Witches : A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Killing of Women Book

In this topical study the author argues that the naming andpersecution of women as witches in the 16th and 17th centuries resulted from the powerful unresolved psychic conflicts of their persecutors. The accusation of witchcraft and the merciless and sadistic killing of innocent women which ensued emanated from an attempt to resolve the conflict through splitting and projective identification. Claiming that Freud and others were seriously mistaken in their understanding of e events, Evelyn Heinemann asserts that the witch phenomenon is an example of the potential for destructiveness by the human imagination and shows the necessity of understanding unconscious processes in social phenomena today. DESCRIPTION : Evelyn Heinemann, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, is a professor at the University of Mainz, Germany. She is the author of many books including Aggression (1996), and was a contributor to Psychoanalysis and Mental Handicap also published by Free Association Books in 1998.