When Sigmund Freud died, Auden wrote 'he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion'. Something similar could be said for therapy today. We live in a therapeutic age. It is generally accepted that the world of subconsciousness plays into all of our thoughts and actions, and that, in the hands of experts, it can be directed along more fruitful pathways. But as a science and a practice, therapy has always been fraught with dilemmas and crises. It has been bound up with power and manipulation, though its finest practitioners and participants counter that it contributes to human liberation. This issue of Granta explores all of these dimensions of therapy.
The issue includes non-fiction from Sheila Heti, Jesse Barron, Paul Keegan, Elfriede Jelinek, Deborah Levy and Dushko Petrovich Córdova; interviews with Christopher Bollas, Juliet Mitchell and Jonathan Lear; fiction by Benjamin Kunkel, Camilla Grudova, Anne Serre and Missouri Williams; photoessays by Louise Bourgeois, Rinko Kawauchi, Musuk Nolte (introduced by Guadalupe Nettel) and Nigel Shafran; plus poetry by Robert Hass, Natalie Shapero, Victor Heringer and Olive Franklin.