New Books in Psychoanalysis

I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water, I heard a news report that the children of refugee women were being removed from them at the American border. Rose is nothing if not prescient in her thinking and in this book, perhaps especially so. While most of us learn what we think “alla nachträghlichkeit” (after the fact), her mind has the capacity to trip the light fantastic. I follow her writing to discover what I won’t let myself know. Perhaps she has more access than most to the realm of the preconscious. It seems to be the case. This wide-ranging book (Rose is an exemplary literary critic and feminist theorist so she pulls from multiple intellectual arenas) is largely about motherhood and its enemies. She examines “mother” as a signifier demonstrating how it functions as a repository for blame and misogynist aggression. The book’s twilight message and hot tip for women on the religious right: beware veneration of the maternal for behind it often lies something quite venal. Mothers, Rose argues, cannot win for losing and yet remain fantastically vested with delivering the impossible: never ending happiness and total safety. “A simple argument,” she writes, “guides this book: that motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we … bury the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human.” To be fully human involves being in need of help, failing frequently and feeling unwieldy hate. (Her chapter on hating and the negation of mothers’ hateful feelings and the social impact of that negation is worth the price of the book alone.) I have the urge to offer an example from the social realm to make clear what Rose is getting at throughout this text—if only because I found myself fogging over at times while reading. My hazy response I believe relates to my resistance to the topic. Hearkening back to Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (another powerful book that caused me to often drift), Rose dares to look at motherhood as an institution, denaturalizing it to the core. The example that comes to mind comes from Kristin Luker’s incredible Dubious Conceptions, which debunked the ever-popular idea (see the Clinton Administration, circa 1996 that eviscerated the social safety net) that teen pregnancy creates poverty. The truth, Luker argues, is closer to the reverse: teen poverty may generate teen pregnancy, as poverty can foreclose roads to adulthood, leaving motherhood as a last resort. Poor teen girls who don’t carry to term and poor teen girls who become mothers occupy the same economic strata ten years on. It’s not the pregnancy that hurts their life chances but rather that economic policies are culpable. And yet, teenage mothers, scapegoats really, have long served to hide planned economic inequality; the truth, as it were, is buried in young female flesh. As our ugly summer wore on, I re-read this book, further preparing for the interview, in addition to spending time in the consulting room, doing what I do: listening to patients elaborate upon themselves. To state the obvious, the psychoanalyst makes her living being inundated with a plethora of words about mothers. To state the further obvious, as temps skyrocketed, Freud’s maxim regarding the repudiation of femininity as bedrock was being powerfully reinforced in America. July and August offered daily opportunities to witness... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Prof. Herzog carries forward the groundbreaking research program into the politics of desire that already brought us Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany and Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and The Future of American Politics. The book offers fresh readings of the work of such titanic (and sadly misunderstood) figures as Karen Horney, Robert Stoller, Félix Guattari and Konrad Lorenz—and it will change the way you think about trauma, libido and the New Left. Our conversation focused primarily on the radical currents in Cold War psychoanalysis and what happens when the world comes crashing through the bedroom window. David Gutherz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of the human sciences and revolutionary politics, with a special interest in Fascist and Post-Fascist Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Elliot Jurist is one of the authors, along with Peter Fonagy, of a prominent book in psychological science called Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self, published in 2002. This book, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy (The Guilford Press, 2018), comes along 15 years later and “corrects” some aspects of the previous book as well as elaborates upon the emotional component of the mentalizing process. What does mentalization have to do with Psychoanalysis? A lot, if you agree with Dr. Jurist who argues that the prospects for psychoanalysis as a thriving discipline within the academic and clinical worlds is greatly enhanced by the conversations and research emerging from the mentalization paradigm. Minding Emotions accomplishes many tasks, ranging from introducing the science of mentalization, discussing the place of emotions within mentalization studies, proposing the central value of concepts like “mentalizing affectivity” through “autobiographical memory,” analyzing the intersection between mentalization and contemporary psychoanalysis, and critiquing the neoliberal biases hidden within current forms of psychological discourse. The book will be useful and practical to therapists of all kinds, while raising intriguing questions for mature psychoanalytic thinkers about the essential and necessary aspects of the psychoanalytic endeavor. 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

