Professor Ankhi Mukherjee, Oxford University, will be discussing some of the key themes of her book Unseen City.
The book examines the relevance of psychoanalysis at the intersection of race and class in global cities.
The talk will give a flavour of the way in which Ankhi Mukherjee has combined literature, history of medicine, and clinical case studies in this experimental work.’
The author's third book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis across three continents. It is also an experimental work of literary and cultural criticism, examining fictional representations of poverty in relation to each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture.
The causal relationship between precarity and mental illness is explored through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. Unseen City argues that a humanistic understanding of the living, suffering, and surviving lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the psychoanalytic unconscious is key to poverty alleviation. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.
