Cartographies of the reverse

Psychoanalysis as an artistic language and the understanding of the symbolic. Birman launches his new book as a commitment to understanding the human being beyond the objective realm.

The book brings together 22 essays, highlighting the problematics of writing in psychoanalysis (a therapeutic method that interprets unconscious content) and its relationship to the aesthetics of subjectivation. The essays are organized into eight sections: Language and Discourse, Writing, Fiction, Sublimation, Humor, Literature, Visual Arts, and Cinema. The book addresses Freud's conception of psychoanalysis and the different interpretations of Freudian discourse, primarily by philosophers such as Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. The guiding thread of this interpretation is language and artistic discourse and their relationship to the subject in psychoanalysis. Therefore, the discussion of themes from the fields of humor, literature, painting, and cinema is constantly explored. According to Professor Paulo Vaz, who wrote the blurb for Cartographies of the Inside Out, "The book's axis is the conceptualization of how psychoanalysis understands human beings in their processes of symbolization. Joel Birman proposes that there are three forms of decentering of consciousness, conceptualized by psychoanalysis: unconscious desire, helplessness, and the anguish of the real disseminated by trauma. Corresponding to these decenterings, there are three efforts at symbolization, three scenes of self-writing: writing provoked by unconscious desire, writing provoked by the force of the drive, and writing of trauma. Through this axis, therefore, the book addresses the question of meaning in our current times and, thus, considers the proliferation of autobiographical narratives, especially those that focus on the violence suffered."