Can one integrate Klein and Winnicott? Or does one have to choose between them when practicing psychoanalysis? These are questions for Abram and Hinshelwood in this podcast interview of two scholars known for their reference books on Klein and Winnicott. Bob Hinshelwood is the author of The Dictionary of Kleinian Thought and Jan Abram is the author of The Language of Winnicott. Most psychodynamic clinicians practicing today are heavily influenced by Object Relations theory, but many of them do not distinguish between the various kinds of OR theories. This book will give them an excellent opportunity to learn about the fundamental differences between the “object” of the Kleinian infant and the “object” of the Winnicottian one. Since we (therapists) become that object in the transference, Klein and Winnicott give us different paradigms to understand who we might be to our patients in their transference experience. The Clinical Paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott: Comparisons and Dialogues (Routledge, 2018) is relatively short, with concise introductory articles and authentic back-and-forth dialogues between the authors as they clarify their respective paradigms. These dialogues, spiced at times with impatience and frustration, are nevertheless cordial and lucid presentations of the basic ideas and concepts of Klein and Winnicott, with the differences and similarities clearly called forth. 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

Psychoanalysis is a queer theory. That’s what Tim Dean said, according to Eve Watson in the afterword to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (Punctum Books, 2017), a new book that she co-edited with Noreen Giffney. In her interview for this podcast, Watson qualifies that declaration by saying that psychoanalysis isn’t always a queer theory, but it should be. “There are many psychoanalyses.” Queer theory challenges the conventional approach to sexuality that many clinicians absorbed from their training. These clinicians run the risk of imposing outdated and oppressive sexual norms upon their clients. Until the mid-70’s, homosexuality was officially a mental illness and many psychoanalysts continued to try to cure homosexuals of their sexual pathology long after the DSM corrected its culturally determined diagnostic judgment in 1973. Queer theorists argue that this error was not an isolated incident but rather a trend within institutionalized psychoanalysis that continues to limit the effectiveness of psychoanalytic practice today, and in the worst cases, to harm its consumers. In fact, the paragraphs above may give a distorted view of the book which does not pursue an argument but presents a stimulating conversation among queer theorists and clinicians about psychoanalysis, sexuality, gender, identity, and discourse. The conversation can fly high at times, especially for those who are new to this kind of literature, but the variety of contributors speak in many voices and every reader will find something valuable in this book for deepening their psychoanalytic vision. 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

This interview with Jonathan House is about a book titled Laplanche: An Introduction (The Unconscious in Translation, 2015). Dr. House is not the author of the book (more on that below) but he is the publisher and translator of portions of the book. This interview tries to understand Laplanche: An Introduction in the context of House’s expertise as a teacher, translator, scholar, and publisher of the works of the French psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche. Laplanche consists of three essays including a long introductory essay by Dominique Scarfone which presents a broad overview of the evolution and scope of Laplanche’s theory. The second section of the book is an essay written in 1964 by Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis on the origins of phantasy, desire, and the unconscious. This essay was translated by House. The final section of the book is another essay by Jean Laplanche, “Preface to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Dr. House teaches in the literature department at Columbia University and serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst at the University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is also the founder of a publishing enterprise called “The Unconscious in Translation” which specializes in translating and publishing the works of Jean Laplanche and other French thinkers. In this interview, I hope to introduce the listener to the flavor of Laplanche’s thinking and to Dr. House’s passion about the importance of Laplanche to the psychoanalytic endeavor as it relates to the sexual unconscious. 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

