New Books in 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

From the Central Coast of California to Baden-Baden, Toronto, Siracusa, and Budapest, Christina Griffin's The Regulars’ Table: Conversations with Ferenczi (International Psychoanalytic Books, 2018) is about deep enduring friendships; then and now. Inspired by Ignotus’ eulogy for Ferenczi, Christina Griffin decided to emulate his experiments in thought transference. This experience of sitting wordlessly with a friend and “silent writing” is the catalyst for a great adventure from her home in California to the cafes of Budapest where Ferenczi once gathered with friends and colleagues at their regular table. In 1929 one of the regulars, Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story, Chains where he introduced the concept of six degrees of separation. Through her receptivity as a psychoanalyst, Dr. Griffin allows for the “interruption of the uncanny”, explores the “consequences and fears of vanishing” and discovers that she is separated from Ferenczi and his regulars by fewer than six degrees. Mining the Ferenczi correspondence as well as the writings of novelists, poets, painters, psychoanalysts, playwrights, and musicians, Griffin reconstructs a world where she joins Ferenczi to satisfy their mutual interest in “all that was human” and the “mysterious process of living among others.” Christopher Russell, LP 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 areas of the Law and psychoanalysis overlap in interesting and compelling fashion in the new book, Psychoanalysis, Law, and Society (Routledge, 2019) edited by Adrienne Harris and Plinio Montagna. The book is far reaching and covers where the law and psychoanalysis intersect in diverse areas such as family dynamics, feminism, philosophy and the environment. The authors included here are international experts with experience with the law and the consulting room. In this interview I was able to speak with several of them, Harris, Montagna, Laura Orsi and Elizabeth Allured, and we engaged in a lively discussion that also addresses the current Covid-19 crisis. This is a relevant book that will help therapists to incorporate legal ideas and philosophy into their everyday clinical practice. You can reach Christopher Bandini at @cebandini. 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 Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (Routledge 2020) Professor Nancy J. Chodorow gives name and shape to an American middle group between the ego psychological and interpersonal approaches: The American Independent Tradition or intersubjective ego psychology. Through her careful exegesis of theoreticians like Hans Loewald, Erik Erikson and her contemporaries Warren Poland and James McLaughlin she is able to distill an analytic attitude in which the patient’s individuality takes front and center. We get a measured account of how her thinking about the American Independent Tradition evolved over the last two decades, about its "Americanness" and about a powerful approach to technique in which the patient becomes a centred unit by being centred upon. Turning outward from the consulting room, the in-depth study of psychoanalytic theory is framed by a focus on a larger context, the connection between individuality and society. Chodorow advocates for a return to an interest in the social and social sciences in psychoanalytic thinking. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality. 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

