Imprint: Brainstorm Books
FORTHCOMING Fall 2025
Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast through such varied social and cultural artifacts as bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults, Marilyn Monroe, milk-carton images of missing children, orgies, Mickey Mouse, zombies, teenage slang, shock therapy, and surf music, The Case of California offers a dizzying psycho-history of the twentieth century as crystallized in[…]
FORTHCOMING Summer 2025
These writings spring from an observation: When migraine arises, the voice fails. It does so on many levels, ranging from a vocal-technical disintegration to migraine-specific symptoms like dysarthria and aphasia, up to the muteness forced upon the sufferer by stigmatization. As a migraine-suffering singer, Marsike Broeckmeyer witnesses and experiences these alterations. Frequently, routinely, and almost[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
FORTHCOMING Winter 2025
What should I do? What is the right thing to do? What do I do when I don’t know what to do? The difficulty in answering these questions does not come from a lack of knowledge but a deeper problem that requires us to look inward (and outward). Inner Conflicts is an antidote to the[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
Published: 06/27/2024
The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work—the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues—present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer,[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
FORTHCOMING Summer 2025
Have you ever wondered what makes you wake up in the morning? Why not just lay down, stay, and eventually disappear? What is the wanting, the energy, and the grace of liveliness? Desire is at the core of liveliness, and this book explains why it is so. Desire is much more than a mere appendix[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
Published: 04/20/2023
Chaucer’s Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann’s conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
FORTHCOMING Fall 2023
“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant in this volume. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
Published: 01/14/2021
In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked[…]