Archive Fevers Av Tara Blake

<p><i>Archive Fevers</i> offers a new generation of psychologically-engaged readers a playful queer/feminist interpretation of Jaques Derrida’s <i>Archive Fever</i> (1995). Through its creative critical form, the book demonstrates the unconscious life of research while interrogating the often misunderstood, overlooked or misrepresented landscape of individual gender-queer experiences of therapy. <br><br>Utilising the framework of experimental narrative fiction, Blake elucidates Derrida’s concept of archive fever, Freud’s seminal concept of the death drive and Avita Ronell’s concept of haunted writing. <br><br>The relationship between anthropology, psychoanalysis and surrealism during the early 20th century is examined throughout. Surrealism, though shunned by anthropology and psychotherapy, asserts an urgent contemporary usefulness. <br><br>The role of technology in psychotherapy comes under necessary scrutiny, the ever-chainging backdrop of a global pandemic adding yet another layer of relevance to current phsychotherapy practice. <br><br>The resulting narrative brings to the fore the bizarre, messy, disturbing, sometimes gruesome aspects of archival and ethnographic research that are usually left out of formal accounts. </p>