Psychoanalytic theory has developed very rapidly in recent years across many schools of thought. One of the most popular builds on the work of Wilfred Bion. Fulvio Mazzacane's new book Contemporary Bionian Theory and Technique in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018) provides a concise and comprehensive introductory overview of the latest thinking in this area, with additional contemporary theoretical influence from Freud, Klein and Winnicottian thought. Covering central psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, dreams and child analysis, this book provides an excellent introduction to he most important contemporary features of Bionian theory and practice. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist 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 the contemporary philosophical landscape, a variety of materialist ontologies have appeared, all wrestling with various political and philosophical questions in light of a post-God ontology. Entering into this discussion is Adrian Johnston, with his 3-volume ​Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism​, an attempt to develop a systematic and thoroughly atheistic material ontology of the subject. The first volume, subtitled ​The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2013) looks at three recent French theorists, Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillasoux, arguing that all three ultimately fail to maintain a consistent atheism, regularly relying on various supramaterial elements to hold their systems together. In doing so, the book attempts to clear the ground for a consistently materialist ontology to be pursued in the latter two volumes. Adrian Johnston is chair and distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of close to a dozen books, including among others ​Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Northwestern 2005) and ​Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh 2014). He is also a co-editor of Northwestern University Press’ book series ​"Diaeresis​," of which this trilogy is a contribution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the current order? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries, and it’s the question that animates Dominik Finkelde’s book ​Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundation of Ethics (Columbia University Press, 2017). The book looks at these three major thinkers, and the ways they saw subjects as being immersed in a particular set of ethical orientations, but also always with a subtle but profound potential to do something beyond what they might’ve thought possible. Dominik Finkelde is a professor of contemporary political philosophy and epistemology at the Munich School of Philosophy, and is also the author of ​Zizek Between Lacan and Hegel and Benjamin Reads Proust.​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In Enduring Time (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), practicing psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychosocial Theory Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck, University of London) explores what it means to ‘take care’ of time in our current temporal predicament, where time appears radically suspended -- without the hope of a progressive future -- yet intensely felt. Drawing on a wide range of artistic, political, cultural, and psychoanalytic objects, she addresses how we might meaningfully engage with ‘the time of our times’ through a series of chapters whose titles also capture our everyday temporal experience: staying, maintaining, repeating, delaying, enduring, recalling, remaining, and ending. In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss the concerns that brought Baraitser to write this book, explore some of her case studies, and ask how her thinking might be brought to bear on clinical practice today. This interview is the second in my 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. The interview was recorded in person, prior to the COVID-19 lockdown. Jordan Osserman grew up in South Florida and currently calls London home. He received his PhD in gender studies and psychoanalysis from University College London, his MA in psychosocial studies from Birkbeck College, and his BA in womens and gender studies from Dartmouth College. His published work can be found here. 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 new book Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity: Contemporary Freudian Explorations of Trauma, Memory, and Clinical Process (Routledge, 2019), Bruce E. Reis writes intimacy is “transformative prior to the delivery of observation or interpretation” and while this book explores “the monsters, dreams and madness which emerge in the consulting room” it is primarily interested the “micro-rather than macro-level at which change occurs.” Honoring his “intellectual commitments” Reis enlists theorists including Winnicott, de M’Uzan, Bollas, and Ogden, to help him render elegant clinical moments as opposed to grand narrative case studies. Through these personal encounters, the reader is invited to consider ways of “sitting with” an unconscious experience that “disrupts rather than brings closure, knowledge or continuity.” While each chapter addresses a specific dialectic, they are all deeply interrelated. Observations made in one reflect and echo in the others; the result, according to Christopher Bollas, is a work of “quiet genius.” Dr. Reis is a Fellow and Faculty Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York, an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and a member of the Boston Change Process Study Group. He is North American book review editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and serves on the editorial boards of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the co-editor (with Robert Grossmark) of Heterosexual Masculinities featured on this program in 2013. 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

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, peering deep into the human mind is, well, really hard. On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (University Chicago Press, 2019) begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the United States in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results. In this interview, Dr. Whooley and I discuss the sociology of knowledge and ignorance that guide this book. We then discuss the changing identity of the field of psychiatry, how the DSM affected the legitimacy and perception of the discipline, and ways of managing ignorance. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of knowledge, health and illness and medical sociology, historical sociology, and mental health. Dr. Owen Whooley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Senior Fellow, UNM Center for Health Policy. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek’s prolific quips on various cultural and political issues around race and related issues, found either in short YouTube clips or lengthy books have gained a lot of attention, much of it admittedly confused and occasionally offended and frustrated. Part of this is likely due to Žižek’s style, which tends to jump around in a blur of philosophical and cultural references, sometimes obscuring what his actual point is. However, his eclectic style shouldn’t deter us from trying to use Žižek’s theories of fantasy and ideology to understand the racial dimensions of our current political situation. This is the project set out by Zahi Zalloua, with his new book ​Žižek on Race: Towards an Anti-Racist Future​ (Bloomsbury, 2020), which seeks to use Žižekian philosophy to arrive at more complicated, but also more productive and emancipatory visions of racial oppression and emancipation might look like. Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells professor of Philosophy and Literature, and Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College. He is also the author of ​Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek​, as well as ​Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature and Philosophy​. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer.Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

