformation in psychoanalytic theory. This reformation is still incomplete, for it remains true today that despite the proliferation of techniques and schools, we do not know which are more correct or more successful--and all psychoanalysts continue to encounter intractable cases of mental disorder. Balint argues that ordinary "rigid" techniques and theories are doomed to failure in such cases because of their emphasis on interpretation.

The Basic Fault continues to illuminate the crucial current issues in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general: the nature of self, the role of developmental defects, the value of empathy, and the central importance of the relationship between therapist and patient. This paperback edition includes a foreword by Paul H. Ornstein discussing the impact of Balint's work at the time of its publication and its continued importance now.

First published in 1968, The Battered Child quickly became a landmark work. Our awareness of child abuse today is due in no small part to the remarkable impact of its first and subsequent editions.

The new edition of this classic text continues the legacy. While updating and significantly adding to previous editions, the fifth edition retains the multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach that initially set the work apart. This new edition contains chapters from professionals in such diverse fields as pediatrics, psychiatry, legal studies, and social work that reflect the past decade's extraordinary advances in research and techniques. Twenty of the book's 30 chapters are entirely new, while the remaining material has been extensively revised.

Part I provides a historical overview of child abuse and neglect as well as background material on the cultural, psychiatric, social, economic, and legal contexts of child maltreatment. Part II discusses the processes of assessing cases of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and neglect from the unique perspectives of all the professionals involved, including teachers, pediatricians, and social workers. Part III describes intervention and treatment, focusing on legal issues, investigative procedures, and therapeutic processes, while Part IV addresses prevention and policy issues.

Previous editions of The Battered Child have earned the labels of "a classic" and a "Bible." With its up-to-date information, unequaled scope, and contributions from experts on every aspect of child abuse, the fifth edition of this cornerstone text is even more essential to the field than its predecessors.

"Comprehensive and up-to-date."—David Cottrell, British Journal of Psychiatry

"A valuable contribution to the field of abuse and neglect"—Prasanna Nair, Journal of the American Medical Association

This book introduces an approach to mental health that dates back 3,000 years to an ancient body of Jewish spiritual wisdom. Known as the Connections Paradigm, the millennia-old method has been empirically shown to alleviate symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. After being passed down from generation to generation and tested in clinical settings with private clients, it is presented to a broad audience for the first time.
The idea behind the paradigm is that at any given moment, human beings are either “connected” or “disconnected” across three key relationships. To be “connected” means to be in a loving, harmonious, and fulfilling relationship; to be “disconnected” means, of course, the opposite. The three relationships are those between our souls and our bodies, ourselves and others, and ourselves and God.

These relationships are hierarchal; each depends on the one that precedes it. This means that we can only connect with God to the extent that we associate with others, and we cannot connect with others if we don’t connect with ourselves. The author, Dr. David H. Rosmarin, devotes a section to each relationship and describes techniques and practices to become a more connected individual. He also brings in compelling stories from his clinical practice to show the process in action.

Whether you’re a clinician working with clients, or a person seeking the healing balm of wisdom; whether you’re a member of the Jewish faith, or a person open to new spiritual perspectives, you will find this book sensible, practical, and timely because, for all of us, connection leads to mental health.

Suffering is an inescapable part of life. Some suffering is so profound, so violating, or so dogged that it fundamentally changes people in indelible ways. Many existing therapeutic approaches, from a medical model, treat suffering as mental illness and seek a curative solution. However, such approaches often fail to examine the deep questions that suffering elicits (e.g., existential themes of death, isolation, freedom, identity, and meaninglessness) and the far-reaching ways in which suffering affects the lived experience of each individual.

In The Courage to Suffer, Daryl and Sara Van Tongeren introduce a new therapeutic framework that helps people flourish in the midst of suffering by cultivating meaning.

Drawing from scientific research, clinical examples, existential and positive psychology, and their own personal stories of loss and sorrow, Daryl and Sara’s integrative model blends the rich depth of existential clinical approaches with the growth focus of strengths-based approaches.Through cutting edge-research and clinical case examples, they detail five “phases of suffering” and how to work with a client's existential concerns at each phase to develop meaning. They also discuss how current research suggests to build a flourishing life, especially for those who have endured, and are enduring, suffering.

Daryl and Sara show how those afflicted with suffering, while acknowledging the reality of their pain, can still choose to live with hope.  

Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti offers a new reading of these eminent Victorian siblings’ literature and visual arts. Suzanne M. Waldman views well-known poems and artworks such as Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel and Venus Verticordia in new ways that expose their authors’ savvy anticipation of concepts that would come to be known as narcissism, fetishism, and the symbolic and imaginary orders, among many others. Waldman makes a strong case for the particular psychoanalytic importance of the Rossettis by looking at how the two Rossetti siblings’ own psyches were divided by conflicts between the period’s religious scruples and its taste for gothic sensationalism. The Demon and the Damozel is a close and contextualized reading of their writings and artwork that displays, for the first time, continuity between the medieval cosmologies these Pre-Raphaelites drew upon and the psychoanalytic theories they looked ahead to—and locates the intricate patterns of proto-psychoanalytic understanding in the rich tapestry of Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism.

