Steven Groarke
Biographic Data
| ID | 364785 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven Groarke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | Groarke |
| SIGNATURE | GROARKE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Roehampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3203-3494 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Perverse sexual enactment
This paper is about sexual perversion and its enactment. It is divided into three parts, including, a consideration of William Gillespie's reading of Freud with Klein as the basis on which he formulated a general theory of perversion; a selective reading of more recent works on the psychoanalysis of perversion; and a clinical contribution to the analysis of a case of scopophilia
Blank pain and pathological mourning in the analytic situation
This paper presents an account of the psychoanalytic treatment of pathological mourning in the context of early psychic trauma. I introduce the concept of blank pain, understood as a negative of early trauma, to describe a distinct type of unthinkable anxiety. And I treat pathological mourning as a defence against the unbearable pain of the latter. Clinical observations reveal the extent to which, in a situation where the patient reacts to enviro…
Feeling Intellect: The Independent Tradition in English Psychoanalysis
The sense of the past: Theoretical and clinical aspects of deferred action
Psychoanalysis has made a singular contribution to our understanding of how we live with the past; most importantly, the concept of "deferred action" (it will become clear why I wish to retain the English translation) challenges the association of causality with a particular temporal direction, that is, the earlier-to-later direction of causal efficacy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of "backwards causation" (as it were)…
Freud and the Remembered Past
This paper addresses the problem of memory in psychoanalysis. To begin with, I identify two contrasting models of the remembered past in Freud, a type of recollective memory that consists of repressed but retrievable mnemic experience, and an active conception of memory, what I call re-descriptive memory, comprising an imaginative sense of the past. I develop the hypothesis of re-descriptive memory through a discussion of the scriptural analogy o…
Thinking in cases, by John Forrester
The Disgraced Life in J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands
Through a close reading of J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands , this paper explores the productive overlap between literature and psychoanalysis, without assimilating one to the other. The author argues that while Coetzee is not in any meaningful sense of the word a "psychological" novelist, nonetheless his work provides a rich source for our understanding of inner narratives. His novels thus overlap, broadly speaking, with the psychoanalytic thinking of …
Reflections on the psychoanalysis of hope
Though he slay me, yet will i trust in him’: A critical reconstruction of Winnicott's theory of value
This paper extrapolates an outline for a theory of value from Winnicott's reflections on war in 'Discussion of war aims' (1940). The author treats Winnicott's discussion as an occasion for a critical reconstruction of his theory of life-values. He discerns an implicit set of distinctions in Winnicott's reflections on war, including different orders of value (existential, ethical, and psychosocial); a distinction between maturity and necessity; an…
The good story: Exchanges on truth, fiction and psychotherapy
In their co‐authored book, The Good Story, (2015), the novelist, essayist and literary translator J. M. Coetzee and the clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz stage a dialogue of sorts, what they cal
The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature
What does it mean to read? The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye is a book that is probably best read backwards. Full versions or extended extracts of previously published essays on Kafka, Frost
The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays
As a result of a patient having initially plunged her analyst into a great silence, paradoxically, we have an account of the subsequent analytic treatment that has the makings of a 19th century nov
Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis
World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post‐Cartesian Psychoanalysis
Writing is invariably a game of fort‐da and, for the past 20 years since Contexts of Being, Robert Stolorow's innovative contribution to psychoanalysis may be seen in this way as a work of repetiti
Donald Winnicott Today
A quote from Winnicott's unpublished notes for the 27th IPA Congress in 1971 appears on the cover of Donald Winnicott Today, and is also used as an epigram by the editor, Jan Abram, for her Introdu
Managed Lives: Psychoanalysis, Inner Security and the Social Order
The christopher bollas reader introduction
The criterion of maturity
Reading Winnicott
Psychoanalysis in a New Light
Rycroft’s Idea of Language
Unthinkable Experience: Winnicott's Ontology of Disaster and Hope
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the question of being in Winnicott's clinical thinking. The argument that Winnicott provides an original theory of being is supported with reference to his interpretation of the "fear of breakdown" as a reaction to early trauma. The paper elaborates the ontological as well as the clinical implications of Winnicott's account of trauma and its aftermath. It discusses the temporal and spatial…
Intimacies
Rycroft and the Romantic Imagination
This paper addresses a gap in the critical literature regarding the psychoanalytic writings of Charles Rycroft. It argues that Rycroft's theoretical work is underpinned by Romantic ideas, most notably primal sympathy, the fusion of contraries, and creative agency. Based on an appraisal of key texts, the author reconstructs these ideas as principles of creativity, each of which is discussed in light of the object the infant needed to find. From th…
Going Sane
Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development: Mixed Methods in the Study of Childhood and Family Life
Psychoanalysis and Structuration Theory: The Social Logic of Identity
This article examines the sociological appropriation of psychoanalysis in the work of Anthony Giddens. It describes how Giddens uses psychoanalysis as a theoretical and strategic resource for the sociology of identity. The paper comprises an outline of the axes and problematizations of subjective identity in structuration theory. On the one hand, the three axes of cognition, competence and biography; on the other hand, the four problems of trust …
The good story: Exchanges on truth, fiction and psychotherapy
In their co‐authored book, The Good Story, (2015), the novelist, essayist and literary translator J. M. Coetzee and the clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz stage a dialogue of sorts, what they cal
Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis
Donald Winnicott Today
A quote from Winnicott's unpublished notes for the 27th IPA Congress in 1971 appears on the cover of Donald Winnicott Today, and is also used as an epigram by the editor, Jan Abram, for her Introdu
Blank pain and pathological mourning in the analytic situation
