Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

In writing and lecturing over the past two decades on the relationship between psychoanalysis and art, Danielle Knafo has demonstrated the many ways in which these two disciplines inform and illuminate each other. This book continues that discussion, emphasizing how the creative process in psychoanalysis and art utilizes the unconscious in a quest for transformation and healing. Part one of the book presents case studies to show how free association, transference, dream work, regression, altered states of consciousness, trauma, and solitude function as creative tools for analyst, patient, and artist. Knafo uses the metaphor of dance to describe therapeutic action, the back-and-forth movement between therapist and patient, past and present, containment and release, and conscious and unconscious thought. The analytic couple is both artist and medium, and the dance they do together is a dynamic representation of the boundless creativity of the unconscious mind. Part two of the book offers in-depth studies of several artists to illustrate how they employ various media for self-expression and self-creation. Knafo shows how artists, though mostly creating in solitude, are frequently engaged in significant relational proceses that attempt rapprochement with internalized objects and repair of psychic injury. Dancing with the Unconscious expands the theoretical dimension of psychoanalysis while offering the clinician ways to realize greater creativity in work with patients.

Knafo, Danielle

Arts & Photography

Routledge

The haunting work of turn-of-the-century artist Egon Schiele continues to compel and shock viewers today. Living and painting in Austria during the decline of the Habsburg Empire and in the twilight of World War I, Schiele's image of man portrays the alienation and insecurity experienced at a time of decay and transition. Like his contemporary Sigmund Freud, Schiele probed the depths of human nature, and his graphic work is beginning to earn recognition as a major force in the evolution of modern art. As the first psychoanalytic book of Schiele's self-portraits, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation represents an important contribution to the available literature on this fascinating artist. Dr. Danielle Knafo provides valuable new insights into Schiele's countless anguished self-images, and convincingly demonstrates how childhood traumas were both exhibited and mastered in his art. She also helps us understand the aesthetic appeal the spectator experiences in viewing Schiele's personal struggle and emotional turmoil. Dr. Knafo reconstructs the formative events in Schiele's early life by carefully studying his art, diaries, and correspondence, illustrating those events that were to become the primary determinants of the content and form of his art. She explains how a failed mirroring experience with his mother and family deaths, including that of his father from syphilis, profoundly influenced Schiele's body image and subsequent self-representation. He depicted his relationships to both parents in his art: reviving his father from the dead, he simultaneously killed his mother. Schiele wrote in 1911, "I want to tear into myself, so that I may create again, a new thing which I, in spite of myself, have perceived," Repeatedly and compulsively creating his artistic double, Schiele not only developed an unusually personal - even autobiographical - art form, but he also transformed his canvas into a mirror where he worked at defining himself. He used his self-portraits not only to express himself but also to create a self. Despite the continuous nature of his self-obsession, Dr. Knafo demonstrates that Schiele's self-portraits changed over time, reflecting alterations that took place in his psychic organization, particularly regarding the development of his sense of self and his object relationships. His self-portraits, therefore, display the emergence of an evolving self. They reveal his transformation from a solitary adolescent tormented by his sexuality and morbid fears of body damage and psychic dissolution into a man with an integrated character structure. An unfolding of his personality as well as an increasing maturity in his work is evident over time. Although Schiele's career was brutally truncated by his premature death at the age of twenty-eight, his oeuvre retains a sense of completeness and resolution, for it demonstrates his triumphant use of art for mastery in the quest for identity.

Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation : A Psychoanalytic Study of the Artist's Self-Portraits

Individual Artists

UNKNO

This book examines the lives and works of ten pioneering female artists over the last century whose self-representational art challenged the cultural presuppositions and gender stereotypes of their time, while opening up a vista on the feminine experience. Each of the artists - Kathe Kollwitz, Claude Cahun, Charlotte Salomon, Frida Kahlo, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, and Orlan - used her art to overcome personal tragedy and trauma, so her work is in simultaneous and dramatic dialogue with both her social world and her personal history. "In Her Own Image" extends the dialogue between feminism and art history, while developing a psychoanalytic examination of women's self-representation. The author analyzes the work and life of each of these artists and shows how their art illuminates and advances the way women relate to their bodies - to beauty, sexuality, motherhood, relationships, race, aging, sickness, loss, and death. Their art reflects profound changes in woman's evolving self-awareness while it explores the transcendent possibilities of the female psyche and its creative potential for healing. Danielle Knafo is an Associate Professor in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at Long Island University's C. W. Post campus.