Peter H. Wolff, a world-renowned authority on infant behavior, helped lay the foundation for the field in the 1960s with his innovative studies of behavioral studies, motor coordination, smiling, and crying in infancy. Some twenty years later, as infancy studies have become increasingly specialized and fragmented, he calls for new theoretical perspectives and methods of investigation. Applying ethological methods used in field studies of animal behavior, Wolff first observes how babies behave in the "natural" ecology of their homes to catalog their species-typical behavioral repertory and then manipulates their behavior through informal experiments designed to examine functional significance.

Wolff argues that a coherent psychobiological theory of early human development must begin with knowledge about the infant's behavioral repertory under free field conditions. Many current theories of human development begin instead with assumptions about the organization of behavior derived from studies of psychological function in the adult; moreover, they appeal to instincts, maturational programs, or genomes to explain the apparent lawfulness in the development of these behavioral categories. Such a priori explanations, Wolff contends, beg the whole question of development. As an alternative to theoretical metaphors that portray the infant as a closed system and suggests that development is controlled by prescient programs that anticipate the mature steady state, Wolff proposes a metaphor of the infant as an open, self-organizing system with partial, mutative mechanisms of development. Applying this metaphor, he addresses the essentially unsolved problem of how novel behavioral forms are induced during ontogenesis.

Wolff presents a study of twenty-two infants who were observed for thirty hours each week in their homes during the first months after birth. He builds a week-by-week description of changes in behavioral states of wakefulness and examines how reversible state changes influence developmental transformations in social-affective behavior and sensori-motor intelligence. The observations and informal experiments emphasize expressions of emotion and the infant's changing relations to persons and things. Pointing out that movements are our only clue to what infants "feel" or "think," Wolff gives special emphasis to the systematic variations in spontaneous and environmentally evoked patterns of motor coordination as a function of behavioral state transitions.

Of great importance to psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and students of development in general, The Development of Behavioral States and the Expression of Emotions in Early Infancy offers a major empirical, methodological, and theoretical rethinking of the subject to which Wolff has made outstanding contributions.

How do children develop an understanding of future events? In this state of the art review of two decades of empirical and theoretical work, leading researchers in developmental psychology and neuroscience explore what is known about the development of future-oriented processes.

Following Marshall Haith's seminal studies on early infant anticipation, this collection begins with a survey of current knowledge about the early development of expectations. Addressing both the state of neural research in this field and the role of language and social context in the development of future orientation, the authors discuss the nature of planning in action, future orientation in humans and in nonhuman primates, and the development of intermediate and long-term expectations with regard to cognitive skills and scientific activity.

Combining developmental and cognitive perspectives, this volume will interest professionals in developmental psychology, child development, and neuropsychology.

The Drama Therapy Decision Tree provides an integrated model for therapeutic decision-making by deconstructing the processes of choosing drama therapy interventions. The authors strive to provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do in terms of diagnoses and interventions, especially for students and early career professionals in the field.

The book provides a systematic method for drama therapists and drama therapy students to use to determine the most appropriate therapy technique for clients. Paige Dickinson and Sally Bailey have identified and analyzed their own experiences with the task, and here they explain how to put learned theory into practice. In doing so, they provide early career drama therapy professionals a reliable and effective tool for making clinical decisions and offer practitioners a point of reference in addressing the socio-emotional needs of their clients.

The authors explain the basic tools drama therapists use in therapy situations, identify the core healing concepts of the practice, discuss the basic treatment planning process, and explain how these components are used together to identify an  appropriate type of intervention for the client. They also offer examples of how this system can be applied to a variety of common diagnoses, and the appendices provide resources to connect drama therapy interventions to global treatment outcomes.

Rethinking the importance of Sigmund Freud’s landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams a century after its publication in 1900, this work brings together psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists, film and visual theorists, and literary critics from several continents in a compilation of the best clinical and theoretical work being done in psychoanalysis today. It is unique in convening both theory and practice in productive dialogue, reflecting on the encounter between psychoanalysis and the tradition of hermeneutics. Collectively the essays argue that Freud’s legacy has shaped the way we think about not only psychology and the nature of the self but also our understanding of politics, culture, and even thought itself.

