Vicissitudes

Book excerpt: Academics, analysts and artists are gathered together in this illustrated volume, which celebrates the culmination of a two-year project at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies to discover and debate current issues in psychoanalysis in the arts and humanities across five language-fields in Europe and beyond. The twenty-four essays include surveys of psychoanalytic thought in areas speaking French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish; the work of eight artists, ranging from found objects in Marseilles or the figure of Gradiva on a man-hole cover to the life of Le Corbusier, the lightest object in the world and words on a glass wall; and eight academic essays, including studies of humour in child therapy, Freud in Argentina, sibling trauma in the Schreber family and psychoanalysis in the university curriculum.