“Clinical moments,” as defined in this book, are those therapeutic encounters that challenge the analyst’s capacity to make snap judgments about how to respond to a patient at particularly delicate times. Richard Tuch and Lynn S. Kuttnauer‘s edited collection Conundrums and Predicaments in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018), presents twelve such moments, each one written by a different analyst, with twenty-five experts who share their ways of thinking about the conundrums and predicaments facing the clinician. The objective of the book is not to teach clinicians about how to rise to the occasion, but rather to illustrate multiple perspectives and approaches and thereby investigate theoretical and technical questions about therapeutic action: How can we best promote change and healing in our patients’ lives? Each clinical moment is introduced by an editor’s introduction and a “moment in context” which serves as a kind of literature review for the particular issue described. The expert commentators represent most of the prominent schools, including Bionian, Contemporary Freudian, Ego Psychology, French Psychoanalysis, Interpersonalist, Kleinian, Lacanian, Relational, and Self-Psychology. Commentators include Salman Akhtar, Anne Alvarez, Fred Busch, Andrea Celenza, Jay Greenberg, and Theodore Jacobs, among many others. Some of the chapters are particularly provocative and surprising such as the one presented by Lynn Kuttnauer about her patient, an Orthodox Jew who turns to her Rabbi for help in a moment of great need. The commentators for this moment include Rosemary Balsam who provides a compelling feminist perspective and Rach Blass, who argues strongly for a classically intrapsychic, Kleinian approach to the material. This chapter, and the book as a whole, serves as a stimulating and pleasurable exploration into comparative psychoanalysis and a challenge to hone one’s own beliefs and commitments about what one is doing as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. 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

Dominique Scarfone‘s The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious (The Unconscious in Translation, 2015) charts “a new itinerary through the vast landscape that is Freud.” For many North American readers, or others who may not appreciate the relevance of drive theory and Freud’s metapsychology in today’s world, this book serves as an inspiring re-visitation of that territory and presents a cogent theory for understanding clinical material and analytic aims in a faithfully Freudian context. The book is also an excellent introduction to many of the ideas that animate the French School of Psychoanalysis, especially for readers who may not have found an accessible way into that rich and stimulating tradition. The title of the book is a reference to time and history as they affect the unconscious. Scarfone emphasizes the temporal dynamics of the unconscious as opposed to spatial dynamics (topographies and structures). He analyzes the psychoanalytic truism that “the unconscious is timeless” and shows us how that statement is not exactly true in the way people typically think about it. Scarfone says that a close reading of Freud’s work shows us that “time does exist for the unconscious, but somehow the repressed is protected from its corrosive effects.” This observation will ring true to any clinician who has witnessed the destructive repetitions that occur in clients’ lives and that manifest disturbingly in the transference. These repetitive phenomena are the “returns” of unconscious elements that remain presently active, unpast, until through analysis they can be inserted into another kind of time that transforms them into history, rescuing them from occurring as eternal symptoms. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles. He is candidate at The Psychoanalytic Center of California. [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 history of psychoanalysis is full of twists, turns and also glaring omissions. In their new two-volume set, editors Irwin Hirsch and Donnell Stern attempt to set the record straight in regard to the overlooked contributions of interpersonal writers and thinkers. In this interview, they speak at length about the history of the interpersonal tradition, why it was initially ignored by more traditional approaches, and how it became the one of the foundations of what is known as the relation school today. The Interpersonal Perspective and Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s (Routledge, 2017) and Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis 1980s-2010s (Routledge, 2018) are valuable additions to the psychoanalytic canon and essential texts for anyone interested in the development of relational and all contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. On Twitter @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 April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted with his surgeon Hans Pichler 92 times. Freud’s smoking motivated much of the fussiness with his prosthetic jaw: it had to be right at the palate edge, with optimal occlusion so as to get the most out of his cigars. For Freud, smoking facilitated writing and intellectual creativity; it provided exquisite enjoyment. An inanimate object thus served as a conduit of both vitality and grave illness—a testament to the entanglement, indeed, the indistinguishability of the life and death drives. In 1977, after a biopsy of a tumor in her right breast, Audre Lorde fantasized about lopping off the agent of her destruction like “a she-wolf chewing off a paw caught in a trap.” (56) In the manner of a Kleinian infant, she directed her rage at the persecutory breast that betrayed her (once again) and ceased being her own. Lorde turned her poetry and personal survival into political acts of reparation, linking the ravages of cancer to racial and sexual injury and offering herself to queer communities of color as an object of introjection and identification. In 1992, on the anniversary of her breast cancer diagnosis, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was en route to yet another academic lecture. She sat in a plane on a runway in frigid Toronto watching Pepto-Bismol-pink anti-icing fluid run down the window beside her. Seized by nauseating horror, she recalled the bloody lymphatic discharge draining from her body in the weeks following her mastectomy. In 1996, after imaging revealed a spinal metastasis that would ultimately kill her, Sedgwick emerged as a patient-teacher in her polyphonic A Dialogue on Love (1999), an account of a psychodynamic treatment intermixed with her poetry and her therapist’s notes. Through autobiographically inflected theoretical writings and the advice column, “Off My Chest,” Sedgwick engaged in what she called good pedagogy, instructing readers about love and mourning in the “prognosis time” of incremental bodily loss. Lana Lin brings together the stories of Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick, as well as insights from her own struggle with breast cancer in the tour de force, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham University Press, 2017). With her three transferential figures, Lin explores what it means to loosen one’s grip on objects, to live with self-estrangement and threats to bodily integrity, and to understand loss as the maintenance of relationality. As cancer fragments and changes one’s relationship to time, it becomes a catalyst for reparation, invention, and love. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 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