Contributors: Willy Apollon, Gifric; Karyn Ball, U of Alberta, Edmonton; Raymond Bellour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Patricia Gherovici, Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar; Judith Feher-Gurewich, New York U; Jonathan Kahana, New York U; A. Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College; Pablo Kovalovsky, Clinica de Borde; Jean Laplanche, U of Lausanne; Laura Marcus, U of Sussex; Andrew McNamara, Queensland U of Technology; Claire Nahon; Yun Peng, U of Minnesota; Gerard Pommier, Nantes U; Jean-Michel Rabaté, Princeton U; Laurence A. Rickels, U of California, Santa Barbara; Avital Ronell, New York U; Elke Siegel, Yale U; Rei Terada, U of California, Irvine; Klaus Theweleit, U of Freiburg-im-Breisgau; Paul Verhaege, U of Ghent, Belgium; Silke-Maria Weineck, U of Michigan.

Catherine Liu is associate professor of comparative literature and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. John Mowitt is professor and chair of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Thomas Pepper is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Jakki Spicer received her Ph.D. in cultural studies and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota.

"The Emergence of Morality in Young Children is one of very few scholarly books concerning the development of moral tendencies in the early years. In its pages, a diverse group of eminent social and behavioral scientists address this fascinating topic and struggle with issues of inquiry that have persistently plagued this field."—Nancy Eisenberg, Harvard Educational Review

"This is a welcome and immensely provocative book. For those of us who favor ethical theorizing done in close proximity to psychology and anthropology, it provides new and illuminating theory and research relevant to perennial debates about the origins of moral sense, its psychological organization, and the objectivity and unity of the moral."—Owen Flanagan, Ethics

The contributors are Augusto Blasi, Lawrence Blum, Judy Dunn, M. Ann Easterbrooks, Carolyn Pope Edwards, Robert Emde, Carol Gilligan, Charles C. Helwig, William F. Johnson, Jerome Kagan, Melanie Killen, Sharon Lamb, Manamohan Mahapatra, Joan G. Miller, Edward Mueller, Richard A. Shweder, Catherine Snow, Elliot Turiel, and Grant Wiggins.

With increasing numbers of children suffering emotional, educational, and social failure on entering school, the years from five to seven have returned to prominence in developmental psychology. This volume collects state of the art research on child behavior in the school transition years.

Leading researchers in neurology, sociology, anthropology, education, and psychology assess what is now commonly known as the five to seven year shift. They consider how development is influenced by changes in neurobiological subsystems; cognition, emotion, and self-concept; concerns with peers and families; and school and cultural practices. They find that important transitions in behavior and environment do take place in this period, and are best described in terms of the qualitative increase in complexity due to interactions among ecological systems.

This volume increases our understanding of both child development and the study and treatment of children at home and at school. It will interest researchers, clinicians, and students of psychology and education.

The functional dialectic system approach to therapy has been widely embraced and is now used internationally, with individuals and couples as well as with families. It differs substantially from the common psychotherapeutic models that have prevailed in the West for more than a century. According to the system model, an individual who is in treatment is not considered to be the primary focus of interest but is seen instead as part of a social context, the network of relationships that play significant roles in his or her life.

In this book, Moshe Almagor offers a comprehensive view of the contemporary system approach—from theory to practice—and shows how it can be applied to a variety of psychological problems and in a variety of therapeutic modes. The system approach to therapy concentrates on the present situation of a client, aware that people are always in transition yet seeking order, safety, belonging, and identity. Their behavior is thus goal oriented and functional. The principles of dialectics assert that everything includes its opposite, that there is an ongoing conflict between the poles, and that this inevitable conflict creates pressure that leads to a continuous alteration.

These principles, thoroughly explained in the book and practically illustrated by case examples drawn from the author’s own practice, show how the system approach is optimistic in its orientation and is designed to help clients change their lives by broadening their understanding of themselves, their situations, and their options.

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan’s late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience. 

Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger’s own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other. 

Bracha Ettinger is a painter and a senior clinical psychologist. She is professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds, England, and Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. 

Judith Butler is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Griselda Pollock is professor of fine arts at the University of Leeds. Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal.

In this work, acclaimed Jungian James Hillman examines the concepts of myth, insights, eros, body, and the mytheme of female inferiority, as well as the need for the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality. By examining these ideas, and the role they have played both in and outside of the therapeutic setting, Hillman mounts a compelling argument that, rather than locking them away in some inner asylum or subjecting them to daily self-treatment, man's "peculiarities" can become an integral part of a rich and fulfilling daily life.

Originally published by Northwestern University Press in 1972, this work had a profound impact on a nation emerging self-aware from the 1960s, as well as on the era's burgeoning feminist movement. It remains a profound critique of therapy and the psychological viewpoint, and it is one of Hillman's most important and enduring works.

