New Books in Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis began as a politicized form of treatment for people from all walks of life. Yet in the United States, it has become divorced from these roots and transformed into a depoliticized treatment for the most well-to-do, according to my guests, Drs. Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian. Their edited book, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2018), returns psychoanalysis to its social activist origins, with special emphasis on its urgency and usefulness for Latinx patients, including the poor. In our interview, we discuss the possibilities and necessity for bringing psychoanalysts to the barrios, as well as the unique offerings the barrio might have for psychoanalysis. Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Philadelphia and New York, an analytic supervisor, and a recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press: 2003) winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference ​(Routledge: 2017). Christopher Christian, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, CT and co-editor of the book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky. He is also co-editor with Michael J. Diamond of the book The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action. He serves as dean of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (aka IPTAR), where he is also a supervising and training analyst. And he was co-executive producer of the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst 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

Pan plays a central role in European mythology, originating as a figure who represented all that was impossible to tame in the world, something anyone who has ever worked with goats will understand. This primitive origin was slowly assimilated by the Greeks as a celebration of life and vitality, although through Plato’s radical dualism and the moral inflection introduced by Christianity, his transition from goatlike deity to devil leaves us with a complicated relationship today towards everything he represented, giving birth to a collection of complexes and pathologies that demand addressing. Joining me to discuss these ideas is Sharon Coggan, here to discuss her new book Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil (Lexington Books, 2020). Synthesizing Jungian psychology with the history of mythology and theology, Coggan works her way through the history of Pan as a way of thinking about the development of various forms of consciousness, both individual and social. This is then a history of myth and religion, but with the goal of developing a psychological and sociological diagnosis, and thinking about what sort of cure might be called for. Sharon Coggan is a recently retired professor who spent much of her career at the University of Colorado in Denver, and founded the Religious Studies Program where she served as director for many years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The relational revolution led to what is arguably the most radical revision of our understanding of how to effect healing and change in the mind since Freud’s ground-breaking work more than a century ago. In The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Confer Books, 2021), Steven Kuchuck addresses core theories as well as newer, cutting edge trends within relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This book defines postmodern relational concepts, and offers a clear, thoughtfully curated examination of relationality and its impact on psychoanalytic technique for both experienced clinicians and those newer to the field. Roy Barsness is a Clinical Psychoanalytic Psychologist, Founder and Executive Director of the Post-Graduate Program in Relationally-Focused Psychodynamic Therapy; Professor at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and have been in clinical practice for 30+ years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press, 2021), stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today. Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers’ lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

This is part two of a two part interview with Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales about their book Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch (Routledge, 2019) Taking a deep dive into contemporary Western culture, this book suggests we are all fundamentally ambivalent beings. A great deal has been written about how to love - to be kinder, more empathic, a better person, and so on. But trying to love without dealing with our ambivalence, with our hatred, is often a recipe for failure. Any attempt, therefore, to love our neighbour as ourselves - or even, for that matter, to love ourselves - must recognise that we love where we hate and we hate where we love. Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has claimed that to be in two minds about something or someone is characteristic of human subjectivity. Owens and Swales trace the concept of ambivalence through its various iterations in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to question how the contemporary subject deals with its ambivalence. They argue that experiences of ambivalence are, in present-day cultural life, increasingly excised or foreclosed, and that this foreclosure has symptomatic effects at the individual as well as social level. Owens and Swales examine ambivalence as it is at work in mourning, in matters of sexuality, and in our enjoyment under neoliberalism and capitalism. Above all, the authors consider how today's ambivalent subject relates to the racially, religiously, culturally, or sexually different neighbour as a result of the current societal dictate of complete tolerance of the other. In this vein, Owens and Swales argue that ambivalence about one's own jouissance is at the very roots of xenophobia. Peppered with relevant and stimulating examples from clinical work, film, television, politics, and everyday life, Psychoanalysing Ambivalence breathes new life into an old concept and will appeal to any reader, academic, or clinician with an interest in psychoanalytic ideas. Carol Owens, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic scholar in Dublin, Ireland. She edited The Letter: Perspectives in Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2003–2008), Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children and Adolescents: Further Notes on the Child (with Stephanie Farrelly Quinn, Routledge, 2017) and Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V: From Lack to Desire (with Nadezhda Almqvist, Routledge, 2019). She is the series editor for the newly established Routledge series, Studying Lacan’s Seminars. Stephanie Swales, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, USA, a practicing psychoanalyst, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a clinical supervisor located in Dallas, Texas. Her first book, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject, was published by Routledge in 2012. Christopher Russell is a Psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

This is part one of a two part interview with Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales about their book Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch (Routledge, 2019) Taking a deep dive into contemporary Western culture, this book suggests we are all fundamentally ambivalent beings. A great deal has been written about how to love - to be kinder, more empathic, a better person, and so on. But trying to love without dealing with our ambivalence, with our hatred, is often a recipe for failure. Any attempt, therefore, to love our neighbour as ourselves - or even, for that matter, to love ourselves - must recognise that we love where we hate and we hate where we love. Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has claimed that to be in two minds about something or someone is characteristic of human subjectivity. Owens and Swales trace the concept of ambivalence through its various iterations in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to question how the contemporary subject deals with its ambivalence. They argue that experiences of ambivalence are, in present-day cultural life, increasingly excised or foreclosed, and that this foreclosure has symptomatic effects at the individual as well as social level. Owens and Swales examine ambivalence as it is at work in mourning, in matters of sexuality, and in our enjoyment under neoliberalism and capitalism. Above all, the authors consider how today's ambivalent subject relates to the racially, religiously, culturally, or sexually different neighbour as a result of the current societal dictate of complete tolerance of the other. In this vein, Owens and Swales argue that ambivalence about one's own jouissance is at the very roots of xenophobia. Peppered with relevant and stimulating examples from clinical work, film, television, politics, and everyday life, Psychoanalysing Ambivalence breathes new life into an old concept and will appeal to any reader, academic, or clinician with an interest in psychoanalytic ideas. Carol Owens, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic scholar in Dublin, Ireland. She edited The Letter: Perspectives in Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2003–2008), Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children and Adolescents: Further Notes on the Child (with Stephanie Farrelly Quinn, Routledge, 2017) and Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V: From Lack to Desire (with Nadezhda Almqvist, Routledge, 2019). She is the series editor for the newly established Routledge series, Studying Lacan’s Seminars. Stephanie Swales, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, USA, a practicing psychoanalyst, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a clinical supervisor located in Dallas, Texas. Her first book, Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject, was published by Routledge in 2012. Christopher Russell is a Psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The laws that govern psychiatric treatment under coercion have remain largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. But this is not because of their effectiveness, rather, these laws cling to outdated notions of disability, mental illness and mental disorder why deny the fundamental rights of this category of people on an equal basis with all others. In Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coercion (Oxford University Press, 2017) Professor George Szmukler examines the violation of these rights, such as the right to autonomy, self-determination, liberty, and security and integrity of the person in the context of the domestic laws which themselves perpetuate ongoing discrimination against people with mental impairments. Tracing first the history of the medical coercion and involuntary treatment of people with mental illnesses and mental disorders, Professor Szmukler offers a potential path which he argues would end discrimination against this category of people. He puts forward a legal framework which is non-discriminatory and is based on a person's decision-making abilities and best interests, as opposed to a diagnosis. Crucially, he argues that this law is generic, and would not apply by reason of a person's mental disorder. His solution - Fusion Law - would better support people's autonomy, better engage with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and have significant social value by recognising the dignity and equality of people with mental health impairments. It would also have implications for the forensics system, in particular, with regards to defendants who have mental disorders. Professor George Szmukler is a psychiatrist who started practising in the field as a trainee in 1972. He retired from clinical work in 2012, and is now an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Society at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's college London. His major research now concerns methods of reducing compulsion and ’coercion’ in psychiatric care, for example, through the use of ’advance statements’. A related interest is mental health law, particularly the possibility of generic legislation centred on impaired decision-making capacity which would apply to all persons, regardless of the cause of the underlying disturbance of mental functioning. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Neil Altman’s White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) is a slip (80 pages including references and the index) of a book that reads as both addendum and antidote to some of the literature aimed at waking white people (Ta-Nahesi-Coates’ “dreamers”) up to the realities of racism. I say antidote as some of that literature (the work of Robin Di Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi come to mind) seems to depend on commands from the super ego to shed the scales from white eyes. On finishing Di Angelo’s White Fragility (which was required reading last summer) I felt both paranoid and ashamed and had to wonder how self-policing was going diminish my racism? Altman’s book intervenes precisely in this potentially deleterious cycle arguing that anti-racist thinking that relies on “should” and “oughts”, are potentially doomed to fail. By attacking the defenses rather than softening them, such efforts run the risk of hardening the racism they set out to transform. Humans hate. Freud tells us it is our first feeling. Undeniably, hating can fill us with great and solidifying pleasure. Racism is one form of hatred. When acted on, it can and does destroy lives. Fully loaded with white privilege, white people are apt to act on our racism, and also to shudder, deny or dissociate when encountering our racist thoughts and feelings. When confronted with our racism and its impact, with our awareness that we in fact rely on denigrating stereotypes to feel a little better about ourselves, states of mortification (deathliness) emerge that do no one any good. Such a state is a purely narcissistic one where the other has been snuffed out. If you are white, as I am, you have likely found yourself more than once tossing the hot potato of your own racism as far away as from yourself as you can. And some part of you feels weakened by being this way but it is practically an involuntary reflex. Thinking about this reflex, Altman employs Melanie Klein’s thinking about what it means to be human, which highlights our ineluctable destructiveness. If hate is a human feeling, not one to be gotten rid of but rather one to be accepted and contended with, there may be a way for us to take responsibility for being hurtful, for being racist. Hating hate or hating our racism can maintain the status quo. In fact, hidden hateful feelings seek justification and become reified, rather than being fleeting—as all feelings truly are. Altman highlights the difference between making reparations based on guilt versus the descent into guiltiness. Guilt implies that one is interested in our impact on others because we know that in living, we will hurt many people along the way. Guiltiness, which we can see in white virtue signaling around racism, has much more to do with returning the self that has harmed to its happy and perfect place without addressing the harm done. While white people are primed, particularly in an American context, to say and do horrible and hurtful racist things, it is the disavowal of the destructiveness that perhaps does, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the most harm in the end. Altman quotes the journalist Leonard Pitts who captures the experience of white negation succinctly, writing, “If people who hate you would stand up and declare it you would not have to go through with your day on guard against the world.” The refusal to take responsibility for the harm we do—and Altman makes the strong point that whiteness can be defined as an identity that is principally based on dehumanization—keeps white people on the run from reality. When we depend on delusions to shore us up, a part of us knows we are in real bad shape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

When Minds Meet: The Work of Lewis Aron (Routledge, 2020) offers a sampling of Lewis Aron's most important contributions to relational psychoanalysis. One of the founders of relational thinking, Aron was an internationally recognized psychoanalyst, sought after teacher, lecturer, and the Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. His pioneering work introduced and revolutionized the concepts of mutuality, the analyst's subjectivity, and the paradigm of mutual vulnerability in the analytic setting. During the last few years of his life, Aron was exploring the ethical considerations of writing psychoanalytic case histories and the importance of self-reflection and skepticism not only for analysts with their patients, but also as a stance towards the field of psychoanalysis itself. Aron is known for his singular, highly compelling teaching and writing style and for an unparalleled ability to convey complex, often comparative theoretical concepts in a uniquely inviting and approachable way. The reader will encounter both seminal papers on the vision and method of contemporary clinical practice, as well as cutting edge newer writing from the years just before his death. Edited and with a foreword by Galit Atlas, each chapter is preceded by a new introduction by some of the most important thinkers in our field: Jessica Benjamin, Michael Eigen, Jay Greenberg, Adrienne Harris, Stephen Hartman, Steven Kuchuck, Thomas Ogden, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Merav Roth, Chana Ullman, and Aron himself. This book will make an important addition to the libraries of experienced clinicians and psychoanalytic scholars already familiar with Aron's work, as