An Interview with Todd McGowan about his recent Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book advocates for the relevance of Hegel’s dialectical method to questions of contemporary theory and politics. It seeks to disabuse readers of common misapprehensions concerning Hegel’s philosophy, such as the familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis schema to which the dialectic has so often been reduced, and to show that the concept of contradiction understood in Hegelian fashion is intrinsically subversive of authority. By championing contradiction over ‘difference’ it defies the rhetoric of much leftist theory as it has been formulated in the wake of so-called ‘post-structuralism’. Emancipation After Hegel also combines sophisticated discussion of matters like the limits of formal logic and the history of German Idealism with playful allusions to Star Trek characters and classic films like Casablanca and Bridge on the River Kwai. Bill Schaffer is a semi-retired academic and writer. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney and held positions teaching Film Studies, Philosophy, and Literature at campuses in Australia and the UK. He has published widely in Film and Animation Studies. He is currently a scholar of No Fixed Institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Relying on Carl Jung’s theory of the complex, as well as the archetypal narratives of the Greek character Pan, Sukey Fontelieu’s The Archetypal Pan in America: Hypermasculinity and Terror (Routledge, 2018) seeks to examine a collection of social and political traumas, both personal and collective. The book examines the development of our personal and social identities in psychoanalytic terms, as well as their historical development through large and defining political events, such as the treatment of indigenous populations, foreign military interventions, and the increasing levels of violence at home. The result is a book that sees our current situation as having been in development for quite some time, and that will require deep personal reflection if we are to move forward. Sukey Fontelieu, PhD attended the University of Essex and Pacifica Graduate Institute and is currently a professor in the Jungian and Archetypal Studies Program at Pacifica. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

We want to be happy, we want to get what we want, we want to love and be loved. But life, even when our basic needs are met, often makes us unhappy. You can't always get what you want, Freud noted in his 1930 short book, Civilization and its Discontents. Our desires are foiled not by bad luck, our failures, or the environment -- but by the civilization meant to make life better. So why isn't civilization set up to maximize our happiness and pleasure? Why does more civilization also mean more psychological suffering? In his trenchant short book, Freud shows how culture is not the refinement of humanity but an effort to socialize everyone into a system that produces the types of "discontents" and "unease" which characterize modern existence. I spoke with Peter Brooks, an expert on Freud who has taught at Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Virginia and other universities. He's authored many books, including: Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), Reading for the Plot (1984), and, with Alex Woloch, Whose Freud? (2000). Professor Brooks linked Freud's Civilization and its Discontents to the earlier Thoughts for the Times on War and Death where Freud noticed that the veneer of civilized behavior was thin indeed, and that within months of the beginning of World War I people who had co-existed peacefully were capable of inflicting the most gruesome violence on their neighbors. I asked him: if civilization and progress inevitably leads to more psychological suffering, what's our way out? Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

More than anything else, Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind: I Woke Up Dead (Routledge, 2019) bears witness to what’s possible when the raw pain and heartbreak of life and death are worked with in Psychoanalysis. It tells the moving story of an analyst and his patient’s relationship as they discover the uncanny and often eerie aspects of their connected lives, and their deaths. And, yet, the book is much more. Since its invention, Psychoanalysis has worked with phenomena such as telepathy, thought transference, shared dream and trance states, mass hallucination, dissociated identities, premonitions from the future, doppelgängers, doubles, parallel lives, somnambulism, visitations from the deceased, and other paranormal phenomena. Dan Gilhooley and Frank Toich’s book is a considerable contribution to this history in Psychoanalysis that is still very much in the making. Rather than approaching these phenomena and Psychoanalysis through a biological model, as Freud did, or through a linguistic model, as Lacan did, Gilhooley and Toich approach these phenomena through quantum theory. In doing so they provide what is certainly one of the more radical revisionings of the Unconscious to date. In their hands, the Unconscious speaks to us from the future and from locations beyond ourselves just as much as it provides access to multiple universes and times. In doing so, Gilhooley and Toich offer an account of the unconscious that radically decenters the self and its identities, desires, and impulses in ways that make it possible to imagine anew what is possible in psychoanalytic treatment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Activists have been working to dismantle patriarchal structures since the feminist and civil rights movements of the last century, and yet we continue to struggle with patriarchy today. In their new book, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Polity, 2018), Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider use psychoanalysis and psychology as frameworks for understanding the vexingly enduring power of this social structure. They offer a cogent and eye-opening theory addressing the fear of loss against which patriarchy aims to protect us, and the consequent impingements on our ability to enter into genuine relationships. In our interview, Carol and Naomi talk about how this book came about and what their ideas offer for our understanding of current political events. Carol Gilligan is a writer, activist, University Professor at New York University, and the author of In a Different Voice, one of the most influential feminist books of all time. Naomi Snider is a research fellow at New York University, co-founder of NYU’s Radical Listening Project, and a candidate in psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute. Eugenio Duarte 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 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