Shame is the ghost in the machine of the human mind.  It can implant itself in the psyche before the first word is spoken, even before the first thought has formed.  In his groundbreaking book, The Science of Shame and Its Treatment, psychotherapist and author Gerald Loren Fishkin, Ph.D., addresses the genesis of shame and self-talk from an empirical analysis of their core elements, its insidious ingress into conscious thought, and the havoc it inflicts on a person’s self-worth and behavior.

Through his empirical analysis and understanding of toxic shame, Dr. Fishkin has identified multiple effective clinical approaches for its treatment and addressing shame-based behaviors.  He clearly outlines why contemporary treatment approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapy, do not treat core shame wounds and most often cause individuals to terminate the therapeutic process prematurely.
This book is a must-read for clinicians, addiction specialists, teachers, students of human behavior, counselors, social workers, patients in treatment.

Twenty-four distinguished behavioral scientists present recent research on the self during the pivotal period of transition from infancy to childhood and place it in historical perspective, citing earlier work of such figures as William James, George Herbert Mead, Sigmund Freud, and Heinz Kohut.

Contributors are Elizabeth Bates, Marjorie Beeghly, Barbara Belmont, Leslie Bottomly, Helen K. Buchsbaum, George Butterworth, Vicki Carlson, Dante Cicchetti, James P. Connell, Robert N. Emde, Jerome Kagan, Robert A. LeVine, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Editha Nottelmann, Sandra Pipp, Marian Radke-Yarrow, Catherine E. Snow, L. Alan Sroufe, Gerald Stechler, Sheree L. Toth, Malcolm Watson, and Dennie Palmer Wolf.

This volume is a superb introduction to the richness and originality of Abraham and Torok's approach to psychoanalysis and their psychoanalytic approach to literature. Abraham and Torok advocate a form of psychoanalysis that insists on the particularity of any individual's life story, the specificity of texts, and the singularity of historical situations. In what is both a critique and an extension of Freud, they develop interpretive strategies with powerful implications for clinicians, literary theorists, feminists, philosophers, and all others interested in the uses and limits of psychoanalysis.

Central to their approach is a general theory of psychic concealment, a poetics of hiding. Whether in a clinical setting or a literary text, they search out the unspeakable secret as a symptom of devastating trauma revealed only in linguistic or behavioral encodings. Their view of trauma provides the linchpin for new psychic and linguistic structures such as the "transgenerational phantom," an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant, and the intra-psychic secret or "crypt," which entombs an unspeakable but consummated desire. Throughout, Abraham and Torok seek to restore communication with those intimate recesses of the mind which are, for one reason or another, denied expression.

Classics of French theory and practice, the essays in volume one include four previously uncollected works by Maria Torok. Nicholas Rand supplies a substantial introductory essay and commentary throughout. Abraham and Torok's theories of fractured meaning and their search for coherence in the face of discontinuity and disruption have the potential to reshape not only psychoanalysis but all disciplines concerned with issues of textual, oral, or visual interpretation.

"Philip Rieff has become out most learned and provocative critic of psychoanalytic thinking and of the compelling mind and character of its first proponent. Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist remains the sharpest exegesis yet to be done on the moral and intellectual implications of Freud's work. It was a critical masterpiece, worthy of the man who inspired it; and it is now followed by a work that suffers not at all in comparison. No review can do justice to the richness of The Triumph of the Therapeutic."—Robert Coles, New York Times Book Review

"A triumphantly successful exploration of certain key themes in cultural life. Rieff's incidental remarks are not only illuminating in themselves; they suggest whole new areas of inquiry."—Alasdair MacIntyre, Guardian

Elaborating the fundamental concept of Trieb, or drive, Freud outlines two basic types of conflict that at once disturb and organize mental life: the conflict between drives and reality; and the conflict between the drives themselves (as in amorous Eros against the aggressive death drive). In Time Driven, Adrian Johnston identifies a third distinct type of conflict overlooked by Freud: the conflict embedded within each and every drive. By bringing this critical type of conflict to light and explaining its sobering consequences for an understanding of the psyche, Johnston's book makes an essential theoretical contribution to Continental philosophy. His work offers a philosophical interpretation and reassessment of psychoanalysis that places it in relationship to the larger stream of ideas forming our world and, at the same time, clarifies its original contribution to our understanding of the human situation.

Johnston draws on Jacques Lacan's oeuvre in conjunction with certain philosophical resources-elements from transcendental philosophy, structuralism, and phenomenology-to rectify the inconsistencies within the Freudian metapsychological model of drive. In doing so, he helps to answer a question haunting Freud at the end of his career: Why is humanity plagued by a perpetual margin of discontent, despite technological and cultural progress?

In Time Driven, Johnston is able to make sense of Freud's metapsychology both as a whole and in its historical development of Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud, and of the place of both Freud and Lacan in modern philosophy.

Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation, Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that have dominated modern discussions.

From Aeschylus' classic drama The Persians to the hidden tragic themes in The Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. The study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.