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By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, this book offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. The book makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. The book analyzes how development's unconscious desires “speak out,” most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. It investigates development's many irrationalities — from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts — enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria — the book critically analyzes important issues in development — growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, “race,” LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. The book offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

Immigrant Japan? Sounds like a contradiction, but as this book shows, millions of immigrants make their lives in Japan, dealing with the tensions between belonging and not belonging in this ethno-nationalist country. Why do people want to come to Japan? Where do immigrants with various resources and demographic profiles fit in the economic landscape? How do immigrants narrate belonging in an environment where they are “other” at a time when mobility is increasingly easy and belonging increasingly complex? The book illuminates the lives of these immigrants by bringing in sociological, geographical, and psychological theories—guiding the reader through life trajectories of migrants of diverse backgrounds while also going so far as to suggest that Japan is already an immigrant country.

This book explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences — both ancient and modern — a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, the book addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, the book reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.