Short description:

In this fascinating book, Michel Thys explores the limitations of human imagination and symbolisation, showing the potentially destructive result of a mind that cannot confront reality. His wide-ranging research takes us into the domain of the unimaginable, unthinkable and unspeakable.

Long description:

In this fascinating book, Michel Thys explores the limitations of human imagination and symbolization, showing the potentially destructive result of a mind that cannot confront reality. His wide-ranging research takes us into the domain of the unimaginable, unthinkable and unspeakable.

Divided into four parts, On the Edge of Human Imagination sees Thys adopt a phenomenological perspective to move through experiences encountered in the analyst?s room, from depression and psychosis to PTSD. Through a dialogue with philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, Thys investigates the relationship between fascination, identification, socio-cultural phenomena and aesthetic pleasure. Throughout, he uses the paintings of Edward Hopper, Sophocles? Antigone, Mary Shelley?s Frankenstein, Franz Kafka?s Metamorphosis and Charlie Chaplin?s Modern Times to support his ideas. Integrating Freudian, Kleinian and Bionian theories, he shows the psychic impact of humanity?s attempt to balance fear and passion on the edge of the imaginable and the liminality of the search for meaning. The book brings together psychoanalytic theory and practice and philosophical anthropology, confronting, in the end, Freud?s ideas of the death drive with Sartre?s understanding of the desire for being as the main driving force in human existence.

This book offers an illuminating evaluation of what it means to be human, making it an important read for psychoanalysts, psychologists and psychotherapists, as well as philosophers interested in the intersection between psychoanalytic, philosophical and phenomenological thought.

"In On the Edge of Human Imagination, Thys unfolds the thesis that it is precisely in its limits that the essence of the human comes into its own par excellence. Using examples from psychoanalytic practice, art and literature, and linking these to ideas from philosophy, Thys gives language to situations in which the linguistic is under pressure. The flowery treatises exemplify the author's broad background. From ingredients of all his worlds, he makes new creations. Thys is a true word artist. The book is ?food for thought? and is very suitable for joint reading in, for instance, intervision groups; it provides new language for sharing experiences."

Esther Spuijbroek Tijdschrift voor Psychoanalyse en haar toepassingen [Journal of Psychonalysis and its applications]

"In On the Edge of Human lmagination, Thys arrives at a coherent theory of fascination and the ?inhuman?. His lucid exploration of the limits of the human is marked by a deep engagement with several thinkers and disciplines and provides a framework to better understand certain experiences, such as trauma. Thys' clear use of language also makes the book a good introduction to various currents within philosophy and psychoanalysis. He deftly manages to draw the reader into his reflections and thought processes. The diversity of vignettes makes the reading itself a fascinating experience."

Kasper Essers Filosofie en Psychiatrie [Philosophy and Psychiatry]

Table of Contents:

Part 1: From Fascination to Desire for Being  1. Phenomenology of fascination - A dialogue with Sartre  2. Fear of self-destruction - Fascinating metamorphoses and solidified truth  3. I is a thing- On trauma and desire for being  Part 2: From Body to Identity  4. Dysincarnation - The body on the edge of the symbolic  5. From discreet whispers to public shouts - Psychoanalysis and the culture of self-disclosure  6. Inevitable and elusive- Identity between melancholy and megalomania  Part 3: Narrative Challenges  7. Hopper, Levinas and the quasi-subject - The subject outside time  8. The corpse of Polynices - The obscene and tragedy as fascinum  9. Monstrous Frankenstein- The narrative at the last minute  Part 4: On the Edge of the Human  10. Disaster tourism and violent transformations - Cultural figures of the inhuman  11. From Charcot to Chaplin - On the infantile, the traumatic and the grotesque  12. The subject as ruin - Back to the desire for being  Bibliography