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [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 2012, the world-renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek released his 1000-page tome ​Less Than Nothing​, following it up afterwards with its shorter reformulation ​Absolute Recoil​ in 2014. The works contained his usual use of movie-references, historical and political events and jokes to engage in some substantial philosophical formulations, particularly in dialogue with Hegel and Lacan. In these books, Žižek forged a new developed a number of innovative approaches to various philosophical questions, from quantum mechanics to contemporary political movements. Adrian Johnston’s most recent book on Žižek, A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism​ (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces a number of these various developments in detail, salvaging the key philosophical themes while also offering several criticisms and developments of his own. Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor in and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and is a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. His many books include ​Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity​ (2008) and ​Badiou, ​Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009)​. With Slavoj ​Žižek and Todd McGowan, he is a co-editor of the book series ​Diaeresis​, all from Northwestern University Press. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue (Routledge, 2018), edited by Rosine Jozef Perelberg, clarifies and develops the Freudian conception according to which sexual identity is not reduced to the anatomical difference between the sexes, but is constructed as a psychic bisexuality that is inherent to all human beings. The book takes the Freudian project into new grounds of clinical practice and theoretical formulations and contributes to a profound psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality. The object of pychoanalysis is psychosexuality, which is not, in the final analysis, determined by having a male or a female body, but by the unconscious phantasies that are reached après coup through tracing the nuanced interplay of identifications as they are projected, enacted and experienced in the transference and the countertransference in the analytic encounter. Drawing on British and French Freudian and post-Freudian traditions, the book explores questions of love, transference and countertransference, sexual identity and gender to set out the latest clinical understanding of bisexuality, and includes chapters from influential French analysts available in English for the first time. Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with a private practice in Los Angeles. He is candidate at The Psychoanalytic Center of California. 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

Imagination is one of the most important elements of being human, but is most often assumed we know what it is, while rarely being analyzed. Here with me today is Jonathan Erickson to discuss his recent book Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience (Routledge, 2019). The book looks at various theories of imagination through history, and then looks at what neuroscience can tell us about the functioning of imagination, as well as looking at what the functioning of imagination can tell us about neuroscience. Jonathan Erickson is a writer and educator, and holds a BA in English literature from UC Berkeley and a PhD in depth psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Dr. Babette Becker’s memoir I Should Have Been Music (Page Publishing, 2018) recounts her experience as a patient in four different mental hospitals from 1957 to 1960. It was a time when little was known about mental illness, except the shame and horror of it, and nothing was known about early childhood trauma. Passed from hospital to hospital carrying several severe classic diagnostic labels, she narrowly missed being sent to a State hospital where, if not for luck, she might have been incarcerated for the rest her life. The memoir follows her progress through these hospitals as well as the progress from psychosis to functioning adult. Along with her memories and journal entries from her time in the hospitals the book includes doctors' reports from each of the hospitals. These primary source materials reveal the stark contrast between the doctors' portrayal and the reality of Dr. Becker’s experience. Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst in private practice 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

Gun violence must be what drive defusion looks like; with every shot fired, with every life stilled by rounds of ammo, we are summoned to address the acute darkness of psychic collapse and radical decompensation. We witness the unthreading of a once more sturdily interwoven seam. We live on the edge. Don’t sit with your back to the door. By the time you get that gun out of your purse, you know it’s already too late. How did we get to this point? How did you and I become captive to a violence that holds us all captive? Ours is a culture that depends on spikes in fear followed by states of frenzy followed by mind-blowing numbness. Given the overstimulation that drives us to seek quiescence—how we live now—I chose the death drive as the autumnal theme for my work at NBiP. Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler’s book Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Routledge 2018) provided me with an antidote to the temptation to defensively play dead. It is perhaps an understatement to say that our capacity to withstand otherness needs some bolstering. We are in luck with this interview for no one works with otherness in quite the way Lacanian-inflected analysts do. Sinclair and Steinkoler argue that we have gone beyond being unbehagen—the malaise one feels in everyday life (which would now feel like a luxury)—and detail a different kind of anxious, imperiled experience—they call it to be “angwashed”: in short, we are soaking in it. This book is about the consequences of a new experience of aloneness, about the inculcation and proliferation of narcissism, and its dire consequences. I think of guns and I think of trigger warnings. The one who pulls the trigger is radically alone. The one who needs the safe space ends up being set apart. No one belongs. Belonging demands we be with others. Yet when you kill someone they are with you forever. When you kill someone you have also at long last really made contact with a being outside yourself. As Modern analysts say: “follow the contact.” Lacan reminds us that the human subject is catapulted into being by an encounter with language, the other, and the social link. Each of these entities threatens human narcissism. As such, every encounter with difference (represented by language, the other, the world) can arouse the specter of violence. Please feel free to address all comments regarding the interview to me 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

