Mikita Brottman is a psychoanalyst, author, and cultural critic known for her work on the pathological elements of contemporary culture. She received a DPhil in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. Formerly Chair of the program in Humanities and Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, she is currently a professor of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, and American Imago. She has written influentially on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman.
Why are jokes funny? Why do we laugh? In Funny Peculiar, Mikita Brottman demurs from recent scholarship that takes laughter - and the broader domain of humor and the comical - as a liberating social... (more)
As Freud predicted, there has always been great anxiety about the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary life, particularly in relation to its ambiguous and complicated relationship to the realm of... (more)