The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking psychoanalysis and literature (Co-author Thomas H. Ogden)
New York and London: Routledge Press, April 2013. Translations: Italian (CIS Editore, Milan) and Portuguese (Escuta Publishers, Sao Paulo).
The Analyst’s Ear and the Critic’s Eye is the first volume of literary criticism to be co-authored by a practicing psychoanalyst (Thomas Ogden) and a literary critic (Benjamin Ogden). The result of this unique collaboration is a lively conversation that not only demonstrates what is most fundamental to each discipline, but creates a joint perspective on reading literature that neither discipline alone can achieve.
BEYOND PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERARY CRITICISM: BETWEEN LITERATURE AND MIND
New York and London: Routledge Press, April 2018. Translations: Italian (Catelvecchi, Rome).
Through a series of radical and innovative chapters, this book challenges the tradition of applied psychoanalysis that has long dominated psychoanalytic literary criticism. I propose that a new form of analytic literary criticism take its place, one that begins from a place of respect for the mystery of literature and the complexity of is inner workings. In this book, through readings of such authors as J.M. Coetzee, Flannery O'Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov, the mysteries upon which literature relies for its enduring power are enumerated and studied. Such mysteries are thereafter interwoven into a series of pioneering studies of how the conceptions of thinking, dreaming, and losing becoming meaningful within the unique aesthetic conditions of individual poems and novels. Each chapter is a provisional solution to the difficult "bridging problems" that arise when literary figures work in the psychoanalytic space, and when psychoanalysts attempt to make use of literature for analytic purposes.