Alenka Zupancic has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about sex with only cursory mention of things naughty. What is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017) avoids fluff, heterosexual intercourse, and the gender binary (and gender altogether) and instead cogently explains sexual difference, the elusive “beyond” of the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, the materiality of signifiers, the hole in being, the non-coincidence of truth and knowledge, primal repression, passion, the event, and the political importance of psychoanalysis. Sex for Zupancic is an ontological problem, co-extensive with a disturbance in reality, a signifying gap and structural impediment. Sex is attached to that which cannot be fully known or embodied and is therefore directly related to the unconscious. Subjectivity emerges from within the fault entailed in signification, as does surplus enjoyment. Important here, too, is the well-worn notion, but with a twist, that there is no reality prior or external to discourse. Zupancic reminds us that nature is not a pure and full presence before the arrival of the human but an object produced by and for science. The Real is an effect of language: the signifier invades the signified and alters it from within. Finally, and perhaps most mind-blowingly, the human in her formulation is not that which is merely in excess of the animal (dressing it up in language and culture, let’s say) but, rather, an unfinished and dysfunctional dimension: humanity as a veil that simultaneously points and gives form to animals’ ontological incompleteness. We cover these complex ideas in the interview, as well as other pressing matters: the disappearance of the hysteric, the desert of the post-oedipal (the only one who managed to escape the Oedipus Complex, Lacan noted, was Oedipus himself), and the status of love at the end of analysis. Anna Fishzon, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 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

What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral culpability for the Holocaust? Roger Frie explores the thorny issue of historical memory and intergenerational trauma in his new award winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017). In an intensely personal confrontation with the Nazi past in his own family, Roger searches for ways to navigate historical traumas and reconcile the memory of his grandfather with the knowledge of his deeds. Roger Frie is a registered psychologist and interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and history. He publishes and lectures widely on historical trauma, culture, memory, and human interaction. Roger has also edited a collection of essays bringing together historians and psychoanalysts to further examine the dynamics of intergenerational trauma entitled History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy (Routledge, 2018). Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of modern Europe specializing in Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Richard Tuch is an analyst in Los Angeles who specializes in writing and teaching about psychoanalytic technique. In this book, he succinctly reviews a number of major historic controversies regarding technique, fairly presenting both sides and arguing that psychoanalytic practice tends to evolve toward a middle ground after the pendulum swings too far in favor of an overvalued idea. Tuch was trained as a modern ego psychologist but he is steeped in other schools as well, especially British Object Relations, the Middle School, and the Relational School. He is well-versed in the literature about mentalization, theory of mind, and meta-cognition. In Psychoanalytic Method in Motion: Controversies and Evolution in Clinical Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2017), he covers debates concerning free association, transference interpretations, enactment, empathy, the analysts authority, and the scientific evidence for psychoanalysis. His writing is lucid, accessible to a lay audience, open-minded, and solidly based in the reality of the day-to-day interactions between analysts and patients. While he is unabashedly pluralistic and multi-lingual in terms of psychoanalytic theory, he is not afraid to disclose his biases and personal conclusions about where a contemporary analyst can confidently stand. 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