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

"I’m very happy to say I really really do love psychoanalysis. I think the insights are absolutely genius and I don’t think that I would be able to do any of my work if I didn’t have those ideas readily available to me." In Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge 2019), Professor Brett Kahr takes us on a tour de force through the rough fringes of clinical practice. He portrays his work with forensic and non-verbal patients, with sado-masochistic couples and deeply disturbed individuals. He is a true champion of the lost art of interpretation in the face of extremely challenging behaviour in the consulting room and treats us to gems of insight gathered from decades of clinical experience and in-depth study of the history of the field. The book and the interview will be of great interest to clinicians working in independent or institutional settings with the most threatening and vulnerable patients. 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

There are many pathways into the world of psychoanalysis. Some arrive from fields like psychiatry and psychology; some from literature, philosophy, and the humanities; and others from political organising. Our guest Ian Parker found his way into Lacanian psychoanalysis via dissatisfaction with his training in psychology, alongside strongly-held Marxist and feminist political commitments. In his autobiographical work, Psychoanalysis, Clinic, and Context: Subjectivity, History, and Autobiography (Routledge, 2019), Ian shares with us his encounter with British psychoanalysis’s “entangled world of personal-political relationships and rivalries,” including his exploration of Kleinian leftists, group analysts, and Lacanian institutes, while making the case for the emancipatory potential of psychoanalytic thinking and practice, as summarized in his provocative statement: “Psychoanalysis is not what you think.” Tune to hear Ian’s story and his views on the political, theoretical, and clinical potentials and pitfalls of psychoanalysis today. Jordan Osserman grew up in South Florida and currently calls London home. He received his PhD in gender studies and psychoanalysis from University College London, his MA in psychosocial studies from Birkbeck College, and his BA in womens and gender studies from Dartmouth College. His published work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you may have in your mind of Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in flagrante delicto. If this reference does not ring a bell, perhaps you can just consider yourself lucky. What follows are some head spinning facts: Sabina Spielrein was the first female member of Freudʼs inner circle. As a young Russian woman from a prominent, educated and chaotic Jewish family, she fell ill and was treated at the Burghozli Hospital for psychiatric illnesses in Zurich. There she began to recover and to do research into the psyche. On regaining her emotional balance, she attended medical school. She wrote a paper that argued for the existence of a death instinct in 1912, pre-empting Freudʼs work in that area by 8 years. She developed ways of working with children that also preceded the thinking of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. Her dissertation was on the language of schizophrenia. She comingled evolutionary ideas with psychoanalytic ideas. She was interested in sex and sexuality. She treated Jean Piaget. She worked with Vygotsky. She was involved with the project under Trotsky to link communism with psychoanalysis. She endeavored to mend the rift between Freud and Jung. She was killed by the Nazi regime. Her life resembles a nodal point; she stood at the crossroads of extraordinary changes in world politics and psychoanalysis. She was not necessarily happy. She wrote in ways that could hide her strong points of view. She was on the scene yet left almost no footprint. She was a person with breakdown knowledge who became an analyst. She was with people, working, and yet she comes off as solitary. I have written all of this and not mentioned she had a youthful affair and fascination with Carl Jung. Why do I not lead with this story you may ask? After all that is the story we all know if we know anything about her. But given what has been detailed above, a life with many contours, doesnʼt the young adult dalliance with Jung seem more or less a footnote? Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and first host of NBIP. A psychoanalyst, practicing in NYC and Rome, she serves on the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. Trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Write to her 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

Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund Freud's associations, anxieties and conflicts. These books tackle what has often remained hidden both in the historical writing about psychoanalysis and in Freud's explicit account of castration: the practice of female genital mutilation, pervasive in major European cities as treatment for hysteria in the end of 19th century. In this interview we discussed the first volume of work, The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein (Routledge, 2015). We talked about Freud's reaction to the practices of medical castration of women and children, as well as his attempts to cope with the demands of his father that Sigmund, following the orthodox Jewish custom, circumcise his own sons. We begin to introduce the complex imagistic structure of Bonomi's analysis: the dreams that form the backbone of this study, particularly the dream of Irma's Injection. In the next part, we will speak about the relationship between Freud, his trauma, and Sándor Ferenczi, and discuss Ferenczi's legacy in the history of psychoanalysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. 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

