Mental Zoo: Animals in the Human Mind and its Pathology
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : February 2014
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 336
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Category 2 :
Bargain and Discounted Titles - Catalogue No : 35543
- ISBN 13 : 9781782201670
- ISBN 10 : 178220167X
Also by Salman Akhtar
Also by Vamik D. Volkan
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‘Salman Akhtar and Vamik Volkan’s dynamic book, Mental Zoo, takes the reader on a panoramic tour illuminating the rich world of animals in human experience. Here Freud’s rats, wolves, and horses join our own cats and dogs to meet snakes, spiders, birds, and cockroaches. With an engaging blend of whimsy and erudition, the contributors describe the feelings, fantasies, dreams, nightmares, and delusions that animals evoke in us all. Detailed clinical examples capture the richness of the intrapsychic and interpersonal places that animals inhabit in our psyches. The book encompasses the role of animals not only in normal development and psychopathology, but also in history and mythology. Mental health professionals will listen to their patients with new sensitivities after Mental Zoo introduces them to this fascinating menagerie.’
— Alex Hoffer, MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of New England
‘This book, a psychoanalytic study of the role played by animals in the human mind, is a huge contribution to the understanding of a segment of mental life never before studied in such depth and focus. The results are spectacular. The subject matter, besides being immensely informative, is riveting. From the very dedication, in which the two editors remember their respective family’s menagerie, including, a cat, dog, horse, cow, donkey, python, and pet tiger, it is apparent how much each author approaches his subject with reverence, awe, and love. This book, besides deepening the psychoanalytic situation, extends applied analysis to another level, from the inanimate to man’s next of kin.
The spectrum of animals studied, from rats to horses, dogs, cats and wolves, to birds, snakes, spiders and insects, is dazzling, provocative, and always thought-provoking. It is psychoanalytic, with each animal viewed from philia to phobia, from unconscious to conscious effects, thorough at every level. Each contribution resounds with its relevance to clinical work and to everyday observations. The scholarship is historical, prehistorical, even paleontological, and ranges over myths, religious worship, rituals, language, folklore, symbols, art, and always clinical data, from Freud’s to our own with a special bounty to dreams and nightmares. Several of the chapters will be classics. The book as a whole is more than a compendium; it is an encyclopedia.’
— Leo Rangell, MD, (1913–2011) psychoanalyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California
About the Editor(s)
Salman Akhtar, MD, is professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. His more than 450 publications include twenty-three solo authored books – Broken Structures (1992), Quest for Answers (1995), Inner Torment (1999), Immigration and Identity (1999), New Clinical Realms (2003), Objects of Our Desire (2005), Regarding Others (2007), Turning Points in Dynamic Psychotherapy (2009), The Damaged Core (2009), Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2009), Immigration and Acculturation (2011), Matters of Life and Death (2011), Psychoanalytic Listening (2013), Good Stuff (2013), Sources of Suffering (2014), No Holds Barred (2016), A Web of Sorrow (2017), Mind, Culture, and Global Unrest (2018), Silent Virtues (2019), Tales of Transformation (2022), In Leaps and Bounds (2022), and In Short (2024) – as well as sixty-nine edited or coedited volumes in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Dr. Akhtar has delivered many prestigious addresses and lectures including, most significantly, the inaugural address at the first IPA-Asia Congress in Beijing, China (2010). Dr. Akhtar is the recipient of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Best Paper of the Year Award (1995), the Margaret Mahler Literature Prize (1996), the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians’ Sigmund Freud Award (2000), the American College of Psychoanalysts’ Laughlin Award (2003), the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Edith Sabshin Award (2000), Columbia University’s Robert Liebert Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychoanalysis (2004), the American Psychiatric Association’s Kun Po Soo Award (2004), the Irma Bland Award for being the Outstanding Teacher of Psychiatric Residents in the country (2005), and the Nancy Roeske Award (2012). He received the Sigourney Award (2013), which is the most prestigious honor in the field of psychoanalysis. Dr. Akhtar is an internationally sought speaker and teacher, and his books have been translated in many languages, including German, Turkish, and Romanian. His interests are wide and he has served as the film review editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and is currently serving as the book review editor for the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. He has published eighteen collections of poetry and serves as a scholar-in-residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia. His Selected Papers (Vols I–X) were recently published and released at a festive event held at the Freud House & Museum in London.
Vamik D. Volkan is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He is the president of the International Dialogue Initiative and a former president of the International Society of Political Psychology, the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society, and the American College of Psychoanalysts. He received the Sigmund Freud Award given by the city of Vienna in collaboration with the World Council of Psychotherapy, and in 2015 received the Sigourney Award, honouring achievements for the advancement of psychoanalysis.
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