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Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture

Shame and Sexuality? Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture is a collection of new writings that examine the interface between emotion and culture, using psychoanalysis and visual culture. The book was co-edited by Pajaczkowska and included a chapter by her.

The book examines shame – understood by psychoanalysts as a structure relating intrapsychic and social relations – by exploring visual culture as one form of this interface. Pajaczkowska convened the seminars, discussions and conference that gave rise to this book, and co-wrote its introductory essay with Ivan Ward. Pajaczkowska’s chapter, 'The Garden of Eden: Sex, shame and knowledge’, claims that the innovation of post-Freudian psychoanalysis is the exploration of pre-Oedipal subjectivity. The originality of this book is that it takes a concept, currently overlooked in science and the arts, and brings to it the multi-disciplinary debates of both clinicians and cultural theorists.

The book was reviewed in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2009), the reviewer stating that it provided, ‘arrestingly vivid moments, fresh angles on old themes, and new lenses through which to see the hidden […] it will allow readers a deep and thorough grasp of the many dimensions of sexuality and the all-important affective phenomenon of shame.’ In January 2013, Pajaczkowska gave seminars based on the research for the book at the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna) and at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She also presented a related research paper on tacit knowledge at the international conference ‘Is Dialogue Possible’ in London (2013).