The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis

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.

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.