Inquiries in Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers of Edna O'Shaughnessy

The papers of Edna O'Shaughnessy are among the finest to be found in psychoanalytic writing. Her work is unified not so much by its subject matter, which is diverse, but by her underlying preoccupations, including the nature of psychic reality and subjectivity, and the psychic limits of endurance and reparation.

Here a selection of her work, edited and with an introduction by Richard Rusbridger, is brought together in a collection which demonstrates the contribution that O'Shaughnessy has made to many areas of psychoanalysis, from personality organisations, the superego, psychic refuges and the Oedipus complex to the subject of whether a liar can be psychoanalysed. Inquiries in Psychoanalysis is a record of clinical work and thinking over sixty years of psychoanalytic practice with children and adults. This wide-ranging selection of work will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students.

Contents: Foreword. Introduction. Papers: The Absent Object. Interminably a Patient. A Clinical Study of a Defensive Organisation. A Commemorative Essay on W.R. Bion’s Theory of Thinking. Words and Working Through. A 3 ½ Year Old Boy’s Melancholic Identification With an Original Object. The Invisible Oedipus Complex. Seeing With Meaning and Emotion. Can a Liar be Psychoanalysed? Enclaves and Excursions. Psychosis: Not Thinking in a Bizarre World. What is a Clinical Fact? Relating to the Superego. Dreaming and Not Dreaming. A Projective Identification With Frankenstein: Some Questions About Psychic Limits. Whose Bion? Mental Connectedness. Intrusions. Gratitude. Where is Here? When is Now? Reviews. Review of Phyliss Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work. Review of Herbert Rosenfeld, Impasse and Interpretation. Review of Gérard Bléandonou, Wilfred Bion: his Life and Work 1979-1979. Review of The Dead Mother: the Work of André Green, Edited by Gregorio Kohon. References