'In the destructive element immerse.' These words from Joseph Conrad's Stein in Lord Jim cast a shadow over twentieth-century literature. At the same time, Freud's bleak prognosis of culture's discontents left a psychoanalysis with a legacy that found one of its most profound realisations in the play-rooms of British child psychoanalysis. In this book, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers a new perspective on the history of our fascination with culture's discontents by returning to British psychoanalysis and second-wave modernism.

LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE is a Lecturer in English in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the editor (with John Phillips) of Reading Melanie Klein.