Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice

Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice is the second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and our character.

Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Demons in the Consulting Room reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture.

In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Demons in the Consulting Room will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.