Reading list

Psychoanalysis: Verso Student Reading

Our psychoanalysis reading for the year ahead.

Verso Books24 August 2022

Freud and Lacan are two of the towering figures of twentieth century thought. Get to grips with all aspects of their thought with this essential selection of books on psychoanalysis.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

The Politics of Immunity

by Mark Neocleous

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown...

Sexuality in the Field of Vision

by Jacqueline Rose

A pivotal work in the history of feminism and a groundbreaking intervention into film theory, Sexuality in the Field of Vision is a brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminis...

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

by Sigmund Freud

Introduction by Philippe Van Haute and Herman Westerink

Translated by Ulrike Kistner

Available for the first time in English, the 1905 edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality presents Sigmund Freud’s thought in a form new to all but a few ardent students of his work.This...

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

by Katherine Angel

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And m...

The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...

The Capitalist Unconscious

by Samo Tomšic

Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology—as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Žižek—there remain remarkably fe...

The Dialectics of Liberation

Contributions by Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael, John Gerassi, Lucien Goldmann, Paul Goodman, Jules Henry, R.D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Sweezy

Edited by David Cooper

The now legendary Dialectics of Liberation congress, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of dissent. Existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists, and ...

Freud

by Octave Mannoni

Translated by Renaud Bruce

Octave Mannoni worked in France, Madagascar and Africa throughout the twentieth century to extend Lacanian psychoanalytical methods into the field of ethnology. He is best known for his research in...

Read My Desire

by Joan Copjec

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines—psychoanalysis and histor...

Lacan

by Élisabeth Roudinesco

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan's career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is ove...

The Weary Sons of Freud

by Catherine Clément

Translated by Nicole Ball

The Weary Sons of Freud lambasts mainstream psychoanalysis for its failure to grapple with pressing political and social matters pertinent to its patients’ condition. Gifted with insight and comp...

Freud and the Non-European

by Edward W. Said

Introduction by Christopher Bollas

Contributions by Jacqueline Rose

Using an impressive array of material from literature, archaeology and social theory, Edward Said explores the profound implications of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for Middle-East politics today. ...

Freudianism

by Valentin Voloshinov

Introduction by Neal Bruss

Translated by I.R. Titunik

Freudianism is a major icon in the history of ideas, independently rich and suggestive today both for psychoanalysis and for theories of language. It offers critical insights whose recognition dema...

Marx and Freud in Latin America

by Bruno Bosteels

This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artist...

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)

Contributions by Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Božovic, Michel Chion, Mladen Dolar, Fredric Jameson, Stojan Pelko, Renata Salecl and Alenka Zupancic

Edited by Slavoj Žižek

The contributors bring to bear an unrivaled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, analyzing movies such as Rear Window and Psycho. Starting from the premise that ‘everyth...

Freudian Slip

by Sebastiano Timpanaro

Introduction by Perry Anderson

Philology cross-examines Freud in this sustained critique of psychoanalysis and its foundational notion of the slip.Challenging virtually every account of linguistic error in Freud’s work as arbitr...

The Freud Scenario

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Translated by Quintin Hoare

In 1958, the US director John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a scenario for a film about Sigmund Freud. Huston wanted Sartre to concentrate on the conflict-ridden period of Freud’s life whe...

The Man Who Closed the Asylums

by John Foot

In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, r...

My Teaching

by Jacques Lacan

Preface by Jacques-Alain Miller

Translated by David Macey

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, and prefaced by Jacques-Alain Miller, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduct...

Déjà Vu and the End of History

by Paolo Virno

Translated by David Broder

This book places two key notions up against each other to imagine a new way of conceptualizing historical time. How do the experience of déjà vu and the idea 'End of History' relate to one another?...

Heroes

by Franco Berardi

What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? Through an exhilarating mix of philosophical and psychoanalytical theory and reportage - from the suicide epidemic in Korea to the wav...

Psychopolitics

by Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Erik Butler

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower...

The Weary Sons of Freud

by Catherine Clément

Translated by Nicole Ball

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek

What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking proj...

Freud and the Non-European

by Edward W. Said

Introduction by Christopher Bollas

Contributions by Jacqueline Rose

Translated by David Macey

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