Overview

The Psychic Life of Fragments rethinks trauma and psychic fragmentation starting from the psychoanalytic clinic. What does it mean to work with fragments in psychoanalysis? What is the psychic life of fragments? And what can a fragment do? Raluca Soreanu writes about trauma, fragmentation and the radical plasticity of the psyche. Reconstructing Sándor Ferenczi’s trauma theory, she articulates an original vocabulary of fractures, splits, atomisations, pulverisations, leakages, detritus and psychic dematerialisation along with new formations, protective membranes, expansions, contagions and growths. She approaches the scene of trauma from new angles, paying attention to oblique lines and asymmetric encounters. Mobilizing clinical and literary vignettes, this book further argues for a minor psychoanalysis, one that emerges at the intersection of four types of theoretical-clinical experimentation: a psychoanalysis of scars, a psychoanalysis of organs, an eventful psychoanalysis and a blue psychoanalysis. This book is important for clinicians and trainees in psychoanalysis, for mental health practitioners working with trauma, and for psychosocial and psychoanalytic thinkers. It is written to be used, between the psychoanalytic chair and the couch, especially at challenging times, in the transference and in the world.

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9781032715896

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Reviews

'Raluca Soreanu has become an indispensable thinker in contemporary psychoanalysis. With dazzling precision, she shows that the psyche’s fragments are not detritus but lively actors in trauma, memory, and repair. This book outlines a 'minor psychoanalysis' of scars, organs, catastrophe—an audacious re-staging of Ferenczi that re-opens psychoanalysis to its most experimental, timely, and unruly possibilities.' Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis 'Soreanu’s return to Ferenczi, like Lacan’s return to Freud, levers us not into the past but a transformational future, a new psychoanalytic imaginary that is oblique, tentacular, visceral, surreal, decolonial. Here is a vocabulary of pliable elements, mimicry, asynchronous temporalities, fluid bodies, mosaics of dead and alive fragments – a psyche sensorially gripped and dismembered by the scars of time, but endowed with radically creative capacities and modes of registration and survival. Compelling, poetic, and precise, anchored throughout in luminous clinical narratives and a rigorous didactic concern with process, this is an epoch-making contribution to the emergent Ferenczian tradition: rerouting the mainstream into fascinating, life-preserving waters.' Matt Ffytche, Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex and Editor, Psychoanalysis and History 'In her strikingly lyrical text, Raluca Soreanu elucidates what ‘being in fragments’ might mean psychically. Drawing on the work of Sándor Ferenczi, Soreanu takes us beyond the static and repetitive temporalities of dissociation and splitting, and suggests that rather than the discarded elements of trauma, psychic fragments have a life of their own. Through clinical vignettes she shows us how patient and analyst can create a montage of such fragments, producing transformations in suffering through the co-creation of new and surprising forms of psychic life. Breathtakingly original, Soreanu offers us an entirely new thesis on trauma.' Lisa Baraitser, Psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Author Information

Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychoanalytic studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK. She is a member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, UK.

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