New Books in Psychoanalysis

When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there?In the intimate space of the consulting room, we meet the woman who can't post her wedding invitations but then, decades later, can't decide whether to get divorced; the friendship group that explodes when an adulterous affair begins; and the man whose partner's death is almost too much to bear.As an analyst, Grosz's unerring ability is to locate what ails the heartsick. As a writer, he elegantly shows how we can deploy the agonies of love as tools for understanding.The labour of love is the work of a lifetime but in finally learning to see ourselves and our world clearly, we find we are truly ready to love one another. Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst - he has worked with patients for more than forty years. Born in America, he was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, and now lives in London. His Number One Sunday Times bestseller, The Examined Life, has been translated into more than thirty languages. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In this episode of the New Books Network, I sat down with the contributors of Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India (Routledge, 2025) to discuss the profound psychic textures of the East. Moving away from the traditional Eurocentric focus on the Oedipal complex, this volume investigates the "primal relationship"—the foundational bond between mother and infant—and how it is uniquely structured within the cultural contexts of Japan and India. The authors challenge the universality of Western clinical models, proposing instead that the maternal matrix in these societies offers a different roadmap for understanding the self, intimacy, and dependency. Osamu Kitayama is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Japan Psychoanalytic Society, Professor Emeritus at Kyushu University, and President of Hakuoh University. He served as President of the Japan Psychoanalytic Society from 2016–2019 and con tinues to work with patients in private practice. He has authored numerous articles on culturally oriented psychoanalysis and books.Jhuma Basak is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Indian Psychoanalytical Society. She has published on culture and gender. Over the past 20 years, she has pre sented at IPA Congresses along with the first Keynote from Asia-Pacific, 4th IPA-region at the 53rd IPA Congress (International Journal of Psychoanalysis). A past Co-chair of COWAP Asia-Pacific, she co-edited Psychoanalytic and Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Women in India: Violence, Safety and Survival (2021).Ashis Roy, PhD, is a psychoanalyst (IPS Kolkata/IPA London) and faculty member at the China-American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA). With an extensive background in clinical training and institutional building at Ambedkar University Delhi, his work emphasizes the dialogue between clinical practice and Asian cultural dynamics. He is a host for the New Books Network and the author of the recently released book, Intimate Hindu-Muslim Relationships: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Self and the Other (2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis (American Psychological Association, 2025) intricately weaves psychoanalytic and developmental theory to explain how we become who we are, and how we might grow beyond the places we get stuck.In recent decades psychological research and practice has focused heavily on cognitive domains, with far less attention paid to the nonverbal systems through which people register essential meanings. This has led many clinicians to seek disembodied and often mechanistic solutions to clients’ problems. But these approaches fail to recognize hidden sources of trauma, which can be difficult to access through conscious reflection. As the source of a trauma recedes further into the past and remains unexplored and unmourned, the effect can become a lingering adversity that masquerades as destiny―and this worldview can even be passed along through subsequent generations.In this volume, Marilyn Charles argues for a more embodied, less mechanistic view of human development. To understand a client’s problem at a particular moment in time, we must understand the history that has given rise to it, some of which the client may be able to tell us directly, but some that we must intuit from signs and symptoms because not all history can be recalled consciously. After drawing on psychoanalytic and developmental theory to ground her model, Charles uses clinical vignettes and comparisons with her own life to illustrate how we might facilitate our clients’ development.Development is never final. It is an ongoing, lifelong process that can get off-track. Using the theory and techniques in this book, therapists can help clients find and integrate the missing pieces of their life story. Your host for this episode, Ben Greenberg, PsyD is a psychoanalytic psychologist and founding director of both the Center for Dynamic Practice (CFDP) in Santa Fe, NM and Southwestern Alliance for Psychoanalytic Psychology (SWAPP). A disabled former symphony French hornist and musical pedagogue, Ben has published several scientific papers among other written media, and is currently working on several manuscripts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Why do certain women become icons of evil? Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Joanna Bourke offers the first comparative, non-sensationalist account of five of the most reviled women in the modern Anglophone world: Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Aileen Wuornos, Karla Homolka and Karla Faye Tucker. It examines their lives, crimes and cultural reception in the UK, USA and Canada, asking how violence committed by women is understood, judged and remembered. Going beyond moral outrage or tabloid headlines, the book explores how concepts of 'evil' are shaped by history, belief systems and social context. Through historical and ethical reflections, it offers a deeper, more critical engagement with female violence, and considers how society should respond to those who commit acts of unimaginable harm. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In their book The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism (Columbia UP, 2025) Mari Ruti and Gail N. Newman offer our beleaguered souls a breather. Together they tackle the question of what makes life worth living, and before you recoil at the sound of that question, which intentionally has a little neoliberal ring to it, emphasis mine, let me say that this book studies and challenges the neoliberal way of, if you will, “being” and does so beautifully. Lamenting how perfecting, polishing and pushing ourselves beyond the beyond has become de rigeur—(with our overfull email boxes, demands for more, more, more that keep piling in, and how we are doing it all proudly on our own, no side to fall into) Newman and Ruti plumb the works of Marion Milner and Donal Winnicott, two analytic thinkers, both members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, contemporaries in fact, in search of an escape hatch. It is important to note that Ruti was dying, knew she was dying, when she wrote this book, in which she fearlessly lays some blame for her demise at the feet of neoliberal modes of relating. At one point she describes the pressures of academia to attend to too much outside the realm of the classroom and scholarship, driving her to want to exclaim “Stop just stop.” Who has not had this experience where we are called upon to be on all the time, available, responsive, game? Today I listened to a patient who was very ill with a cold moments before he trudged into work. Sure he has sick days but the new ethos is not to take them. We must not give in. His partner whose father died within the last six months is also back at work where she is expected to plow though her grief: “you must feel better by now right?’, her boss asks nervously. Not a one of us lives outside this realm. Ruti and Newman study the ways in which our loss of the ability to stop, feel emptiness, or seek isolation can foment a kind of psychic deformation that threatens to trounce our creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Body as Shadow: Jung’s Method of Embodied Healing is Jungian analyst Erica Lorentz’s passionate, clinically grounded argument that Jung’s psychology was never meant to be “head-only.” It was always an embodied practice, one that asks us to meet psyche where it actually lives: in sensation, emotion, energy, imagination, and what Jung called the somatic unconscious or subtle body. At the heart of the book is Lorentz’s central method: embodied active imagination, a way of working in which inward attention to a symptom, sensation, or emotion becomes a portal into imaginal material and archetypal depths, without forcing interpretation or prematurely translating experience into words. This approach is shaped by her long apprenticeship in Authentic Movement (also known as Movement as Active Imagination), where the psyche is allowed to emerge through the body in a protected relational container and a non-directive witnessing stance. Lorentz argues that many modern approaches to trauma and psychotherapy remain constrained by a left-brain bias: we attempt to heal through insight, narrative, and cognitive explanation, while the original wound and the original healing energy often sits below language. Drawing on Jung’s own words from the Zarathustra Seminar, she emphasizes the mysterious interlocking place where body and psyche become indistinguishable: where we cannot know if we are in matter or in psyche, because we are in both. Throughout the book, Lorentz bridges what is too often split in Jungian circles: developmental work and archetypal work. She insists that when we work with complexes, we must come to terms not only with childhood roots, but with the archetypal core “on its own ground”, because the archetype is not a metaphor; it is a force, and one we encounter in a bodily way. Erica Lorentz, M.Ed., L.P.C., is a Jungian analyst (IAAP) and training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of New England. With early roots in dance and decades of experience in Authentic Movement (Movement as Active Imagination), she integrates depth psychology with embodied and imaginal approaches to healing. Trained in object relations and shaped by clinical work with autistic and psychotic youth, she has taught and lectured widely on Jung, the body, and embodied active imagination across the US, Canada, the UK, and internationally, including teaching in India in 2024. