Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery (Psychoanalytic Horizons) - Hardcover

Osserman, Jordan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501368168 ISBN 13: 9781501368165

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Synopsis

An Independent Book of the Month

Penises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. This book examines how one thing that some people do to penises-remove the foreskin-has become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. While most contemporary work on the subject is concerned with whether circumcision is right or wrong, safe or harmful, Circumcision on the Couch takes as its starting point that the significance of male circumcision exceeds anatomical and juridical considerations.

Deploying a feminist Lacanian framework, while drawing from a wide range of archival sources and critical thought, Jordan Osserman asks: How can psychoanalysis help us shed light on the ideologies, discourses, and fantasies surrounding circumcision and the impassioned stances for and against it? And how might the history of circumcision, in turn, allow us to re-assess and clarify how we understand the split (or “snipped”) subject of psychoanalysis?

About this title

About the Authors

Jordan Osserman is a Lecturer and Program Director in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, UK, and practices psychoanalytic therapy in London.

Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida as well as Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs and Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the editor of American Imago. A coeditor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series and editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge, Rudnytsky is the author of books from Freud and Oedipus (1987) to Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002), for which he received the Gradiva Award, and Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (2022). He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Gainesville.

Hilary Neroni is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, USA. She is the author of Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Bloomsbury, 2016), The Subject of Torture (2015), and The Violent Woman (2005) and has also published numerous essays on film and theory.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501368168
• ISBN 13: 9781501368165
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264