well as students, newer professionals or anyone seeking an introduction to relational psychoanalysis and one of its most stunning, vibrant voices. Roy Barsness is a Clinical Psychoanalytic Psychologist, Founder and Executive Director of the Post-Graduate Program in Relationally-Focused Psychodynamic Therapy; Professor at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and have been in clinical practice for 30+ years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan (Routledge, 2019)brings a unique, non-partisan approach to the work of Jacques Lacan, linking his psychoanalytic theory and ideas to broader debates in philosophy and the social sciences, in a book that shows how it is possible to see the value of Lacanian concepts without necessarily being defined by them. In accessible, conversational language, the book provides a clear-sighted overview of the key ideas within Lacan’s work, situating them at the apex of the linguistic turn. It deconstructs the three Lacanian orders – the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real – as well as a range of core Lacanian concepts, including alienation and separation, après-coup, and the Lacanian doctrine of temporality. Arguing that criticism of psychoanalysis for a lack of scientificity should be accepted by the discipline, the book suggests that the work of Lacan can be helpful in re-conceptualizing the role of psychoanalysis in the future. This accessible introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan will be essential reading for anyone coming to Lacan for the first time, as well as clinicians and scholars already familiar with his work. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars of philosophy and cultural studies. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in New York City. [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice (Bloomsbury, 2020), Mitchell Wilson explores the fundamental role that lack and desire play in psychoanalytic interpretation by using a comparative method that engages different psychoanalytic traditions: Lacanian, Bionian, Kleinian, Contemporary Freudian. Investigating crucial questions Wilson asks: What is the nature of the psychoanalytic process? How are desire and counter-transference linked? What is the relationship between desire, analytic action, and psychoanalytic ethics? Mitchell Wilson is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, USA. While in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, he obtained a postgraduate degree in English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the early English novel and Lacanian theory. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and has served on the editorial boards of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of JAPA. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected]. 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, J.J. Mull interviews Gavin Arnall, author of Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (Columbia University Press, 2020). Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon’s work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. In this conversation, Arnall touches on various Fanonian traditions and what they have to tell us about contemporary psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected]. 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, host J.J. Mull interviews Daniel José Gaztambide about his book, A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology (Lexington Books, 2021). The project traces a global intellectual lineage spanning from the first generation of analysts in Europe to Harlem, the Caribbean, and finally, to Latin America. Challenging a broader cultural narrative that conceives of psychoanalysis as somehow fundamentally “white” or euro-centric, Gaztambide presents a radical and politicized version of psychoanalytic thought inherited and expanded by thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and Ignacio Martín-Baró. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Jack Black, Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy (Routledge 2021). In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. On this episode of New Books Network, your host Lee M. Pierce (they) interviews author Jack Black (he) about psychoanalysis, PC culture, The Office, and the subversive potential of comedy to change our collective experience. Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Jack Black is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. After completing his postgraduate studies at Loughborough University, his research has continued to explore the interrelationships between sociology, media and communications and cultural studies. The clip from The Office discussed in the interview is here. Connect with Jack on Twitter @jackstblack and with Lee @rhetoriclee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Microaggressions have been identified as a common and troubling cause of low retention and poor psychotherapy outcomes for people of color. All therapists want and intend to be helpful to their clients, but many unknowingly committing microaggressions due to unconscious biases and misconceptions about people from ethnic and racial minority groups. Managing Microaggressions: Addressing Everyday Racism in Therapeutic Spaces (Oxford UP, 2020) is intended for mental health clinicians who want to be more effective in their use of evidence-based practices with people of color. Many well-intentioned clinicians lack the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively engage those who are ethnoracially different. This book discusses the theoretical basis of the problem (microaggressions), the cognitive-behavioral mechanisms by which the problem is maintained, and how to remedy the problem using CBT principles, with a focus on the role of the therapist. Not only will readers learn how to avoid offending or harming their clients, they will also be better equipped to help clients navigate microaggressions they encounter in their daily lives. Managing Microaggressions will endow clinicians with a clear understanding of these behaviors and the errors that underpin them, leading to more successful therapy. Debbie Sorenson is a psychologist in Denver and the host of the podcast Psychologists Off the Clock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification. In Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (MIT Press, 2020), Lucas Richert investigates the radical challenges to psychiatry and to the conventional treatment of mental health that emerged in the 1970s and the lessons they offer for current debates. Drawing on archives and government documents, medical journals, and interviews, and interweaving references to pop (counter)culture into his account, Richert offers fascinating stories of the decade's radical mental health practices. He discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans; the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other); the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s; the development of DSM III; and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA. Many of these issues have resonance today. Debates over medical marijuana and microdoses of psychedelics echo debates of the 1970s. With rising rates of such disorders as anxiety and depression, practitioners and patients continue to search for therapeutic breakthroughs. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Elizabeth Severn: The 'Evil Genius' of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017) chronicles the life and work of Elizabeth Severn, both as one of the most controversial analysands in the history of psychoanalysis, and as a psychoanalyst in her own right. Condemned by Freud as "an evil genius", Freud disapproved of Severn’s work and had her influence expelled from the psychoanalytic mainstream. In this book, Rachman draws on years of research into Severn to present a much-needed reappraisal of her life and work, as well as her contribution to modern psychoanalysis. Arnold Rachman’s re-discovery, restoration and analysis of the Elizabeth Severn Papers – including previously unpublished interviews, books, brochures and photographs – suggests that, far from a failure, that the analysis of Severn by Ferenczi constitutes one of the great cases in psychoanalysis, one that was responsible a new theory and methodology for the study and treatment of trauma disorder, in which Severn played a pioneering role. Elizabeth Severn should be of interest to any psychoanalyst looking to glean fresh light on Severn’s progressive views on clinical empathy, self-disclosure, countertransference analysis, intersubjectivity and the origins of relational analysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

