This book looks beyond both theory and practice to the politics and cultural resonances of psychoanalysis-in the torments and anxiety of artistic endeavour, and in the urgent and wearying sense of the blindness of our troubled history and politics, in Israel and in South America.

Foreword -- Sexuality -- Hysteria -- Fetishism -- Obscure objects of desire -- Creativity -- Dreams, acting out, and symbolic impoverishment -- From the analysis of an artist -- Stephen King's Misery-the horrors of writing -- History -- The Aztecs, Masada, and the compulsion to repeat -- Knowledge -- Knowledge and its vicissitudes