Foreign Objects

Foreign Objects is a new book series that Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute will launch in the coming years. The series takes its name from the clinical and cultural question of how things—ideas, practices, artifacts, affects—enter domains where they do not belong, or belong only uneasily, and what happens when they lodge there.

The phrase "foreign object" carries a double sense. In medicine, it refers to something that has entered the body through a wound or orifice and must be located, interpreted, sometimes removed. In culture, it describes an element that appears out of place, that disrupts expectation, that demands a response. The series will bring these registers together: psychoanalytic attention to what gets inside and what gets stuck, alongside critical inquiry into how concepts travel, how traditions are translated, and how the familiar becomes strange.

Planned volumes will include single-authored works, edited collections, and hybrid forms—essays, case studies, archival recoveries, and contemporary interventions. The focus is deliberately broad: the history of psychoanalysis, its entanglements with art and politics, its afterlives in theory and practice, and its capacity to illuminate the foreignness that persists within the everyday.

Foreign Objects will be published under the auspices of Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute. Details on submission, format, and timeline will be announced in a future issue of W44.