What makes racist feelings and ideas objectionable? In his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Red Globe, 2011), M. Fakhry Davids, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, argues that racism, like the impulse to destroy or act on hatred, is an ineluctable part of us all. Borrowing, but also augmenting the work of his fellow neo-Kleinians (particularly John Steiner and Herbert Rosenfeld) on “psychic retreats” and “defensive organizations”, he names the “internal racist organization” as a normal part of the mind, deeming it a non-pathological component of psychic structure. Davids' thinking has a decidedly hopeful tinge. If accepted, it promises to help open up the kinds of conversations clinically and otherwise that can be had about racist feelings. After all, if they are average and expectable, they are human. And what is accepted as human can potentially be talked through and about, which promises to constrain harmful action. What I love about Davids' thinking is that in updating a psychoanalytic model of mind that accounts for racism, he wipes political correctness and the super ego off the table. By placing the “internal racist organization” as an equal player inside of us, alongside the Oedipal, the ego and the id, it becomes something that you just can’t wish away. That said, if we accept his argument, we do find ourselves contending with the age old problem of the drives, or the paranoid schizoid, wherein managing ourselves in relation to the lure of destructiveness (of which racist feelings play their part) is a life long project. The hope is that if we can come to accept racist thinking as a response to overwhelming and primitive anxieties, (rather than a moral failing), we can see it as a warning sign that internally we are askew. Following Davids, racism can never be expunged (as seems to be the neoliberal fantasy) from the self. In fact, and truly this is the last word, it follows us to the grave. Tracy D. Morgan: Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., Editor, New Books in Psychoanalysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

W. Pearson and H. Marlo's The Spiritual Psyche in Psychotherapy: Mysticism, Intersubjectivity, and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2020) examines the interaction of spiritual and psychoanalytic lineages with psychotherapy in everyday practice. Written by a team of seasoned clinicians and illustrated through clinical vignettes, chapters explore topics pertaining to the mystical dimensions of psychological and spiritual life and how it may be integrated into clinical practice. Topics discussed include dreams, dissociation, creativity, therapeutic relationship, free association, transcendence, poetry, paradox, doubleness, loss, death, grief, mystery, embodiment and soul. The authors, clinicians with decades of experience in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and spiritual practice, draw from their deep engagement with spirituality and psychoanalysis, focusing on a particular theme and its application to clinical work that is supported by the generative conversation among these lineages. At once applied and theoretical, this book weaves insights from the heart of Vajrayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Catholicism, Ecumenicism, Integral Spirituality, Judaism, Kabbalah, Non-violence, Sufism and Vedanta. They are in conversation with psychoanalytic perspectives including Jungian, Post-Jungian, Winnicottian, Bionian, Post-Bionian and Relational. A felt sense of the spiritual psyche in clinical practice emerges from this conversation among spiritual and psychoanalytic lineages, beckoning clinicians ever further on the path of spiritually rooted, psychodynamic practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Brett Kahr has done it again! He has given us a marvelous book, helpful, yet challenging, fun to read, yet digging deep. In How to Flourish as a Psychotherapist (Phoenix Publishing House, 2018) he takes us on a journey through the life cycle of the psychoanalyst – from first thoughts about training and the basic personal requirements for a life in the mental health professions to thriving inside and outside of the consulting room to packing up your practice at the end of your career. In his typical lucid and accessible style, he gives generous examples from his own path to show us how we can make the most of our life in the field. But this trip is not for the faint of heart: Professor Kahr is a demanding tour guide, urging us to dive deep into the work and taking seriously our scholastic history, a paternal voice that tells us about the amazing things we can do with our specialized knowledge – if we apply ourselves and work hard. As any paternal voice ought to in this day and age, the book will surely provoke strong reactions in many readers and listeners. Join us for an in-depth discussion of the book and the profession. This interview was conducted in front of an online live audience as part of a new series of events hosted by the Free Association, a group of psychoanalytic candidates based in the beautiful city of Lisbon, Portugal, creating innovative opportunities of continuous learning in the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. This conversation is part of a new format titled „Forward“, in which I interview exciting psychoanalytic scholars about their work. After the interview – and this is special about Forward - there is an extended discussion with the audience, which you will not hear in this recording. Check out the website of the Free Association for future events at www.freeassociation.pt. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Leon Brenner's The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) makes a forceful case for the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the understanding and treatment of autism. Refusing both cognitive and identitarian approaches to the topic, Brenner rigorously theorizes autism as a unique mode of subjectivity and relation to language that sits alongside the classical Freudian structures of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion. In this interview, Brenner dispels misconceptions around psychoanalysis "blaming the mother," as we explore his conceptualisation of autistic subjectivity alongside clinical examples. Jordan Osserman is a postdoctoral research fellow and psychoanalyst in training in London. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In today’s program, Dr. Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist and clinical professor at the University of British Columbia, discusses his recently released book Psychoanalysis in Medicine: Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Medical Care (Routledge, 2020). In this new volume, Dr. Steinberg offers both theoretical inferences and practical guidance related to the application of psychoanalysis to medical practice. Dr. Steinberg provides insight on, among many other topics, how clinicians’ awareness of their own feelings can aid in the diagnostic process and how a psychoanalytic approach can enrich patient interview. Alec Kacew is a medical school student at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way. What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it struck me as a very original use of Lacanian thought. It also produced something I value very much: the development of fresh ideas for this psychoanalyst to ponder. George argues that owning human property, slaves, offered a surplus of "jouissance" to slave owners. Meanwhile the enslaved, denuded of family, of history and claims to nationality, were often valued solely for muscle mass and fecundity. Psychically emptied--seen only for their capacity to serve the master's needs, and I want to add, also emptying preemptively, and defensively their psychic lives, enslaved people were forbidden access to being, from which flows, following Lacan, crucial early fantasies of a wholeness that must be shattered if one is to become subjectivized. Fantasies of repletion provide a kind of protective “crested shield" with which to endure the rough first brush with the Symbolic. Living under a racist, white animating Master Signifier, slaves were often absent of the requisite psychic buffering with which to enter the Symbolic without undue suffering. Barred from the rudiments of being and lacking a constructive Master Signifier from which to generate vitalizing associations, the gaze of the enslaved was horrifyingly riveted to the “very lack that is masked in the Lacanian subject,” (p.21). Here George offers an apt description of what the sociologist of slavery, Orlando Patterson, refers to as "social death." Rather than celebrate the ways in which the burden of “double consciousness” aided African Americans in generating new linguistic vistas, we find no fan of Henry Louis Gates Jr’s “signifying monkey” here. George declares the project of "resignification" as not going far enough, and crucially, as missing the impact of the unconscious on language. Arguing against a powerful trend in African-American studies to value African-American racial identity as such, George