This paper presents an account of the psychoanalytic treatment of pathological mourning in the context of early psychic trauma. I introduce the concept of blank pain, understood as a negative of early trauma, to describe a distinct type of unthinkable anxiety. And I treat pathological mourning as a defence against the unbearable pain of the latter. Clinical observations reveal the extent to which, in a situation where the patient reacts to enviro…
The sense of the past: Theoretical and clinical aspects of deferred action
Psychoanalysis has made a singular contribution to our understanding of how we live with the past; most importantly, the concept of "deferred action" (it will become clear why I wish to retain the English translation) challenges the association of causality with a particular temporal direction, that is, the earlier-to-later direction of causal efficacy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of "backwards causation" (as it were)…
The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays
As a result of a patient having initially plunged her analyst into a great silence, paradoxically, we have an account of the subsequent analytic treatment that has the makings of a 19th century nov
Unthinkable Experience: Winnicott's Ontology of Disaster and Hope
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the question of being in Winnicott's clinical thinking. The argument that Winnicott provides an original theory of being is supported with reference to his interpretation of the "fear of breakdown" as a reaction to early trauma. The paper elaborates the ontological as well as the clinical implications of Winnicott's account of trauma and its aftermath. It discusses the temporal and spatial…
In defence of the claimant: A critique of the social-market strategy of justice
Psychoanalysis and Structuration Theory: The Social Logic of Identity
This article examines the sociological appropriation of psychoanalysis in the work of Anthony Giddens. It describes how Giddens uses psychoanalysis as a theoretical and strategic resource for the sociology of identity. The paper comprises an outline of the axes and problematizations of subjective identity in structuration theory. On the one hand, the three axes of cognition, competence and biography; on the other hand, the four problems of trust …
Autonomy and tradition: A critique of the sociological and philosophical foundations of giddens’s utopian realism
This article examines the theoretical background to Giddens’s programme of ‘utopian realism’. It begins by looking at the way in which Giddens defines this programme in the context of social welfare. We then turn to a more detailed discussion of the theoretical presuppositions of ‘utopian realism’, focusing first on Giddens’s reworking of Durkheimian autonomy, and second, on his reclamation of the conservative idea of tradition as propounded by M…
Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development: Mixed Methods in the Study of Childhood and Family Life
Going Sane
Rycroft and the Romantic Imagination
This paper addresses a gap in the critical literature regarding the psychoanalytic writings of Charles Rycroft. It argues that Rycroft's theoretical work is underpinned by Romantic ideas, most notably primal sympathy, the fusion of contraries, and creative agency. Based on an appraisal of key texts, the author reconstructs these ideas as principles of creativity, each of which is discussed in light of the object the infant needed to find. From th…
Intimacies
Rycroft’s Idea of Language
Unthinkable Experience: Winnicott's Ontology of Disaster and Hope
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the question of being in Winnicott's clinical thinking. The argument that Winnicott provides an original theory of being is supported with reference to his interpretation of the "fear of breakdown" as a reaction to early trauma. The paper elaborates the ontological as well as the clinical implications of Winnicott's account of trauma and its aftermath. It discusses the temporal and spatial…
Reading Winnicott
Psychoanalysis in a New Light
The christopher bollas reader introduction
The criterion of maturity
Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis
World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post‐Cartesian Psychoanalysis
Writing is invariably a game of fort‐da and, for the past 20 years since Contexts of Being, Robert Stolorow's innovative contribution to psychoanalysis may be seen in this way as a work of repetiti
Donald Winnicott Today
A quote from Winnicott's unpublished notes for the 27th IPA Congress in 1971 appears on the cover of Donald Winnicott Today, and is also used as an epigram by the editor, Jan Abram, for her Introdu
Managed Lives: Psychoanalysis, Inner Security and the Social Order
The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature
What does it mean to read? The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye is a book that is probably best read backwards. Full versions or extended extracts of previously published essays on Kafka, Frost
The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays
As a result of a patient having initially plunged her analyst into a great silence, paradoxically, we have an account of the subsequent analytic treatment that has the makings of a 19th century nov
Though he slay me, yet will i trust in him’: A critical reconstruction of Winnicott's theory of value
This paper extrapolates an outline for a theory of value from Winnicott's reflections on war in 'Discussion of war aims' (1940). The author treats Winnicott's discussion as an occasion for a critical reconstruction of his theory of life-values. He discerns an implicit set of distinctions in Winnicott's reflections on war, including different orders of value (existential, ethical, and psychosocial); a distinction between maturity and necessity; an…
The good story: Exchanges on truth, fiction and psychotherapy
In their co‐authored book, The Good Story, (2015), the novelist, essayist and literary translator J. M. Coetzee and the clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz stage a dialogue of sorts, what they cal
Thinking in cases, by John Forrester
The Disgraced Life in J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands
Through a close reading of J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands , this paper explores the productive overlap between literature and psychoanalysis, without assimilating one to the other. The author argues that while Coetzee is not in any meaningful sense of the word a "psychological" novelist, nonetheless his work provides a rich source for our understanding of inner narratives. His novels thus overlap, broadly speaking, with the psychoanalytic thinking of …
Reflections on the psychoanalysis of hope
Freud and the Remembered Past
This paper addresses the problem of memory in psychoanalysis. To begin with, I identify two contrasting models of the remembered past in Freud, a type of recollective memory that consists of repressed but retrievable mnemic experience, and an active conception of memory, what I call re-descriptive memory, comprising an imaginative sense of the past. I develop the hypothesis of re-descriptive memory through a discussion of the scriptural analogy o…
Psychology (24 works) · Psychoanalysis (21 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (8 works) · Art (6 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Psychotherapist (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)