When the Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis writes a book about the work of psychoanalysis, interested parties ought to take notice. But alas, the world of psychoanalysis speaks many languages and readers often choose authors who speak their own tongue. The Work of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017) by Dana Birksted-Breen, while written in English, listens to international voices in the psychoanalytic community and considers them from the perspective of an analyst who is a multilingual traditionalist with a contemporary ear. The subtitle of the book, Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind, illustrates the point. The author adheres to a French-inflected Freudian premise that sexuality is foundational to psychoanalytic work while at the same time pushing forward the frontiers of theory with her reflections on the theme of time. These reflections are fresh, original, and convincing essays on the temporal processes that are essential to the psychoanalytic endeavor. Birksted-Breen’s book addresses the topic announced in the title—the work of psychoanalysis, taking up questions of sexuality, identity, and time. A central chapter on the “penis-as-link” demonstrates her capacity for honoring, reconciling, and cleaning up theoretical muddles while giving birth to a novel concept. While this chapter focuses on the male member, its conceptualization arises from decades of thinking about the feminine in psychoanalysis. Many readers are likely to take away a renewed understanding and appreciation of the centrality of the feminine and of time as components of the psychoanalytic mind. Dr. Birksted-Breen was born in New York, raised in Paris, and trained in London. In the book, she virtually bridges the channel by integrating key ingredients of the French and British traditions but does not quite cross the pond, citing theoretical emphases that distance her from the American love affair with relational psychoanalysis. She does not criticize other schools but cautions that each one has its own “grammar” that limits any multi-lingual project and obligates the writer to situate the intellectual ancestry of every psychoanalytic term as a necessary discipline for theoretical consistency. Do not fear that the book is an exercise in psychoanalytic pedantry. On the contrary, I cannot imagine that all readers will not agree that Birksted-Breen’s book captures the essential spirit of our profession and presents a brilliant exposition of the uniquely compelling genius of this thing we call psychoanalysis. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in 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

The “tongue in cheek” title of The New Analyst’s Guide to the Galaxy: Questions about Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 2017), which references the hugely popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, hints at the playful and lighthearted tone of the conversation that unfolds between co-authors Luca Nicoli (the “new analyst”) and Antonino Ferro (the Guide) in this mildly irreverent but ultimately serious statement about the future of psychoanalysis. Nicoli is a recent graduate of an Italian institute, struggling to integrate his understanding of the time-honored, psychoanalytic writers that he studied in seminar with the revolutionary thinking of Antonino Ferro who argues that orthodoxy is a mortal threat to the vitality of psychoanalysis. Antonino Ferro is the foremost spokesperson for a theory known as Bionian Field Theory. This theory blends Bionian conceptions (e.g. containing, beta and alpha elements, dreaming) with contemporary field theory (a way of understanding intersubjectivity) and Italian narratology (the analyst and patient pay attention to and develop the characters and scripts that appear in the field of the consulting room as a way of dreaming forward unprocessed emotional material). In this podcast interview, young Dr. Nicoli, who considers himself a contemporary relational analyst, speaks about the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of integrating “standard” relational psychoanalysis with Bionian Field Theory. The book is not a theoretical essay, however, but records a series of questions that Nicoli poses to Ferro about clinical practice, as well as psychoanalytic education. For example, is it necessary for candidates to spend so much time reading Freud? Should analysts charge patients for cancelled sessions? Is the couch necessary? Ferro answers questions like these in light of his theoretical model, provocatively and humorously, but with a deeply grateful attitude for the dreams of our psychoanalytic ancestors. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles. He is a 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

Little murders, unkind cutting back, uneasy intimacy and connoisseurship gone awry are just a few of the provocative relational concepts Dr. Margaret Crastnopol describes and explores in her new book Micro-trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury (Routledge, 2015) Trained in the interpersonal tradition, Dr. Crastnopol writes about how patients experience the slights that occur in their everyday interactions. These exchanges, in an earlier day, in a prior theoretical orientation, may have been dismissed as resistance, or interpreted mainly along the lines of drive theory or Oedipal conflict. Without dismissing the value of these prior viewpoints, or treating her patient reports as superficial or tangential, Dr. Crastnopol mines this material for its own clinical richness. In this interview we explore many of the book’s essential ideas, how Dr. Crastnopol came to write it, and even touch upon how where we practice geographically may influence our analytic work. Pragmatic and clearly written, Micro-trauma is a valuable resource for all practicing clinicians. Christopher Bandini tweets @cebandini. 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 an interview for the pessimists among us: Worried that your career as an analyst is over? That CBT is about to enact world domination over all things psychological? Plagued by ideas that your institute training was all for naught? Aner Govrin is Director of the doctoral program in Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics at Bar Ilan University in Israel, a psychoanalyst, and memberof the Tel Aviv Institue for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP). His keen intelligence and big picture perspective will assuage at least a modicum of your despair. Employing ideas from the sociology of knowledge, Govrin’s Conservative and Radical Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Knowledge: The Fascinated and the Disenchanted (Routledge, 2016) both expands and contracts our point of view on psychoanalysis, organizing the profession into communities of the “fascinated” and the “troubled.” The tension between these two groups promises, if we can avoid collapsing into hostile splitting, to create a state of almost perpetual renewal within the field. According to Govrin, we need the fascinated–those from schools of thought that tend to have charismatic leaders and theoretical ideas that are a kind of “set piece” such as Klein, Lacan, Bion, Kohut or Spotnitz–to dive deeply into their theories, creatively expanding upon them. At the same time, we also need the thinking of the scientifically and philosophically troubled–those who seek to move the field towards interacting with other disciplines, who pursue notions of truth and efficacy, who queried bedrock notions of the analyst’s authority, dismantling the idea that there is only one person’s psyche in the room–to keep things moving. Offering a warning about the ways in which the post-modern turn in the profession might lead to creative torpor, Govrin suggests we embrace the fascinated among us, applauding their diving deeply and fully into their demi-monde. He reminds us as well that behind every troubled community lies a fascinated community about to come into its own. Govrin believes that psychoanalysis displays a marvelous porosity, and so has the ability to make use of myriad cultural shifts. If institutes can encourage creativity amongst candidates and faculty, he argues, rather than demand strict adherence to a “party line,” the field promises to proliferate and thrive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgender experience. Building on the work of sexologists, Freud not only posited a universal bisexuality, thereby implying that we are all transgender in our unconscious, but also indexed something in sexuality that exceeds our grasp. His most controversial claim, perhaps, was that human sexuality itself is faulty and symptomatic — that our confrontation with the enigma and overproximity of parental desire never leads to a resolution but rather to the formation of mediating fantasies. Freud instructed his colleagues to listen attentively to these fantasies and to be open to sexuality in all its manifestations and vicissitudes: desire and the drives, the problem of sexual difference, and the mortality of the sexed body. It was precisely these ethics, this Freud, to which Lacan urged a return and from which he believed psychoanalysis had strayed. Disturbed by ego psychologists’ focus on adaptation to prevailing sociocultural norms, Lacan instead emphasized and elaborated upon the traumatic aspect of sexuality — the difficulties of assuming a sexed body and of regulating jouissance. He stressed listening to what analysands actually say, as opposed to what they mean, in order to approach the locus from which an unbearable truth speaks. Yet, historically, psychoanalysts and institutional psychoanalysis have been tone-deaf to transgender desire. Freudians have linked transsexuality to perversion and borderline disorders. Lacanians have deemed transgender expression an indicator of psychosis. Such pathologization has failed transgender subjects, asserts Patricia Gherovici, in her brilliant and provocative Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017). Despite availing themselves of various forms of talk therapy, trans patients remain wary of psychoanalytic treatments and the suicide attempt rate in the trans population is astonishingly high. Gherovici argues persuasively that psychoanalysis and the trans community have much to offer one another and that Lacan’s sinthome and sexuation formulae serve as especially productive, nonpathologizing frameworks for such a dialogue. She demonstrates how transgender discourse intervenes in and transforms key Lacanian concepts and maintains that psychoanalytic listening can alleviate the anguish felt by transgender subjects, helping them to live. When I press her on this point, inquiring how analysts might attend to the singularity of each case and still manage to generalize about the category of transgender experience, Gherovici, in an adroit dialectical maneuver, finds the universal in the particular. Transgender expression, she explains, offers novel ways of thinking about subjects not wholly dependent on phallic signification and disrupts the binary logic imposed by the phallus as universal signifier. Trans patients’ particular struggles with gendered embodiment and the symbolization of sex bring to light the trouble inherent in taking ownership of the body for all speaking beings. Covering a vast conceptual and evidentiary terrain, Gherovici moves from the public sphere to the clinic to show how increasing transgender visibility and activism paradoxically subvert identitarian claims, making explicit the constitutive elements and continual failures of Man and Woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