boldly declares, “insistences on race perform a rite, an endless repeated act as a means to commemorate the not very memorable encounter that I call the trauma of slavery.” (p.42) How, George asks, can one have an identity based on insult, negation, and injury? Following his argument, the lure of racial pride loses its force majeur. Suddenly we see it as but papering over a potentially productive encounter with lack. And if it is lack that must be faced so as to open the door to a life driven by enlivening, elusive yet worthwhile desire, at what cost is it avoided? The idea of having love of the race and “the race man” become rather quickly tragic in George’s intellectual hands. Furthermore, embracing the narrative that “we come from slavery”, like Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, (a novel George writes beautifully about in this text) one is quickly cornered, metonymically, by the suffocating relationship between race and enslavement. The need for the space to metaphorize is undeniable. To learn more about the work of Sheldon George, please go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Winner the 2019 NAAP Gradiva Award and Co- Winner of International Association for Jungian Studies Awards Program for Best Books published in 2019, Marian Dunlea’s BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: An Embodied Therapeutic Approach (Routledge, 2019) provides a theoretical and practical guide for working with early developmental trauma. This interdisciplinary approach explores the interconnection of body, mind and psyche, offering a masterful tool for restoring balance and healing developmental trauma. BodyDreaming is a somatically focused therapeutic method, drawing on the findings of neuroscience, analytical psychology, attachment theory and trauma therapy. In Part I, Dunlea defines BodyDreaming and its origins, placing it in the context of a dysregulated contemporary world. Part II explains how the brain works in relation to the Body Dreaming approach: providing an accessible outline of neuroscientific theory, structures and neuroanatomy in attunement, affect regulation, attachment patterns, transference and countertransference, and the resolution of trauma throughout the body. In Part III, through detailed transcripts from sessions with clients, Dunlea demonstrates the positive impact of Body Dreaming on attachment patterns and developmental trauma. This somatic approach complements and enhances psychobiological, developmental and psychoanalytic interventions. Body Dreaming restores balance to a dysregulated psyche and nervous system that activates our innate capacity for healing, changing our default response of “fight, flight or freeze” and creating new neural pathways. Dunlea’s emphasis on attunement to build a restorative relationship with the sensing body creates a core sense of self, providing a secure base for healing developmental trauma. Marian Dunlea M.Sc., IAAP, ICP, is a Jungian analyst and somatics practitioner who has been leading workshops internationally for the past 25 years integrating body, mind and soul. She is head of the BodySoul Europe Training, which is part of the Marion Woodman Foundation. She is creator of BodyDreaming an approach which incorporates developments in neuroscience, trauma therapy, and attachment theory with Jungian psychology, and the phenomenological standpoint of interconnectedness. Her trainings include Jungian Analysis, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy, Infant Observation Supervision, and Somatic Experiencing. Christopher Russell is a Psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau's Memory’s Eyes is a contemporary New York Oedipus novel. It is written for readers who enjoy playing with concepts and storylines, here namely the classical Oedipus myth, Sophocles’ three Theban plays, the psychoanalytical concept of the Oedipus complex, and its pop-cultural adaptations in cartoons and jokes. Tragic and funny, playful, but also challenging, readers will find themselves simultaneously knowing and not knowing, anticipating and surprised by how the truth slowly emerges. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected] and his website address is https://www.drphiliplance.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

We’ve all been there – the family dinners turned full-fledged political debates, the awkward chat in the kitchen at work, the difficulty of discussing politics on a first date or even at dinner with a long-time partner. Today’s divisive climate – and the seemingly neverending circus of Brexit – has made discussion of current events uncomfortable and often uncivil. So, how exactly do we find ways to reach across the aisle to those whose views we find unpalatable? Psychotherapist and lifetime liberal Jeanne Safer hopes to shed some light on the situation. Combining her professional expertise with personal experience gleaned from over forty years of happy marriage to her stalwart conservative husband Richard Brookhiser, as well as a wealth of interviews with politically mixed couples, Safer offers frank advice for salvaging and strengthening relationships strained by political differences. Part relationship guide, part anthropological study, I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous Partisan World (Bitback, 2019) is a helpful and entertaining how-to for anyone who has felt they are walking on eggshells in these increasingly uncertain times. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis: A Guide to Practice, Study, and Research (Routledge, 2018) provides a concise and clearly presented handbook for graduate students, experienced clinicians, supervisors, and professors, presenting analytic technique with as clear a frame and purpose as evidence-based models, and a gateway into further study in Relational Psychoanalysis. Barsness offers his own research on technique, and grounds these methods with superb contributions from several master clinicians, expanding the seven core competencies: therapeutic intent; therapeutic stance; analytic listening; relational dynamics; patterning and linking; conflict and courageous speech through disciplined spontaneity. Each of these skills are presented in a straightforward and useable format. Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis is inspired by Barsness’ students where he was motivated to create a text to better understand the complexities of working with the relational psychoanalytic relationship. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected] and his website address is https://www.drphiliplance.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies have tried to treat something which lies on the border between the natural and the pathological. Jonathan Sadowsky's book The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity, 2020) explores the various medical treatments for depression, classed as a modern illness with definite (but changing) symptoms from the 20th century onwards, in relation to a longer history of treatments for ‘melancholia’ and related states considered either as biological or social sicknesses or as a natural part of some people’s constitution. He also compares the western history of medicalising depression with the experiences of both sadness and clinical depression in non-western cultures, such as Nigeria and Japan. He asks, what have we lost as a consequence of the hegemony of the western clinical model, and how can we reclaim the patient experience in the face of sometimes hostile doctors and pharmaceutical companies? The book is poetic but well-researched, written by a leading medical historian, and distinguished from the crowd of books about depression through its global focus, and its historical rigour. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