Benjamin Fong’s Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2016) revitalizes two oft’ maligned psychoanalytic concepts, the death drive and the drive to mastery, and makes lively and thoroughgoing use of both to revisit arguments about the power of the culture industry and how we might resist its narcotizing allure. For instance, we know Facebook is the devil, offering us relief from real strife via impotent political engagement; like prisoners in solitary we write on its wall. We know Netflix is a platform for product placement that we pay for, meanwhile losing track of our myriad subscriptions. We know we ought to think twice before inhaling the contents of either yet we simply cannot seem to stop ourselves. What gives? This--our compliant involvement with what promises to decrease our power and increase our alienation—is an old Frankfurt School obsession and query. Fong attempts to explain our complicity by using Freud altogether differently than his forebears. (Fong has been a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry which, having turned ghosts into ancestors, strikes me as the closest thing we have to a contemporary version of the Institut fur Sozialforschung going today, although I believe most of its members are American born.) He reminds us that the Frankfurt School ignored the death drive. In fact, the Freud engaged by the Frankfurt School appears to have stopped writing around 1919. (It is very odd to think that they did not absorb and make use of Beyond The Pleasure Principle, forget Civilization and Its Discontents.) I admit I found myself wondering if Freud’s conclusions about man as wolf to man, the impossibility of loving our neighbor as ourselves, and our desire to go out as we came in, were simply too bleak even for Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? Of course, the death drive is tough for politics: how to organize people to fight for what is just if, at the end of the day, they simply seek the cessation of tension, and furthermore, are compulsively drawn to repeat their worst experiences? Freud’s thinking after 1920 can be read as offering a devastating critique of neoliberal “just do it” life with its appeals to progress and perfectibility. And Fong puts this Freud to great use. Attempting to construct a way out of being subsumed by the culture industry, with its promise of ruin, Fong champions a reappraisal of the super-ego as a friendly presence. He borrows from Hans Loewald, who argued for the super-ego as being future oriented, and harboring a hopeful fantasy, like a kind parent, about the fate of the ego over time. Fong also engages the thinking of Jacques Lacan, and with his help, tries to answer a question derived from a debate between Freud and Wilhelm Reich, about “where does the misery come from?” (Thanks to Jacqueline Rose for bringing this question to all of our attention). He develops a new theory (!) about aggressivity that locates it as arising neither solely from within nor from without. Interestingly, he does not rely on Laplanche to make his argument. That said, mastery as a concept scares me. Can “the master’s tools,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, “dismantle the master’s house?” Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development did come to mind as I read, and I was left at times feeling a bit like one of Carol Gilligan’s adolescent girls, putting my feet, talk about returning to the primordial ooze, into the shoes of another. Then there is Freud’s idea that women lack sufficient super-egos. Following this logic, it is not too strange to ask if women can exercise mastery? And finally, what about Kerry James Marshall’s evocative and resonant use of the word, albeit spelled differently (Mastry), to refer to both slavery, the slave master, and the lives of those who survived it and his aftermath? Mastery is not a neutral word. Tracy D. Morgan is a psychoanalyst and the founding editor of NBiP. Write to her 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

The subject of ethics in psychoanalysis has long been relegated to the sidelines of clinical theory. In his new book Psychoanalysis as an Ethical Process with a forward by Peter Fonagy (Routledge, 2019), Robert P. Drozek utilizes both philosophical and analytic concepts to arrive at a new theory of an ethical relational psychoanalysis, one that emphasizes the dignity and the values of both patient and analyst. Although the discussion of ethics is often seen as dry, Psychoanalysis as an Ethical Process disproves that notion with compelling clinical examples and lively discussion of theoretical ideas. In this interview we focus on the areas of therapeutic action and technique and how Drozek’s incorporation of ethics can enhance our understanding of our work. This book is will be of interest to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts as well as those with as students of philosophy. You can reach Christopher Bandini at @cebandini. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Buddhism and psychotherapy have been in conversation since the days of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erich Fromm. Today, when practices drawn from Buddhism have entered the mainstream, that conversation continues in multiple dimensions. In Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Ira Helderman looks at the ways psychotherapists, some of them also active as leaders of Dharma communities, have engaged Buddhism, both as individuals and in their approach to their psychotherapeutic practice. He relies on his own research, interviews with therapists, and fieldwork in a field that continues to take new forms. Jack Petranker is the founder of Founder, Center for Creative Inquiry and Full Presence Mindfulness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis