'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