“She is seated in her chair, quietly anticipative. She is in no hurry. There is nothing that has to be achieved. She does not charge the situation with her temper. On the contrary, she is turned towards the other, listening attentively – present in the contact, though with no traces of intimacy or fervency. She is fairly softly spoken, yet clear and factual. A benevolent, lightly questioning tone characterizes her voice. No gestures, no jargon, no implicit jokiness, no sideward glances, no hidden implications. She upholds simplicity of words and expressions.” This impressionistic image of the analyst at work is a condensed starting point for the journey that Siri Erika Gullestad and Bjørn Killingmo take us on with their recently published The Theory and Practice of Psychoanalytic Therapy: Listening for the Subtext (Routledge, 2019). They draw from decades of experience as analysts and university professors of clinical psychology at the University of Oslo to give a theoretically grounded account of their flavor of psychoanalysis, which they call “relational-oriented character analysis”. Making use of ego psychology, object relations theory and concepts of embodiment, they arrive at an approach to therapy that values form over content, the latent over the manifest. In the process, they differentiate between psychopathological developments stemming from conflict and deficit and formulate therapeutic principles that take account of the patient’s level of ego functioning and actualized affect at any given moment. However, the result of their work is much more than yet another textbook of psychoanalysis. At every turn, we are invited into the consulting room to listen to verbatim protocols of sessions and to get a feeling of the affect in the room. This book is a treasure trove of clinical experience and a rare possibility to look over the analyst’s shoulder. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Psychotherapy offices are typically thought of as existing in the background of treatment, but they are brought to the foreground in Mark Gerald’s new book In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Office (Routledge, 2020). In this beautifully written book, illustrated with pictures of psychoanalysts in their offices from around the world, psychoanalyst and photographer Mark Gerald explores the stories offices tell about their holders and their role in the transformations experienced by patients. In our interview, we discuss why he became involved in this decades-long photography project and what he learned along the way about the powerful interface of psyche and physical space. Mark Gerald is a practicing psychoanalyst and trained photographer based in the USA who has written, presented, and taught widely about the visual dimension of psychoanalysis. He is a faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom (Routledge, 2018) proposes a way of constructing hidden psychological narratives of popular film and novels. Instead of offering interpretations of classic films, Trevor C. Pederson recognizes that the psychoanalytic tradition began with making sense of the seemingly inconsequential. Here he turns his attention to popular films like Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (1987). While masterworks like Psycho (1960) are not the object of interpretation, Hitchcock's film is used as a skeleton key. The revelation that Norman Bates' character had been his mother all along, suggests a framework of reading a film as having symptom characters who are excised to create a latent plot. The symptom character's behavior or inter-relations are then transcribed to an ego character. This is a shift in the tradition of literary doubling from hermeneutic intuition to a formal methodology that generates data for the unconscious. Pederson continues the project of unifying competing schools into a single model of mind and offers clinical examples from his own practice for all its terms. Psychodynamic techniques that emphasize the importance of working with the body, the id, and the ubiquity of repetition are introduced. A return to Freud's structural theory, in which complexes are anchored in the stages of superego development, is used to carefully plot and explain the social nature of the superego and its relation to authority in society (secondary narcissism) and the otherworldly (primary narcissism). Discrete phases of superego development and their ties to both the social and the id revive the grand promises of classical psychoanalysis to link with every field in the humanities. Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of film studies and literature interested in using a psychoanalytic approach and ideas in their work. 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, J.J. Mull interviews Lynne Layton and Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, author and editor respectively of Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes, published in 2020 by Routledge as a part of their Relational Perspectives Book Series. This text takes part in an intellectual and political lineage that has called for a more radical understanding of psychoanalysis, encompassing a diverse range of thinkers from Frantz Fanon and Pierre Bourdieau to Eric Fromm and Marie Langer. In this compilation of Layton’s work, we’re given a framework for understanding the intersection between structural forces (gender oppression, racial capitalism, white supremacy, etc.) and the clinical encounter. Over the course of this conversation, Layton and Leavy-Sperounis give an account of the ways in which neoliberalism, capitalism, and other systems of domination give rise to particular kinds of subjective possibilities and gesture towards what psychoanalysis as a field might have to learn from contemporary struggles and insurrections. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected]. 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, Philip Lance interviews Jack Drescher, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who is an expert in psychotherapy with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients. The interview focuses on a recently published series articles about LGBT mental health in an online journal of the American Psychiatric Association. The LGBT population group is heterogeneous, meaning that differences among the members of this group are as important as the similarities. In many ways, psychotherapy for this group does not differ from psychotherapy for heterosexual, gender conforming, and cisgender patients, however, concepts and considerations that arise in psychotherapy with LGBT patients can parallel issues that arise in psychotherapy with patients of other stigmatized minority groups. In this interview, the author discusses the concept of minority stress and its relationship with mental health conditions and reviews specific issues that may arise, including being in the closet, coming out of the closet, the psychotherapeutic search for “causes” of sexual orientation and gender identity, and therapist self-disclosure. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected] and his website is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Our practices of holding people morally and legally responsible for what they do rests on causal relationships between our mental states and our actions – a desire for revenge or a fear for one’s safety may cause a violent act. In either case, John Campbell argues, there is a psychological causal process that leads from the motivating mental state to the action. In Causation in Psychology (Harvard University Press, 2020), Campbell – who is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, claims that the existence of such singular causal relations and our knowledge of them do not depend on the existence of psychological generalizations under which they might be subsumed. Moreover, imaginative understanding or empathy enables us to trace these one-off, idiosyncratic causal sequences and thereby attain knowledge of these singular psychological causal relations. Campbell uses his analysis to distinguish human freedom of action at the level of causal process and to provide a new perspective on the traditional mind-body problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Bringing a fresh contemporary Freudian view to a number of current issues in psychoanalysis, this book is about a psychoanalytic method that has been evolved by Fred Busch over the past 40 years called Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind: A Psychoanalytic Method and Theory (Routledge, 2013). It is based on the essential curative process basic to most psychoanalytic theories—the need for a shift in the patient’s relationship with their own mind. Busch shows that with the development of a psychoanalytic mind, the patient can acquire the capacity to shift the inevitability of action to the possibility of reflection. Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind is derived from an increasing clarification of how the mind works that has led to certain paradigm changes in the psychoanalytic method. While the methods of understanding the human condition have evolved since Freud, the means of bringing this understanding to patients in a way that is meaningful have not always followed. Throughout, Fred Busch illustrates that while the analyst’s expertise is crucial to the process, the analyst’s stance, rather than mainly being an expert in the content of the patient’s mind, is primarily one of helping the patient to find his own mind. Fred Busch is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. He has published 5 books and over 70 papers. His work has been translated into multiple languages. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at [email protected] and his website is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Common morality has been the touchstone of medical ethics since the publication of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979. Rosamond Rhodes challenges this dominant view by presenting an original and novel account of the ethics of medicine, one deeply rooted in the actual experience of medical professionals. She argues that common morality accounts of medical ethics are unsuitable for the profession, and inadequate for responding to the particular issues that arise in medical practice. Instead, Rhodes argues that medicine's distinctive ethics should be explained in terms of the trust that society allows to the profession. Trust is the core and starting point of Rhodes' moral framework, which states that the most basic duty of doctors is to "seek trust and be trustworthy." In The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (Oxford UP, 2020), Rhodes explicates the sixteen specific duties that doctors take on when they join the profession, and demonstrates how her view of these duties is largely consistent with the codes of medical ethics of medical societies around the world. She then explains why it is critical for physicians to develop the attitudes or "doctorly" virtues that comprise the character of trustworthy doctors and buttress physicians' efforts to fulfill their professional obligations. Her book's presentation of physicians' duties and the elements that comprise a doctorly character, together add up to a cohesive and comprehensive description of what medical professionalism really entails. Rhodes's analysis provides a clear understanding of medical professionalism as well as a guide for doctors navigating the ethically challenging situations that arise in clinical practice. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Early on in her clinical practice, psychoanalyst Pilar Jennings was presented with a particularly difficult case: a six-year-old girl who, traumatized by loss, had stopped speaking. Challenged by the limitations of her training to respond effectively to the isolating effect of childhood trauma, Jennings takes the unconventional path of inviting her friend Lama Pema--a kindly Tibetan Buddhist monk who experienced his own life-shaping trauma at a very young age--into their sessions. In the warm therapeutic space they create, the young girl slowly begins to heal. The result is a fascinating case study of the intersection of Western psychology and Buddhist teachings. Pilar's To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power of Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action (Shambala, 2017) is for therapists, parents, Buddhists, or any of us who hold out the hope that even the deepest childhood wounds can be the portal to our capacity to love and be loved. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Psychotherapy tends to be thought of as a verbal enterprise, wherein participants speak and construct meaning through words. However, much goes on between patient and therapist at an embodied, nonverbal level that deserves attention. This is the focus of the book Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity (2020, Routledge), written by my guest, Dr. Steven H. Knoblauch. In his new book, he describes the way that cultural meaning can be inscribed and communicated in bodily gestures, and how being open to difference necessitates attention to these embodied registers. For our interview, Dr. Knoblauch unpacks his ideas and shares insights into the personal experiences that have shaped his work. This interview will be relevant for those interested in expanding their awareness of communication that happens outside of words. Steven H. Knoblauch is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He is a Clinical Adjunct Associate Professor at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New York University. His prior books are The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue (2000) and Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment (2005). Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains. Suvi Rautio is a Course Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her research seeks to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China to reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

“But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream.” Freud (1907) Jessica Gross is a valuable ally. An intuitive reader of Freud her debut novel--Hysteria (Unnamed Press, 2020)--embraces Oedipal conflict, unconscious fantasy, and voracious sexuality. The narrator, a young woman living in current day Brooklyn, discovers Freud tending bar at a neighborhood haunt “perfect for making trouble” which she does and which Freud sees. He also sees her for a session on the couch. An analysand herself, Gross renders the treatment with such emotional precision that “delusion and dream” slip away and we eavesdrop on a highly relatable woman confronting overlapping desires. Throughout the novel, Gross’ generosity with her narrator is a sensitive illustration of “say everything” the fundamental request of analysis. It is a gift for anyone who has never had the experience nor been given the space to do so. It celebrates what it means to meet oneself as sexual being. Jessica Gross is a writer whose nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Longreads, and The Paris Review Daily. She's received fellowships in fiction from the Yiddish Book Center and the 14th Street Y, and teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School. jessicargross.com 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 discussed why music so powerful in eliciting emotions with Roger Kennedy, the author of The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations (Phoenix Publishing House, 2020) Now at The Child and Family Practice in London, Kennedy is a training analyst and past President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. This is his fourteenth book. Topics covered in this episode include: The ability of music to reward close listening because of qualities like movement and the web of interactions involved. How music can draw on and has parallels to a range of situations, like “baby talk” sounds shared by mother and child, and the sounds animals make (especially in mating rituals). Discussion of parallels between music and entering a dream state, rich with free association as opposed to a concrete, logically coherent “narrative” Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

When we are hurt, we hurt others—yet when they hurt us back, we wonder why. This is one of the central phenomena addressed by Mark Bork, Jr. in his new book, Don’t Be a Dick: Change Yourself, Change Your World (Central Recovery Press). He applies his psychoanalytic perspective towards understanding the deep-seated insecurities which drive us to treat others exactly as we wish not to be treated. Yet he also offers practical skills and insights for breaking the cycles that lead to our bad behavior which, in turn, invites ‘dickish’ behavior from others. In our interview, he shares about very personal experiences which served as inspiration for this book and breaks down his concepts so that we might all be better at not being ‘dicks.’ This interview will speak to anyone struggling to understand and overcome toxic behavior, in others or in oneself. Mark Borg is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City who has been in private practice for twenty-two years, and the coauthor of the books Irrelationship and its follow-up book, Relationship Sanity. He is also a community psychologist and founding partner of the Community Consulting Group who has written extensively about the intersection of psychoanalysis and community crisis intervention. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Engaging with one’s patients is one of the most complicated aspects of being a psychoanalyst. Going well beyond simply processing information and spitting out a ready-made answer for them, it involves learning how to listen, slowly teasing out insights, speaking not only the right words but with the right tone, creating an environment where a trusting relationship can be fostered. While much of this comes with time and experience, much can be learned by thinking critically about the mechanics that go into good analytic practice. Here to discuss some of these is my guest today, Mark Winborn, here to discuss his recent ​Interpretation in Jungian Analysis: Art and Technique (Routledge 2019). Placing interpretation at the center of the practice, Winborn develops the creative and expressive elements of analysis, the importance of being attentive to language, the ways metaphors can be used to engage at a deeper level, and how a connection can be forged between an analyst and analysand. Clearly written and filled with lots of useful examples, the book will be of interest not only to analysts looking to better understand their craft, but to anyone interested in learning how to make sense of oneself. Mark Winborn is a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. He is a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and also sits on the editorial board for both the Journal of Analytical Psychology and the ​Journal of Humanistic