Timothy Mathews

    Biography
    Publications
->    Creative nonfiction, and writing 
       that’s hard to categorise
->    Translating and writing
->    Critical writing, writing the critical
->    Collaborations
->    Editing
    Upcoming
    Archive
    Email

Psychopathologies of the Living. Selected essays of Pierre Fédida, edited by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint
Routledge, 2025
https://www.routledge.com/Psychopathologies-of-the-Living-Selected-Essays-of-Pierre-Fedida/ffrench-Saint/p/book/9781032637587



It was thrilled to be invited by Patrick ffrench and Nigel Saint to translate one of the pieces in this book. Through translation, I was immersed in the agility of Pierre Fédida’s language, sliding between the theoretical, the colloquial, and the imaginative; and in the humanity of his approach to psychoanalysis.

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’.  

Prev    Next