It has been said that we cannot not be in intersubjectivity. During the past decades, this fact has challenged the traditional psychoanalytic project. Various psychoanalytic schools have addressed the challenge in their own way, as does Dr. Lewis Kirshner in his new book Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2017). He approaches the topic from the perspective of an academic with a strong background in phenomenology as well as psychoanalysis. The book relies upon an interdisciplinary perspective that appreciates how intersubjectivity is a broad concept inflected by infant research, neuroscience, semiotics, phenomenology, and not but not least, psychoanalysis. While this book should serve as a reference guide for any analyst writing about intersubjectivity because of its superb literature review, it is more than a theoretical essay. We get to see how a philosophical scholar makes sense of intersubjectivity for his own analytic practice. The book is interspersed with clinical material that shows the author thinking deeply about the processes at work in the analytic encounter. The author’s clinical material reflects a strong Lacanian preference and he stays away from a comprehensive comparison of how intersubjectivity gets played out in various schools, but he appreciates and converses with authors such as Winnicott, Modell, Bion, Benjamin, Aron, and many others. 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

Adrienne Harris and Steven Kuchuck‘s The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (Routledge, 2015) contributes to the resurgence of interest in Sandor Ferenczi since the early 1990s when Harris published another book also titled The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi with co-editor Lewis Aron. As Harris says in the interview, the resurgence is partially explained by the work of Steven Mitchell, relational psychoanalysis, and the Vietnam war! War is of particular interest to Harris because it challenges the illusion of intrapsychic privacy and self-containment that traditional psychoanalysis cultivates. War is traumatizing and Ferenczi did not avoid investigating its shattering, splitting, dissociating effects as well as the effects of other disrupting impingements from the external work, in contrast to the classical psychoanalytic emphasis on the elaboration of personal fantasy. The book contains 17 chapters by historians and analysts, including discussions that help to show how contemporary psychoanalysis was anticipated by Ferenczi’s courageous experimentation. After reading this book, you cannot help but feel profound sympathy for Ferenczi’s painful struggle as he sought to develop an analytic theory and method amid great personal and social suffering. He was not able to escape war or trauma, and as a result he could not avoid coping with how this reality affected his work with patients. His writings about this struggle show us the emergence of a psychoanalytic paradigm that considers the psychology of the analyst as important as the psychology of the patient in therapeutic processes. In addition to the scholarly historical material in the volume, the book contains essays by analysts with clinical material that illuminates how Ferenczi’s two-person psychology unfolds in the consulting room today. These essays demonstrate the liveliness of contemporary psychoanalysis when animated by the spirit of this newly honored ancestor. 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

While I was in college, undergrads reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes paraded on gothic quads with flannel armor, black-rimmed glasses, messenger bags, and paperback copies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mired in misinterpretation, budding philosophers of various political stripes dreamed of amoral Ubermenschian architects expressing “will to power” through design of phallic buildings and superior socialities. This memory haunted me years later while teaching On the Genealogy of Morals to first-year college students but was finally vanquished by Jared Russell’s excellent Nietzsche and the Clinic: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Metaphysics (Karnac, 2017). Clinicians familiar with stereotypical and distorted readings of Nietzsche (almost as common as those of Freud) will be surprised and invigorated by Russell’s book, which not only synthesizes philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, but also stages a highly productive encounter between academic work and the practice of psychoanalysis. Each chapter focuses on a distinct psychoanalytic orientation and contains a clinical vignette illustrating the relevance of Nietzsche’s ideas. With rigor and openness, each chapter asks: what does Nietzsche offer the clinic? Russell discusses Nietzschean notions like perspectivism, will to power, and ressentiment, as well as the philosopher’s critiques of metaphysics, commercial culture, authoritarianism, and morality. He then demonstrates the ways Nietzsche’s thought augments and refines psychoanalytic concepts: the Freudian drive, Helene Deutsch’s “as-if personality,” Alan Bass’s “concreteness,” Melanie Klein’s envy and projective identification, Winnicottian play, and Lacan’s late teachings on jouissance and the real unconscious. But perhaps the most original aspect of the book resides in Russell’s ability to put Nietzsche into dialogue with specific elements of analytic clinical practice: interpretation, free association and evenly suspended attention, and knowledge and truth as they emerge for each analysand. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin de Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 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

