Book Announcement by Alice Bar Nes (Israel)
This new Routledge title brings a fresh perspective to key psychoanalytic theories: the mystical element. Alice Bar Nes explores the depth structure of central assumptions in psychoanalytic theory to uncover the mystical core of conventional analytic thinking. Exploring authors from Freud and Ferenczi, through Bion and Winnicott, to contemporary voices such as Ogden, Bollas and Eigen, the book argues that psychoanalysis has always operated on the assumption of psychic overlap, a “soul-to-soul” contact, between patient and analyst.
Bar Nes demonstrates how this “magical” facet goes hand in hand with a pragmatic worldview that explores the epistemological complexities of psychoanalysis, in search of a way to join the subjective, even the mystical, with the practical aim of serving as a validated mental health discipline. This is accomplished through an interdisciplinary and intertextual encounter between psychoanalysis and the innovative pairing of William James’ pragmatic philosophy and Martin Buber’s dialogic thought. The author’s paradoxical stance surrounding the nature and role of psychoanalysis and its mystical facet resonates with the great challenge embedded in Winnicott’s insistence on tolerating paradox and Bion’s demand to respect all parts of the (psychoanalytic) truth – in this case, the practical and mundane alongside the mystical and magical.
The book’s broad, interdisciplinary outlook will interest psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists as well as scholars of philosophy.
Alice Bar Nes, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist with a private practice, faculty member and supervisor at the Temurot School of Psychotherapy, and group supervisor at the continuing medical education psychiatry program at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine.
Alice Bar Nes, Ph.D.
Ramat Gan, Israel
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