From Powells.com
The sex act is, admittedly, a major preoccupation for most humans. But
consider the plight of the female stick insect whose mate has been copulating
with her for ten weeks straight while all she wants is a good night's
sleep, or the male praying mantis who risks his life every time he seeks
to mate with a female mantis whose penchant for decapitation is infamous.
Frankly, sex in the animal kingdom is as wild and diverse as the animals
themselves. So, when you are a lusty Californian mouse who cannot seduce
her neighbor mouse into cheating on his old, ugly wife, or a sagebrush
cricket who has discovered some alarming teeth on his back, or a green
spoon worm who has just inhaled her husband, who do you seek for answers
to some of your more embarrassing questions? Not Dr. Ruth, or even Dan
Savage. Evolutionary biologist and award-winning journalist Olivia Judson,
in the guise of Dr. Tatiana, is the woman for the job. Familiar with every
fickle commutation an insect or mammal can think up, Dr. Tatiana can answer
everything you ever wanted to know about sex in the animal world. Disguised
as a hilarious advice column, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
is in fact an engrossing and educational overview of evolutionary biology.
Be prepared to be quite astonished and very amused. Georgie, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The majority of psychoanalysts today agree that the analytic setting faces them daily with certain aspects of their work for which the answers provided by an analytic theory centred exclusively on the notion of representation prove insufficient.
On the basis of their experience of analytic practice and illustrated by fascinating clinical material, Cesar and Sara Botella set out to address what they call the work of figurability as a way of outlining the passage from the unrepresentable to the representational. They develop a conception of psychic functioning, which is essentially grounded in the inseparability of the negative, trauma, and the emergence of intelligibility, and describe the analyst's work of figurability arising from the formal regression of his thinking during the session, which proves to be the best and perhaps the only means of access to this state beyond the mnemic trace which is memory without recollection.
The Work of Psychic Figurability argues that taking this work into consideration at the heart of the theory of practice is indispensable. Without this, the analytic process is too often in danger of slipping into interminable analyses, into negative therapeutic reactions, or indeed, into disappointing successive analyses.