In Her Own Image: Women's Self-Representation in 20th Century Art

History & Criticism

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

What is the role of unconscious fantasies in psychological development, in psychopathology, and in the arts? In Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World, Danielle Knafo and Kenneth Feiner return to these interlinked questions with a specific goal in mind: a contemporary appreciation of fantasy in its multiform relational contexts. To this end, they provide detailed examinations of primal scene, family romance, and castration fantasies, respectively. Each category of fantasy is pushed beyond its "classical" psychoanalytic meaning by attending to the child's ubiquitous concerns about sexual difference and feelings of incompleteness; her perception of the parental relationship; and the multiple, shifting identifications that grow out of this relationship. Evocative clinical examples illuminate the manner in which patients and analysts play out these three core fantasies. They are balanced by chapters that explore the generative side of these same fantasies in the arts. David Lynch's film Blue Velvet provides an artistic rendering of the primal scene; Jerzy Kosinki's life and work illustrates the family romance; and French multimedia artist Orlan's "carnal art" recreates the trauma of castration. Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World is a tightly woven study of broad and basic questions. It is in equal measure a contemporary re-visioning of the grounds of fantasy formation, a relationally informed guide to clinical techniques for dealing with unconscious fantasy, and an examination of the generative potential of unconscious fantasy in the arts. Out of the authors’ broadening and broad-minded sensibility emerges an illuminating study of the manifold ways in which unconscious fantasies shape lives and enrich clinical work.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Feiner, Kenneth

Mental Health

From Breakdown to Breakthrough (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

As a clear and user-friendly guide for clinicians who work with patients affected by psychosis, this book challenges the false notion that psychosis is untreatable through talk therapy.

SELZER, Michael

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World

What is the role of unconscious fantasies in psychological development, in psychopathology, and in the arts?   In Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World, Danielle Knafo and Kenneth Feiner return to these interlinked questions with a specific goal in mind:  a contemporary appreciation of fantasy in its multiform relational contexts.  To this end, they provide detailed examinations of primal scene, family romance, and castration fantasies, respectively.  Each category of fantasy is pushed beyond its "classical" psychoanalytic meaning by attending to the child's ubiquitous concerns about sexual difference and feelings of incompleteness; her perception of the parental relationship; and the multiple, shifting identifications that grow out of this relationship. Evocative clinical examples illuminate the manner in which patients and analysts play out these three core fantasies.  They are balanced by chapters that explore the generative side of these same fantasies in the arts.   David Lynch's film Blue Velvet provides an artistic rendering of the primal scene; Jerzy Kosinki's life and work illustrates the family romance; and French multimedia artist Orlan's "carnal art" recreates the trauma of castration.  Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World is a tightly woven study of broad and basic questions.  It is in equal measure a contemporary re-visioning of the grounds of fantasy formation, a relationally informed guide to clinical techniques for dealing with unconscious fantasy, and an examination of the generative potential of unconscious fantasy in the arts.  Out of the authors’ broadening and broad-minded sensibility emerges an illuminating study of the manifold ways in which unconscious fantasies shape lives and enrich clinical work. 

The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history.  The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.

Lo Bosco, Rocco

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Knafo, Danielle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Knafo, Danielle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Knafo, Danielle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation : A Psychoanalytic Study of the Artist's Self-Portraits

In Her Own Image: Women's Self-Representation in 20th Century Art

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

From Breakdown to Breakthrough (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

From Breakdown to Breakthrough (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)