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education (Routledge, 2025) provides insight into the antagonism and disputative dialogue present in contemporary discourse. Our guest for this interview, author Joseph Scalia III, Psya.D. is a psychoanalyst, environmental activist, and Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis. Co-authored with Lynne Scalia, Critical Consciousness is of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to readers interested in the psychological aspects of dehumanization, competition, and opposing group identity. Taking a broad, pluralistic psychoanalytic perspective, the authors shed light on how and why ideology and conflict have infiltrated education, environmentalism, and psychoanalysis. This book unpacks forms of indoctrination and rejection of new ideas in environmentalism, considers the desubjectification of the human in mental health "services," and assesses how the educational world needs leaders who can articulate unspoken educational aims that perpetuate inequalities, hidden oppression, and their pathogenic effects on disenfranchised groups. This book takes account of the competing schools of psychoanalysis, their members' dismissiveness and enmity toward each other, and their rationalized resistances to discussion across the aisles. From that viewscape, a challenging path forward is proposed. Your host, Ben Greenberg, PsyD is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and founding director of the Center for Dynamic Practice in Santa Fe, NM. After a wonderful recent conversation with Tracy Morgan about Psychoanalysis, she suggested I become a host to do interviews about a few books I mentioned I'm excited about. I love to hear interviews about new books. I have published several scientific papers among other written media, and am working on a few book manuscripts as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Today I spoke with Dr. Louis Rothschild about his new book Rapprochement Between Fathers and Sons Breakdowns, Reunions, Potentialities (Karnac, 2024). Our conversation moved freely between theory, generational attitudes, thinkers, and personal vignettes. What is a good enough father? What is the difference between a man of achievement and a man of power? Who is the father of the mother’s mind? What happens when a father enables holding? How is masculinity valued by other men? What is meant by phrases such as a “man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do?” Why exactly do we need to “call the boy’s father?” How is the father’s role rendered invisible? These are some of the questions subsumed in the broader question of “Who nurtures and who is nurtured?” (And does the myth of the “self-made-man” indicate a man who exists without nurturing?) “What I'm arguing”, says Rothschild, “is that that sexist dichotomy is a mirage in its own right and that attachment strings needn't be severed. They can be reworked over the lifespan and this idea of having this clean tidy break and going off to live your life where liberating the kid from this regressive maternal bond is the path to individuation, I think that's just patently false.” Like an analyst, the book has been in formation for many years. “Percolating and distilling” as Dr. Rothschild says at the top of the interview. Motivated by the “way the culture was shifting” he sensed “that things I take for granted are actually a minority opinion.” Rothschild’s survey of sons includes mythology; Oedipus scripture; Issac. As well as the sons of literature; Sendak’s Max, Silverstein’s Boy, White’s Swan, and others. Affect rich case illustrations are also presented. The issues addressed in the book are the ones we are contending with in in analysis. They are the discussions we are having with our fathers, sons, and families. Rothschild’s book is essential and meets the clinical moment. “Louis Rothschild’s book is both an outstanding representative of ‘return to the father’ and a unique explication of psychoanalytic thought on its own. This is a book of great literary elegance and impressive psychological wisdom.” Salman Akhtar, MD Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. He is a member of the faculty and supervising analyst at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and The New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. His primary theorists are Sándor Ferenczi and Hyman Spotnitz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Today I spoke with Juliane Maxwald abut her new book Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality ( Taylor & Francis, 2025). Maxwald bridges psychoanalytic theory with contemporary sex therapy