Psychoanalytic Geographies

Book excerpt: Psychoanalytic Geographies is a unique, path-breaking volume and a core text for anyone seeking to grasp how psychoanalysis helps us understand fundamental geographical questions, and how geographical understandings can offer new ways of thinking psychoanalytically. Elaborating on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches that embrace geographical imaginations and a commitment toward spatial thinking, this book demonstrates the breadth, depth, and vitality of cutting edge work in psychoanalytic geographies and presents readers with as wide a set of options as possible for taking psychoanalysis forward in their own work. It covers a wide range of themes and perspectives in terms of theoretical approaches such as Freudian, Lacanian, Kristevan, and Irigarayian; conceptual issues such as space, power, identity, culture, political economy, colonialism, ethics, and aesthetics; disciplinary insights including Geography, English, Sexuality Studies, and History of Science; as well as empirical contexts such as the reception of psychoanalysis in early twentieth century England, psychoanalytic geographies of violence and creativity in a small Mexican city, visual cultures of second-generation Iranian artists living in Los Angeles, and the hysterical underpinnings of climate change scepticism.