Psychology​. He is also the author of ​Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey (2011) and ​Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond (2014). He maintains a private practice in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke University Press, 2020) move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics. Maggie Hennefeld is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her Twitter handle is @magshenny. Nicholas Sammond is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Joel Tscherne is an adjunct history general studies professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Robert Whitehead of London, a self-described “Business Man” who was “no Churchman and not a Jesus worshipper, much as I admire him,” wrote to Robert Eisler on New Year’s Eve of 1929, asking “if it is a frequent occurrence that men see The Christ; and are there occasions known when the visions are free from religiosity and at the same time full of life and power?” These questions came in light of Whitehead’s dramatic experience when he had seen a blazing vision of Christ in his home. In letters between the two men over the next few years, Eisler gave a startling psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream, which he eventually published. In this episode, I talk about Eisler’s only known attempt to psychoanalyze anyone else with psychoanalyst and religion scholar Marsha Hewitt. Guest: Marsha Hewitt (Trinity College, University of Toronto) Voice of Robert Eisler: Logan Crum Additional voices: Logan Marshall Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and His Israeli Orchestra. Funding provided by the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program. Special thanks to the Warburg Institute. Bibliography and Further Reading Eisler, Robert. The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources. London: Methuen & Co, 1931. ———. “Eine Jesusvision des. 20 Jahrhunderts psychologisch untersucht.” Zeitschrift für Religionspsychologie 11 (1938): 14-41. Follow us on Twitter: @averysquarepeg Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at [email protected]. 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 interview, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discusses her first book, Holiness and Transgression Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth, with Rachel Adelman. Translated by Eugene Matansky and published by Academic Studies Press in 2017, it was originally written in Hebrew as Kedeshot ukedoshot: Imahot hamashiah bamythos hayehudi (2014). The book engages with the female dynasty leading up to the House of David in the Hebrew Bible—specifically Lot and His Daughters (Genesis 19), Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38), and the Book of Ruth— and its influence on the Jewish Messianic Myth, from classic midrash to the Zohar. Drawing on anthropology and psychoanalytic theory, Kaniel enhances our understanding of the connection between female transgression and redemption. She identifies a type-scene by motifs that these stories all share (near extinction, lack of knowing, seduction and transgression), addressing the question of agency or lack thereof, and the fundamental tension between sexuality and motherhood. She also traces the same motifs to the opening genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew and the story of Mary in Luke, and compares representations of "the mother of the Messiah" in Christian and Jewish imaginaire. Through the prism of gender studies that explore questions of femininity, motherhood and sexuality, the murky origins of the Messiah appear in a new light. This research intertwines close Jewish literary readings with comparative religion, psychoanalysis, and gender theory, expanding the ‘mythic gaps’ in classical Jewish sources. The book won the Pines, Lakritz and Warburg awards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

What do psychoanalysts do with bodies, and what do they do with them now? Jamieson Webster has been thinking and writing on these questions as they impact her in her practice and her life. In this interview, we explore her latest book, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis, alongside her recent article in the New York Review of Books on her volunteer work in a hospital with the families of loved ones sick or dying from COVID-19. Webster speaks about issues of time and waiting, her skepticism of the call to 'carry on', and the life-threatening and curative conversions that, she suggests, are the beating heart of psychoanalytic practice. This interview is part of a series on Psychoanalysis and Time, produced in collaboration with Waiting Times, a multi-stranded research project on the temporalities of healthcare. Waiting Times is supported by The Wellcome Trust [205400/A/16/Z], and takes places across Birkbeck (University of London) and the University of Exeter. Learn more about the project by visiting whatareyouwaitingfor.org.uk, or follow us on twitter @WhatisWaiting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The concept of the unconscious has a complicated place in the history of psychology. Many areas of study ignored or outright denied it for a long time, while psychoanalysis claimed it as one of its central tenets. More recently, many non-psychoanalytic researchers have addressed the unconscious, but under different names—automaticity, implicit memory and learning, and heuristics, among others. The result is a lack of consensus in psychology on what the unconscious is and how it bears on psychotherapy processes. In their new book, The Unconscious: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications (Guilford Press, 2019) authors Joel Weinberger and Valentina Stoycheva undertake to bring together the various lines of study concerning the unconscious in order to arrive at an integrated model of unconscious processes. In our interview, they discuss the urgency for writing this book, what we might learn from various models of unconscious processes, and how psychotherapy might be enhanced by their state-of-the-art findings. This interview will be illuminating and useful for mental health therapists, researchers, and anyone interested in how the mind works. Joel Weinberger, Ph.D., is Professor in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University and a founder of Implicit Strategies, which consults for political campaigns, nonprofits, and businesses. Valentina Stoycheva, Ph.D., is a staff psychologist at Northwell Health in Bay Shore, New York, where she works with military service members, veterans, and their families. She is also a cofounder and director of Stress and Trauma Evaluation and Psychological Services (STEPS), a group practice that focuses on the integrative treatment of trauma. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The eight stories in The Making of A Psychoanalyst: Studies in Emotional Education (Routledge, 2018) are composites of clinical material highlighting familiar emotional conflicts found in treatment. Dr. Claudia Luiz invites the reader into session switch her as she demonstrates “how two human beings interact with each other to effect profound change.” Chapters do not start with reviews of theory and literature. They begin with patients. We are confronted with who they are, what they want, and their emotional impact on Dr. Luiz. We feel the immediacy of the patient’s needs and the pressures to fix something. We encounter Dr. Luiz, not as theorist looking for strategies, but as a clinician looking for “what might be required of her as a practitioner.” The dialogue between Dr Luiz and her patients is punctuated by endnotes where she shares the theories integrated into the chapter. Placing theories at the end of the chapter is an effective way of teaching because we’ve had the experience of being with the case as it unfolds. Working from a modern psychoanalytic approach Dr. Luiz Believes “the function of interpretation with its corollary penchant for insight is completely antiquated.” The job of the modern psychoanalyst is“to prepare our patients’ minds for self-discovery.” Dr. Luiz is the first-place winner of the 2006 Phyllis W. Meadow Award for Excellence in Psychoanalytic Writing (published in the journal Modern Psychoanalysis) and first place winner of the 2008 Reader’s Digest Best Writer’s Website Award. And her essay “Catrina learns to breathe” is nominated this year for a NAAPGradiva Award. Dr Luiz is on the faculty of the Academy for Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis in Livingston, New Jersey, and has a private practice in New York City and Tarrytown, NY. She was last on the program in 2014 with her book Where’s My Sanity? Stories That Help. Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Chelsea, Manhattan. He can be reached at (212)260-8115 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at [email protected] and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis