Psychopathologies of the Living: Selected Essays of Pierre Fédida

by Patrick ffrench (Editor), Nigel Saint (Editor)

Overview

Psychopathologies of the Living makes the work of the French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida (1934–2002) available in English for the first time.

Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint present key essays selected from Fédida’s extensive oeuvre. The book directs attention to two salient dimensions of Fédida’s writing: his attention to the pathologies of the body, considered as both a psychic and somatic entity, and his insistence on the relevance of psychoanalytic thought to the sciences of life. The chapters included in this collection detail Fédida’s creative use of aesthetic sources in his psychoanalytic work, his distinctive and creative manipulation and revision of central psychoanalytic concepts and his precise attention to the texts of Freud, Ferenczi and Winnicott, among others. This selection of Fédida’s essays also shows his avoidance of thematisation or explicit theorisation; for Fédida the theory of psychoanalysis must arise out of the specific interplay of language and the ‘space of the session’.

Psychopathologies of the Living will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training and to academics and scholars of philosophy, aesthetics and literary studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040411032
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/17/2025
Series:	The International Psychoanalytical Association Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	214
File size:	471 KB

About the Author

Editors and Translators:

Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King’s College London where he teaches 20th-century French literature, philosophy and cinema, critical theory and psychoanalysis.

Nigel Saint is Associate Professor of French at the University of Leeds where he teaches literature, culture and critical theory, and works on contemporary artists and art theory.

Translators:

Timothy Mathews is a critic and creative writer. His most recent translations are Guillaume Apollinaire, Seated Woman (2022), and selected pages from Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (2023). timothymathews.com.

Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio teaches Modernist Studies and Literary translation at the Catholic University of Paris and is Associate Professor in Liberal Arts at Paris College of Art. Her most recent monograph is Le Palimpseste mémoriel. Entendre la mémoire au fil des modernismes (SUP 2024).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Series Editor’s Foreword

Introduction

Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Chapter One: ‘The Site of the Stranger’

Translated by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Chapter Two: ‘The Interlocutor’

Translated by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Chapter Three: ‘Regression’

Translated by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Chapter Four: ‘Where Does the Human Body Begin?’

Translated by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Chapter Five: ‘On the Primitive’

Translated by Timothy Mathews

Chapter Six: ‘The Dream’s Hypochondria’

Translated by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Chapter Seven: ‘Day's Residues, Life's Residues’

Translated by Anne-Marie Smith-Di Basio

Chapter Eight: ‘The Indistinct Breath of the Image’

Translated by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Among French theorists of psychoanalysis Pierre Fédida (1934–2002) is less well-known to Anglophone readers than Lacan, Anzieu, Kristeva, Laplanche or Green, but this book aims to set that right. Eight new translations are presented, as is an extensive introduction to his work. He was a close and scrupulous reader of Freud’s work, relating it to the existential psychology of Binswanger.” - Naomi Segal, Professor Emerita, Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies, University of London

 

“I had the good fortune to know Pierre Fédida personally, and I know and admire his work. I warmly support Patrick Ffrench and Nigel Saint's publication of a selection of his work in translation. This will make an essential contribution to a better understanding of modern psychoanalysis in its capacity to renew, deepen and enrich Freudian thought.” -  Julia Kristeva, University of Paris

From the Publisher