Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community

This book brings together the work of scholars and writer-practitioners of psychoanalysis to consider the legacy of two of Sigmund Freud's most important metapsychological papers: 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' (1914) and 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917 [1915]). These twin papers, conceived in the context of unprecedented social and political turmoil, mark a point in Freuds metapsychological project wherein the themes of loss and of psychic violence were becoming incontrovertible facts in the story of subject formation. Taking as their concern the difficulty of setting apart the inner and the outer worlds, as well as the difficulty of preserving an image of the coherently boundaried subject, the psychoanalytic frameworks of narcissism and melancholia provide the background coordinates for the volumes contributors to analyse contemporary subjectivities in new psychosocial contexts. This collection will be of great interest to all scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies, social and cultural theory, gender and sexuality studies, politics, and psychosocial studies.