Psychology All books
Robert Germinet
An Apprenticeship in the Uncertain
"When I got my degree from the Ecole des Mines, I didn't know how to do anything with my hands. But there was nothing surprising about that: I was an unalloyed product of French teaching methods. I realised that it would be useful to teach students not to be afraid to get their hands dirty: to educate future engineers by first of all inculcating in them an experimental approach to science. The idea was to send them out into the field, dressed in workers' overalls; to make them share in the concerns of the technicians, as well as in management's problems: in short, to make them ingenious engineers." Georges Charak Robert Germinet, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the director of the Ecoles des Mines, Nantes, and regional director for industry, research and the environment for the Pays de la Loire.
Libby Purves
How Not to be a Perfect Family
Perfect families, as we know, live in perfectly kept houses, have admirably well-organized vacations...
Darian Leader
What are you thinking about ? The incertitudes of love
What does it mean to be a woman ? What is the point of jealousy ? What is it that can lead a man to weakness ? And why do we so often end up asking one another : "What are you thinking about ?" Through little insights, both alert and educated, taking their sources from Freud and Lacan as well as from the cinema, literature and his own experience as a psychoanalyst, Darian Leader paints a subtle, enriching and dedramatized portrait of the sentimental motivations of the two sexes. Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst. He practices and teaches in London and in Leeds. He also regularly collaborates with the French Red Cross.
René Frydman, Muriel Flis-Trèves
Dying before living ?
Miscarriages, medical terminations of a pregnancy, embryonic destructions, perinatal mortalities these babies born prematurely dont even have the chance to be properly recognised as a part of this world, leaving their parents to solitude, grief and even a sense of guilt. Isnt it natural that the parents, even if it is painful for them, want to see their child, to name him, to register his existence ? That they need to follow the rituals of bereavement and record the child in the family history ? Doctors, midwives, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts ask themselves what their role is when faced with this kind of sudden death, which has the capacity to affect so intensely other lives : how, they ask, can we help these patients along the road of their bereavement ?
Colette Chiland
Changing Sex
Some human beings refuse to take the path that leads from being male to becoming a man or from being female and becoming a woman and want to belong to the sex for which their bodies were not designed -and this at any price. In our culture, these transsexuals want to both occupy the other place in the network of symbolic exchanges and have a mark of this change in their bodies. Their sadness is irremediable, for although they can change their social sex, they cannot change their bodily sex. "It's better " states one transsexual, "to change what's in the mind". Will we succeed in doing so ? A university professor, Colette Chiland taught psychology and psychopathology of children and adolescents, then clinical psychology at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
Patrice Huerre, Martine Pagan-Reymond, Jean-Michel Reymond
Adolescence doesn't exist
Adolescence is a recent conception in the history of man, a method of signifying, via puberty, the passage from childhood to adulthood which has always existed. In the past, this passage was celebrated and defined through the practice of rituals. Today the transition is no longer marked within such a strict timescale. Even more serious is the tendency for adults to refuse young people entry into their grown up world, either as a result of their own fear of aging, or of their desire to protect the young person from all possible risk. Patrice Huerre is a hospital psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and director of the Georges Heuyer University Medical Clinic in Paris. Martine Pagan-Reymond is a certified professor in Modern Literature. Jean-Michel Reymond, formerly Chief of Staff of Child and Adolescent Psycology is now Director of the Medical-Pedagogic Center of Saint-Lô.
André Green
The Chain of Eros
Sexuality is no longer what it was when Freud elaborated his theory of its psychic functioning. His successors have either given it less importance or a completely different status. André Green has undertaken in this book a real re-founding. Sexuality, seen from a psychoanalistic point of view, is what he calls "an erotic chain", organized according to different steps (impulse, desire, fantasies, erotic language, etc.). For him, the importance it is not so much to consider each of these steps separately but to specify at which link of the chain the analyst himself stands. André Green, is a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist.
