“How successful Diamond is in “solving” the dilemmas she detects is an open question, but her questions and thinking are intelligent and searching, and this book will be good for teaching and dialogue in the field. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections.” (Choice, 1 November 2013)
Nicola Diamond is both an academic and a clinician. She has a multi-disciplinary background in psychoanalysis, attachment theory, developmental psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and sociology. She is known for her original thinking and the way she challenges Cartesian dualism in psychoanalysis. In this book Nicola Diamond provides us with a refreshing approach to the body-mind-society relationship and its clinical implications, particularly in relation to interpersonal trauma and its bodily manifestations.—Mario Marrone, British Psychoanalytical Society and International Attachment Network
This is a book that offers an innovative model of the body which establishes a relation between soma and culture. It is a fascinating read – not only helpful for a psychoanalytic context and the clinical field, but also for psychosocial studies scholars interested in body image and the processes of fantasy that shape our experience of the lived body in everyday life. The book raises important questions about how sensory lived body states and body image are profoundly influenced not only by relations with others, but also by the social field of visual imaging and popular culture.—Dr. Candida Yates, Reader in Psychosocial Studies, University of East London.
Nicola Diamond has always pioneered the integration of academic, clinical and theoretical issues and a book from her is long-awaited. “Between Skins” is an unusual and ambitious book linking the psychoanalytic, attachment theory, biological science and properly focusses on the multi-layered feelings of skin and body processes. Like Orbach and her concepts of the transitional body, Diamond’s psychoanalytic strength also comes through.—Dr.Valerie Sinason M.Inst Psychoanal, Director for The Clinic for Dissociative Studies.
From the Inside Flap
Between Skins presents a rigorous challenge to individualistic accounts of the body in psychoanalysis, and across related disciplines, in order to show how the body is social in nature. It forges interdisciplinary connections between psychoanalysis and the social sciences and demonstrates how somatic states and the social intersect in lived experience.
Drawing on philosophy, contemporary neurobiology, developmental research and a critical review of psychoanalytical literature, Nicola Diamond explores the ways in which bodily processes and skin experience are inseparable from the environmental context. She deals with the current impasses in the debates, the reduction to biological description in the neurosciences, the dualistic tendency to mentalist reductionism in psychoanalysis, and a need to account for the relation between biology and complex social processes. She opens up an understanding of language and the crucial role it plays in bodily development. Her response is to propose a rigorously re-worked ‘relational body’ as a way out of the impasses historically present in psychoanalysis.
In exploring the way the body has been viewed within psychoanalysis, Diamond makes reference to Freudian, Anglo-American and French thought. The book moves towards contemporary developments and makes explicit how recent research emerging out of developmental psychology and neuroscience challenges traditional psychoanalytical understandings of the body, with references throughout to clinical examples and everyday experiences.
From the Back Cover
Between Skins presents a rigorous challenge to individualistic accounts of the body in psychoanalysis, and across related disciplines, in order to show how the body is social in nature. It forges interdisciplinary connections between psychoanalysis and the social sciences and demonstrates how somatic states and the social intersect in lived experience.
Drawing on philosophy, contemporary neurobiology, developmental research and a critical review of psychoanalytical literature, Nicola Diamond explores the ways in which bodily processes and skin experience are inseparable from the environmental context. She deals with the current impasses in the debates, the reduction to biological description in the neurosciences, the dualistic tendency to mentalist reductionism in psychoanalysis, and a need to account for the relation between biology and complex social processes. She opens up an understanding of language and the crucial role it plays in bodily development. Her response is to propose a rigorously re-worked &;relational body’ as a way out of the impasses historically present in psychoanalysis.
In exploring the way the body has been viewed within psychoanalysis, Diamond makes reference to Freudian, Anglo-American and French thought. The book moves towards contemporary developments and makes explicit how recent research emerging out of developmental psychology and neuroscience challenges traditional psychoanalytical understandings of the body, with references throughout to clinical examples and everyday experiences.
About the Author
Dr Nicola Diamond is a Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies, University of East London, and teaches at the Tavistock Clinic. She is also a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with the British Association of Psychotherapists (British Psychoanalytic Council registered) in private practice, and runs a clinic at The Helen Bamber Foundation; before this she worked as a Psychotherapist at the Women’s Therapy Centre in London. She is the co-author of Attachment and Intersubjectivity (with Mario Marrone, 2003) and has published widely in the field.
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