Enigmatic If Not Ineffable

“Philosophy lends itself to thinking. Certainly, thought should pop into the philosopher’s mind frequently and precipitate a mystical investigation of possibilities, stimulating the imagination and provoking the cognitive machinery. Not only are there thoughts in this book, but they are somewhat scattered among several subjects (a tendency of philosophers).” With these words, Samuel Thorpe challenges every reader and prospective scholar to exercise the mind and wonder about reality, knowledge, and values. Learn from the masters and engage their ideas with fresh creative arguments. Readers will be pleasantly surprised how quickly they will be addicted to the study of wisdom. This book is ideal for students of all ages and people who wish to engage their thinking in new ways. Each selection will hopefully provoke readers to consider some other ways to contemplate timeless issues of life that will be conducive to discussion and further reading of classical pieces of philosophy.

Christianity and Gestalt Therapy is a unique integration written for psychotherapists who want to better understand their Christian clients and Christian counselors who want a clinically sound approach that embraces Christian spirituality. This book explores critical concepts in phenomenology and how they relate to both gestalt therapy and Christianity. Using mixed literary forms that include poetry and story, this book provides a window into gestalt therapy for Christian counselors interested in learning how the gestalt therapeutic model can be incorporated into their beliefs and practices. It explores the tension in psychology and psychotherapy between a rigid naturalism and an enchanted take on life. A rich mix of theory, philosophy, theology, and practice, Christianity and Gestalt Therapy is an important resource for therapists working with Christian patients.

The Dark Bible explores early modern England's interactions with difficult aspects of the Bible. For the early modern reader, although the Bible was understood to be perfect, sufficient, and transcendent (indeed, the Protestant Reformation required it), it was not always experienced as such. While traditional interpretive precepts, such as the claim that all dark passages could be read in the light of clear ones, were frequently recited by early modern commentators, their actual encounters with the darkness of the Bible suggest that writers, commentators, and translators were often deeply uncomfortable with the disjunction between what the Bible should be, and what it actually was. The Dark Bible investigates writers' and translators' attempts to explain, accommodate, circumvent, and repair problematic texts across a range of genres and contexts. It charts early modern English use of biblical scholarship in vernacular culture and investigates how vernacular writing in various genres could give voice to questioning and confused biblical interactions. The Dark Bible demonstrates that early modern writers and critics engaged extensively with the Bible's difficulties, attempting to circumvent and repair problematic texts, and otherwise reconcile the darkness of the Bible with theories of the Bible's perfection and clarity.

In Discourses of Desire, Linda S. Kauffman looks at a neglected genre—the love letters written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, Kauffman explores through provocative and incisive readings the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general. Among the texts Kauffman treats are Ovid's Heroides, Heloise's letters to Abelard, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Todorov, Genette, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Derrida, Kauffman demonstrates how the codes of love shape intertextual dialogues among these works, in which each innovation in the genre is simultaneously a response to and a departure from the one preceding it. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the unsettling questions that the genre's shared thematic preoccupations and formal characteristics pose for concepts of gender, authorship, genre, and mimesis. Drawing on poststructuralism and psychoanalytic criticism to extend the boundaries of feminist theory, Kauffman makes a significant contribution to contemporary critical discussions of writing and gender, mimesis and narrative discourse, and poetics and politics. Her book, broad in its scope and far-reaching in its implications, will be valuable reading for anyone interested in feminist criticism, literary theory, and literary history.

Affect is a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis, but there has long been a misperception that Lacan neglected affect in his writings. We encounter affect at the beginning of any analysis in the form of subjective suffering that the patient hopes to alleviate. How can psychoanalysis alleviate such suffering when analytic practice itself gives rise to a wide range of affects in the patient’s relationship to the analyst? Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, is the first book to explore Lacan’s theory of affect and its implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In it, Colette Soler discusses affects as diverse as the pain of existence, hatred, ignorance, mourning, sadness, "joyful knowledge," boredom, moroseness, anger, shame, and enthusiasm. Soler’s discussion culminates in a highlighting of so-called enigmatic affects: anguish, love, and the satisfaction related to the end of an analysis. Lacanian Affects provides a unique and compelling account of affect that will prove to be an essential text for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers.

Visually appealing, conceptually startling, and intellectually engaging-these phrases aptly describe the art of Liliana Porter. Florencia Bazzano-Nelson's study focuses on the principal theme in the Argentine-born artist's work since the 1970s: her playful but subversive dismantling of the limits that separate everyday reality from the world of illusion and simulacra. Over the years, Porter's own evolving interest in perception lead the author to explore a series of interconnected and timely issues in her artistic production, such as the representative function of art, the structural links between art and language, and the witty re-signification of the art-historical images and mass-produced kitsch figurines she has so often featured in her art. Strongly founded in critical theory, Bazzano-Nelson's approach considers Porter's art as the site of conceptually exciting dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges, Ren?agritte, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. Her carefully crafted interdisciplinary analysis not only combines art-historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives but also addresses the artist's work in different media, such as printmaking, conceptual art, photography, and film.

Relational psychoanalysis has revivified psychoanalytic discourse by attesting to the analyst's multidimensional subjectivity and then showing how this subjectivity opens to deeper insights about the experience of analysis. Volume 3 of the Relational Psychoanalysis Book Series enlarges this ongoing project in significant ways. Here, leading relational theorists explore the cultural, racial, class-conscious, gendered, and even traumatized anlagen of the self as pathways to clinical understanding. Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices is especially a forum for new relational voices and new idioms of relational discourse. Established writers, Muriel Dimen, Sue Grand, and Ruth Stein among them, utilize aspects of their own subjectivity to illuminate heretofore neglected dimensions of cultural experience, of trauma, and of clinical stalemate. A host of new voices applies relational thinking to aspects of race, class, and politics as they emerge in the clinical situation. The contributors to Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices are boldly unconventional – in their topics, in their modes of discourse, and in their innovative and often courageous uses of self. Collectively, they convey the ever widening scope of the relational sensibility. The "relational turn" keeps turning.

Benjamin Blech is a tenth-generation rabbi. He has been a Professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University since 1966, and was the Rabbi of Young Israel of Oceanside for 37 years. Rabbi Blech received a B.A. from Yeshiva University, an M.A. in psychology from Columbia University, and rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He is the author of 15 highly acclaimed books, the last one of which – The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican – has now been translated into sixteen languages.

How did the Bible's sixty-six books become sacred Scripture? How have they been understood and interpreted over the last two thousand years? What was it that led to our acceptance of the Bible as the true word of God? For two millennia, Christians have accepted the importance of the Bible as sacred Scripture, and for as many years they have struggled to comprehend its meaning. Over the centuries the church has expressed the centrality of Scripture in numerous ways, and Christians have studied and interpreted the Bible in a wide variety of faithful approaches. Understanding that process is critical to our ability--and our willingness--to accept the Bible as sacred and true. To that end, Richard Soulen leads us through the history of how Christian understandings of the Bible have changed and developed throughout history.