TY  - BOOK
AU  - Mukherjee Ankhi
TI  - Unseen city: the psychic lives of the urban poor
T2  -  / edited by Peter Boxall
SN  - 9781316517581
U1  - 809.933556 
PY  - 2022///
CY  - Cambridge
PB  - Cambridge University Press
KW  - Poverty in literature
KW  - Literature, Modern
KW  - Psychiatric clinics -- Sociological aspects
KW  - Psychoanalysis and literature
KW  - City and town life in literature
N2  - In Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, Ankhi Mukherjee offers a magisterial work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Spanning three continents, this hugely ambitious book reads fictional representations of poverty with each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, particularly as that culture is fostered by state policies toward the welfare needs of impoverished populations. It explores the causal relationship between precarity and mental health through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy. In Unseen City, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the unconscious is key to poverty alleviation.
Combines literary criticism with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the history of medicine, anthropology, and urban studies
Uses literature and case studies alike to capture not only the maladies but the psychic life of the urban poor, with its unrecorded acts of survivalism, resilience, and capability
This study is built on knowledge-sharing and collaborations across critical and clinical fields


ER  -