On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) is a recent book by a BPSI Affiliate Scholar Member, Diane O’Donoghue, PhD. In the final years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud began to construct evidence for the workings of an “unconscious.” On Dangerous Ground offers an innovative assessment of the complex role that his encounters with visual cultures-architecture, objects from earlier...

Therapeutic Communication in Mental Health Nursing: Aesthetic and Metaphoric Processes in the Engagement with Challenging Patients (Routledge, 2017) is a recent publication by a BPSI Fellowship student, Shira Birnbaum, PhD, who is a professor of Education and a psychiatric nurse. Drawing on current writing in cognitive linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, art, music, and child development, the book explores connections between nursing and...

by Daniel Jacobs, MD The Distance from Home (IPBooks, 2019) is a new book and the first work of fiction by Daniel Jacobs, BPSI’s Training and Supervising Analyst and Director of our Library. The novel tells a captivating story of seven friends on a life journey to Nepal. For Hannah Avery, unmarried and 37, the future looks dim. Left by her lover, disparaged by her boss, she wonders whether she can ever be at home in the world. When she...

While the use of the analyst’s own reveries in work with patients has increased in recent times, there has been little critical inquiry into its value, and the problems it may lead to. A new book by our member Fred Busch The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (Routledge, 2019) finds increasing veneration for the analyst’s use of their reveries, while revealing important differences amongst post-Bionians in...

Poems by Steven Luria Ablon, MD Dinner in the Garden, a new book of poetry by our member, Steven Luria Ablon, explores how families interact and evolve and brings to play the deepest feelings. Dr. Ablon is a Training and Supervising Adult and Child Analyst at BPSI and an Associate Clinical Professor of Harvard University Medical School at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Ablon’s earlier...

In his new book, Transformational Processes in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Dreaming, Emotions and the Present Moment (Routledge, 2018), Lawrence J. Brown offers a contemporary perspective on how the mind transforms, and gives meaning to, emotional experience that arises unconsciously in the here-and-now of the clinical hour. Brown surveys the developments in theory and practice that follow from Freud’s original observations and traces this...