Search results for ""Author Lisa Appignanesi""

‘You will find all of life in this’ Deborah Levy After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry. In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Everyday Madness uses all Lisa Appignanesi’s evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society’s experience of grieving. With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the terrain of childhood, the way it forms our feelings of love and hate, and steers us towards a less tumultuous version of the everyday.

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Mad, bad and sad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood mental disorders and extreme states of mind in women over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.

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Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) always stood in the shadow of her lover and teacher, Jean-Paul Sartre, despite the fact that she was a brilliant writer and philosopher in her own right. Her monumental study "The Second Sex" made her a cult figure of the Feminist movement.

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This book journeys into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what sane, what mad or simply bad?Brighton, 1870: A well-respected spinster infuses chocolate creams with strychnine in order to murder her lover's wife.Paris, 1880: A popular performer stalks her betraying lover through the streets of the city for weeks and finally takes aim.New York, 1906: A millionaire shoots dead a prominent architect in full view of a theatre audience.Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts,this book brings to life a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. An increasingly popular press allowed the public unprecedented insight into accounts of transgressive sexuality,savage jealousy and forbidden desires. With great story-telling flair, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honour, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped - the theatre of the courtroom.

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As in her last thriller, Ms.Appignanesi has a way of torquing up the tension..Just like the proverbial shoe waiting to dropon whom and when is the question.The Ottawa Citizen

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Unruly, unpredictable, love is a maddening deity. In this insightful and eloquent meditation on that many-splendored thing, Lisa Appignanesi draws on history, philosophy, psychology, literature, popular culture, and her own experience in order to tangle with love's paradoxes through the span of our lives.Beginning with the rose-tinted raptures of first love, she proceeds to love in marriage, the passions of triangulated love, jealousy and adultery, love in the family, and friendship, illuminating the expectations, the joys and difficulties that accompany each stage.

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As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew.This is the moving story of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community

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FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA'What a magnificent thriller this is' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'She wrote exciting plots . . . a writer of fearless originality' GUARDIAN 'A good original novel, well tinged with nightmare' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'He turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realised, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well. I was looking at myself.'By chance, two men - one English, the other French - meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance is uncanny, and they spend the evening talking and drinking. It is not until John wakes the next morning that he realises his French companion has stolen his identity and disappeared. So John steps into the Frenchman's shoes, and faces a variety of perplexing roles - as owner of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a fractious family, and master of nothing.

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"I have read few autobiographies more extraordinary . . . Astonishing" OBSERVER"A classic. I preferred it to Primo Levi's If This is a Man" EDWARD WILSON"A child's clear-eyed journey to hell" ANNE SEBBAThis is a story of a young boy's journey from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary during the Second World War to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. After a winter in Bergen-Belsen where his father died, he and his mother were liberated by the Americans outside a small German village, and handed over to the Red Army. They escaped from the Russians, and travelled, hiding on a goods train, through Prague to Budapest. Unlike other books dealing with this period, this is not a Holocaust story, but a child's recollection of a journey full of surprise, excitement, bereavement and terror. Yet this remains a testimony of survival, overcoming obstacles which to adults may seem insurmountable but to a child were just part of an adventure and, ultimately, recovery. After having established a career in the West, the author decided to revisit the stages on his earlier journeys, reliving the past through the perspective of the present. Along the way, ghosts from the past are finally laid to rest by the kindness of new friends.With an introduction by Lisa Appignanesi

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A groundbreaking book which explores the impact of women on the development of Freud's ideas.No modern writer has affected our views on women as powerfully as Sigmund Freud. And none has been so virulently attacked for both his theories of femininity and for his alleged elevation of personal prejudice to universal pronouncement.FREUD'S WOMEN examines that bold collaboration with his female patients which made psychoanalysis as much their creation as the young Viennese doctor's. It explores Freud's family life, his relations with daughter Anna, his 'Antigone', and his friendships with his followers. From the writer and turn of the century 'femme fatale', Lou Andreas Salome, to the socialist feminist, Helene Deutsch, early theorist of femininity, to Princesse Marie Bonaparte, who moved from couch to royal court with amazing facility and became head of the French psychoanalytic movement, Freud's women friends and pupils were extraordinary.

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John Forrester’s passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud’s thinking and the nature of Freud’s discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian’s eye for context, Forrester explores Freud’s biography, the scientific moment, the radical subject matter of the field itself – sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language – as well as Freud’s development of a new clinical practice. Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking – not only Freud’s, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished. Freud and Psychoanalysis takes us from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch, to the campus, to film and to literature. This is a slim book that packs a big punch. It invites any curious reader into a field and a way of thinking that shaped the twentieth century.

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With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives.

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John Forrester’s passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud’s thinking and the nature of Freud’s discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian’s eye for context, Forrester explores Freud’s biography, the scientific moment, the radical subject matter of the field itself – sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language – as well as Freud’s development of a new clinical practice. Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking – not only Freud’s, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished. Freud and Psychoanalysis takes us from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch, to the campus, to film and to literature. This is a slim book that packs a big punch. It invites any curious reader into a field and a way of thinking that shaped the twentieth century.

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"A feminist classic."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review“A pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again.”—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book World A pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women writers, and why the book still feels fresh some four decades later.

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'Freud the writer is what Joan Riviere so elegantly presents to the English-Language reader'Lisa Appignanesi from her preface to Sigmund Freud: Essays and PapersThis collection focuses in on the set of Riviere's translations that made up the first library of Freud in English. Including his papers on metapsychology, applied psychoanalysis and technique, and within those broader categories are subjects as diverse as narcissism, love, paranoia and homosexuality. Riviere's great understanding of Freud's work is evident as we see his engrossingly direct arguments - the style that distinguished him from academics of his day - take shape in her talented translations. We are presented with Freud's various guises, both an essayist and master storyteller he brings to life the vagaries of his patients. Riviere was a major player in disseminating psychoanalysis into English, 'no less than the man she translated is she a figure to be hidden from history', in this collection the translator and the scientist come together in a rich, engrossing brew.

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Soleiman Adel Guemar was born and raised in Algiers where he worked as a journalist. He published numerous stories and won two national poetry prizes. In 2002 he left Algeria to seek safety for himself and his family in the UK. 'Sate of Emergency', a representative selection of Guemar's poetry,is rooted in Algerian experience, speaking of urgent concerns everywhere - oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams. His poetry sings of life's sensual pleasures in the face of the grotesque morbidity of violent political repression. In the excellent translation by Tom Cheesman and John Goodby, Guemar's poems carry all their native force and brusque wit. In her introduction, Lisa Appignanesi writes: "Soleiman Adel Guemar is almost exactly as old as the independent Republic of Algeria. He has witnessed its terrible history, the crimes against humanity which attended its birth and the enduring 'state of emergency' under which life has been blighted ever since. This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times...Where before we had only newspaper headlines, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical - an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history. "

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