Longing

<p><em>Longing: Psychoanalytic Musings on Desire</em> is a contemporary interdisciplinary exploration of one of psychoanalysis's most foundational and fascinating areas of investigation. This anthology explores the vicissitudes and varieties of desire its public and private normative and transgressive its light and dark expressions. It examines desire in its relational cultural clinical physical sexual and aesthetic forms. Collectively these essays demonstrate an understanding of the difficulties of identifying and realizing desire precisely because it is multiple omnipresent shape-shifting ongoing and perhaps always ultimately unfulfillable. They question whether desire is by definition something that cannot be satisfied and contemplate how we relate to our desires? Interpersonal psychoanalytic practice and theory understands desire not merely as an intrapsychic drive but also as a force shaped by and shaping interpersonal relationships. From within this perspective a number of the contributors examine a broad variety of clinical manifestations of desire as it struggles for expression or suppression. </p>