to demonstrate that sexual symptoms are rarely just about sex—they're embodied expressions of unconscious conflict, early attachment wounds, relational trauma, and unmet developmental needs. Through eleven richly detailed clinical cases—including Jon's shame-bound spanking fantasies, Connie's trauma-releasing masturbation, Maurice's porn use masking performance anxiety, Joelle's compulsive sexual behavior, Brian's BDSM healing, and Anna and Darren's painful desire discrepancy—Maxwald shows how integrating psychodynamic insight with behavioral interventions, somatic awareness, and trauma-informed care creates transformative healing. The book argues that sexuality is a "portal to the unconscious," where repetition compulsion, dissociation, shame, and erotic transference play out in the body, and that therapeutic work requires not just fixing dysfunction but decoding symbolic meanings, tolerating ambiguity, attending to countertransference, and creating relational safety where clients can reclaim embodied agency, authentic desire, and the capacity for surrender—while acknowledging that sometimes, pragmatically, "a cigar is just a cigar" and simpler medical or behavioral solutions serve clients best. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Today I spoke with Anna Fishzon about her new book The Impossible Return - Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning ( Routledge, 2025). The Impossible Return is a hybrid work of cancer memoir, psychoanalytic theory, and Soviet history that explores the author's experience with breast cancer through the lens of mourning, loss, and identity. Fishzon weaves together her personal narrative of mastectomy and reconstruction with psychoanalytic concepts—particularly the uncanny, shame, and the impossibility of fully mourning what has been lost—while drawing connections to her late Soviet Ukrainian childhood and her deep engagement with opera. The book examines how the reconstructed breast becomes an uncanny double, how the prosthetic oscillates between absence and presence, and how cancer survivorship involves living with "scanxiety" and perpetual waiting. Through this autotheoretical approach, Fishzon explores broader questions about memory as scar tissue, the relationship between voice and embodiment, and what she calls the "terribly obscure utopian" work of psychoanalysis—asking the impossible of both analyst and patient, much like perestroika's call for reconstruction. The work treats cancer survival not as a triumph narrative but as an ongoing, repetitive process of attempting to mourn something that remains fundamentally unmournable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account (Bloomsbury, 2023) brings together the first English translations of Why Lacan, Betty Milan's memoir of her analysis with Lacan in the 1970s, and her play, Goodbye Doctor, inspired by her experience. Why Lacan provides a unique and valuable perspective on how Lacan worked as psychoanalyst as well as his approach to psychoanalytic theory. Milan's testimony shows that Lacan's method of working was based on the idea that the traditional way of interpreting provoked resistance. Prior to Why Lacan, Milan wrote a play, Goodbye Doctor, based on her experience as Lacan's patient. The play is structured around the sessions of Seriema with the Doctor. Through the analysis, Seriema discovers why she cannot give birth, namely, an unconscious desire to satisfy the will of her father who didn't authorize her to conceive. She ceases to be the victim of her unconscious, grasps the possibility of choosing a father for her child and thus becoming a mother. Goodbye Doctor has been adapted into a film, Adieu Lacan, by the director Richard Ledes. Analyzed by Lacan features an Introduction by Milan to both works as well as a new interview with Mari Ruti about her writing and Lacan. Matthew Pieknik, LCSW, MA is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in Manhattan. He can be reached at [email protected]. www.matthewlpieknik.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

How well do we understand our relationship to sex? According to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the new book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), we tend to overlook the “unpleasurable pleasures” that are integral to sex. Sex undoes us, destabilizes us, takes us out of ourselves. Many of our 21st century cultural products—Queer Theory, traumatology, intersectional studies—secretly “hate” sex for these very reasons and build such hatred into their ideas. In our interview, Davis and Dean explain why a full understanding and experience of sex require our reckoning with these truths, and they offer conceptual tools for undertaking such a reckoning. This interview is a must-listen for anyone curious about the unspoken dimensions of sex. Oliver Davis is a professor of French studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Jacques Rancière and editor of Rancière Now. Tim Dean is James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and Beyond Sexuality. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis