Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor

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In Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, Ankhi Mukherjee offers a magisterial work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Spanning three continents, this hugely ambitious book reads fictional representations of poverty with each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, particularly as that culture is fostered by state policies toward the welfare needs of impoverished populations. It explores the causal relationship between precarity and mental health through clinical case studies, the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy. In Unseen City, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the unconscious is key to poverty alleviation.

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. She is the author of two monographs and the editor of three essay collections. What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2014) won the British Academy Prize for English Literature. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the British Academy, AHRC, and Wellcome Trust.

'Considering resonances among contemporary psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and film, Ankhi Mukherjee paints a picture of the world we live in that at once illuminates multiple domains. Mukherjee's chapters encompass what she learned from immersion in the trenches of clinical programs addressing the experiences of homeless and excluded people worldwide, and from the representation of these lives in film and literature, all in the context of philosophically based meaning-making. Whether you are a psychotherapist, an academic, or a culturally aware citizen, Unseen City will augment and transform your experience and understanding of the societies we live in, inclusive of its lives at their margins.' Neil Altman, author of The Analyst in the Inner City 'Ankhi Mukherjee's Unseen City is a unique and unusual work, an exploration of the psychic life of poverty in three global metropolises that is as much about the forces of economic globalization, migration, and war that have shaped the urban spaces in which the poor and precarious subjects of her study live as it is about their specific psychic and mental health needs - and the failure of traditional therapies to address them in a satisfying way. It will appeal not only to scholars and academics, but to anyone who is interested in mental health treatment, racial and economic justice, and the ways in which global capital and mass migration are transforming our cities and the lives of some of their most numerous, albeit largely unseen, residents. Mukherjee is a wonderful writer, whose precise and evocative language and strong voice make for a reading experience that is consistently engaging, even gripping at times. Her chapters often have a cinematic feeling, moving effortlessly between the big scale of the urban landscape and highly focalized narratives involving the experiences of individual residents and the small clinics and caregivers who try to tend to their needs.' Tracy McNulty, Cornell University 'Unseen City is an extraordinary, brilliant, and important book that re-draws the lines between literature, psychoanalysis, post and anti-colonialism, and activism in bold and urgent ways. At the heart of the book are a set of questions - shockingly - rarely asked in the humanities: what if the subject of psychic life is poor? How do the poor mourn, and how do they heal? And, crucially, how might we re-think the theory and practice of literary criticism so that we can begin to answer these questions? Boldly interdisciplinary, theoretically original, Mukherjee's book draws on her acclaimed and formidable critical acumen to produce a fascinating, compelling, and, most strikingly, morally humane argument that insists that we begin with the psychic life of the poor. Reading contemporary literature and theory, psychoanalytic theory and history, alongside empirical work with the free clinics of today, the book reveals the unseen city of its title: a global city, but not a thoughtless cosmopolitan one, a place of trauma but also of solidarity, living, imagining, suffering, and surviving.' Lyndsey Stonebridge, University of Birmingham 'The pandemic represents a historic opportunity to reimagine the world's health systems by demonstrating the profound limitations of a narrow, biomedical framing of what is, ultimately, a social crisis. Surely, this is a metaphor for mental health, whose importance has never been more central or widely acknowledged. Unseen City, at the interface of diverse disciplinary perspectives, and grounded in the lived experiences of diverse actors in three countries, offers insights into exactly what such a reimagined mental health care system might, and should, look like in the future.' Vikram Patel, Harvard Medical School 'Ankhi Mukherjee's important new book takes to another stage the vexed question of whether psychoanalysis has a role beyond its privileged place in Western cultures. This is theory as field-work, academic writing that risks itself on the streets. In a series of illuminating case-studies, Unseen City tracks therapy for the poor, the traumatised and the un-homed across the cities of Mumbai, London and New York, from slums to garden therapy, from free clinics to disaster zones. A model of publicly committed intellectual work, the book will become required reading for anyone interested in theory in the post-colony, in how to create a more equitable global distribution of psychoanalytic therapy, and in the role of cultural production in exposing the urgent need to do so.' Jacqueline Rose, Birkbeck University of London 'Ankhi Mukherjee's Unseen City, which has quickly and deservingly become one of the most publicly discussed works of academic scholarship this year, reopens [the] question of access from the perspective of a demographic with which psychoanalysis has historically had an exclusionary relationship: the 'urban poor', here additionally encompassing asylum-seekers, migrants, and exiles fleeing warfare and political persecution, from six megacities across the world.' Jivitesh Vashisht, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 'Mukherjee shows how these ambulatory, unorthodox methods of analysis are a pragmatic compromise which analysts, practicing under ideal conditions in the West, are all too quick to dismiss. The desire to sanitize the image of analysis has the effect of relegating the poor, Mukherjee observes, to the unconscious. The best way to ensure that psychoanalysis is politically accountable might, then, be a situation where psychoanalysis - understood in its most orthodox sense - undergoes considerable revision.' Jess Cotton, Jacobin