Routledge Mental Health

About the Book

Recent socio-political conditions have moved psychoanalysis into an ongoing consideration of the nature of terror.  In her previous book, The Reproduction of Evil (Analytic Press, 2002), Sue Grand examined the perpetrator of 'evil': the way a history of trauma was transmuted into a repetition of trauma.  In this book, she will offer a phenomenology of terror - through a look at war, genocide, terrorism, torture, as well as familial abuse - and query the conditions through which an individual (or group) retains its humanity through acts of rescue, resistance and memorial activity.  This book asks questions about how/why some individuals (and communities) are immobilized by fear, while others can act without fear, or, in spite of it.  Why do some abandon the persecuted other, while others retain a vision of that other as human, deserving of shelter?  Why do some patients address dread in openness and concern, while others abandon the internal persecuted self, evacuating terror through schizoid compromise, manic defense, or narcissistic insularity?  How have the practitioners of the 'impossible profession' defined their own affective and moral 'courage' in the consulting room, and how does courage fail them in encounters with terror?  Should the patient's social concern and 'heroic motility' be considered an important component of the therapeutic agenda?  How does such motility develop, appear, and collapse within the analytic dyad?  In the tradition of applied psychoanalysis, Grand moves back and forth from the individual to the historico-sociocultural, from literary to clinical narratives, articulating intrapsychic and intersubjective dynamisms which elucidate these issues.