Psychoanalysis as Radical Hospitality: Six Perspectives on Turning-To Versus Turning-Away

This book focuses on different forms of turning-to versus turning-away from speech across a range of experiences in clinical treatment and general life.

The chapters of this volume deal with the entrapment involved in exile from mother tongue, the parasitic language that uses the other’s language as a linguistic prosthesis, the language of blank mourning which separates the mourner from their mourning, the adhesive identification of the voice and the psychotic split between voice and meaning, the mental hypotonia associated with an internalized object that turns away, and the spectrum between revenge and forgiveness. Each chapter sheds light on a different angle of the psyche’s ability to spot its own leverage point and use it to transcend the infinite varieties of helpless victimhood: from the position of the victim to the position of the witness, from being the object of the narrative to being its subject, and from the position of righteousness to the willingness to forgive and be forgiven.

This book is a must read for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and literary scholars, as well as philosophers of language and of the mind.

Dana Amir is a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst at the Israel psychoanalytic society, professor, vice dean for research and head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in psychoanalysis at Haifa University, editor in chief of Maarag - the Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis, poetess and literature researcher. She is the author of six poetry books, three memoirs in prose and four psychoanalytic non-fiction books. She is the winner of many literary as well as academic prizes, including five international psychoanalytic awards.