Reading list

Psychoanalysis: Verso Student Reading

Our psychoanalysis reading for the year ahead.

Verso Books24 August 2022

Psychoanalysis: Verso Student Reading

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.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

See all our recommended Student Reading here.

The Politics of Immunity
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
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

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

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
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
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
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

The Dialectics of Liberation

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

Freud

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
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
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

The Weary Sons of Freud

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

Freud and the Non-European

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

Freudianism

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
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)
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
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...
Paperback
The Freud Scenario

The Freud Scenario

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...
Paperback
The Man Who Closed the Asylums
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

My Teaching

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
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
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

Psychopolitics

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

The Weary Sons of Freud

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...
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
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

Freud and the Non-European

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. ...
Woman's Estate
Combining the energy of the early seventies feminist liberation movement, with the perceptive analyses of the trained theorist, Women's Estate is one of the most influential socialist feminist stat...
Marx and Freud in Latin America
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)
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...
The Man Who Closed the Asylums
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...
Hardback
My Teaching

My Teaching

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...

Filed under: student-reading, versoreadinglists