The influential yet controversial psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan was pioneering in his treatment of schizophrenia however the way he lived privately did not always correspond to the theoretical ideas he espoused publicly. With meticulous research and access to clinical and historical records, historianNaoko Wake, examines the life and work of this pioneer of American Psychoanalysis from an unconventional perspective, quite different than the usual biographical approach. In this interview we discuss Sullivan’s sometimes contradictory life work, especially his time at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, his private practice in New York, and his wider, global ambitions later in life. Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers University Press, 2011), is compelling book and a welcome addition to the historical record of American Psychoanalysis. Find Chris Bandini on Twitter @cebandini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Bruce Fink joins me once again, this time to discuss his latest book, A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques For Everyday Practice (W. W. Norton & Co., 2017). What prompted Fink, a world-renowned Lacanian analyst, to return to Freud? In the spirit of Lacan, he informs us at the outset that he was always already, and forever will be, Freudian. This does not mean, of course, that Fink is uncritical of Freud. Carefully, brilliantly, and often playfully, he reads Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and the Rat Man and Dora cases, drawing out the clinical relevance of key Freudian theoretical concepts, and punctuating (the many) moments Freud strayed from his own clinical recommendations. The death knell of Freudianism has been sounded by various groups—some expected, like psychiatrists, neuroscientists, cognitive behavioral therapists, and feminists—and others less so, including Freudians themselves. Few would deny that Freud, in important and unfortunate ways, was a man of the late Victorian era: much ink has been spilled on his patriarchal values, cocaine habit, casual misogyny, and authoritarian attitude toward patients and colleagues. From his cases and letters we know, too, that Freud made almost every error he warned against in his papers on technique: he bombarded patients with interpretations, dispensed advice, intimidated, and asked them for favors. Nonetheless, even Freud’s detractors view him as a revolutionary and influential thinker who, despite failures to follow through on his own ideals and iconoclastic assertions, changed fundamental beliefs regarding gender and sexuality, art and literature, subjectivity, and social life. He continues to have a profound hold on non-Freudian psychoanalysts, even as they rename his metapsychological concepts and claim to leave him in the dust. Fink provides early clinicians with an excellent guide to Freudian theory and technique, paying special attention to dream interpretation, symptoms, the handling of transference, diagnosis, and the facilitation of free association. Periodically, he inserts his own vivid clinical examples while underlining that which remains valuable in Freud and reading him to the letter. And isn’t this the most generous way to read Freud’s work—armed both with sharp critique and an appreciation of his path-breaking ideas? “The only good father,” to quote Lacan, “is a dead one.” Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Reading Annie Reiner‘s Bion and Being: Passion and the Creative Mind (Karnac, 2012) was a spiritual experience for me. Dr. Reiner illuminates the often-obscure ideas of Wilfred Bion with seemingly effortless and masterful recourse to poetry, literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. The book is a serenely beautiful extended meditation on Bion’s O and a rigorous and lucid explication of a theoretical paradigm that shapes a powerful psychoanalytic vision. In addition to the soulful consolation that I got from the book, I was grateful to observe how a Bionian analyst works with patients. Dr. Reiner shows how Bion’s vision has profound implications for how to work with clients and she demonstrates how she has shaped that vision into an extremely coherent and powerful tool for analyzing the lives that we are privileged to touch as therapists. This book, an example of psychoanalytic writing at its best, is for professionals and students wanting to know more about Bion, for clinicians needing new inspiration for their practice, and for the general reader who appreciates the possibilities of psychoanalysis as a program for life. Annie Reiner is a senior faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is a poet, playwright, and author-illustrator of children’s books. Her psychoanalytic writings have been published in many journal and anthologies. Recently, she edited a festschrift collection of essays about the work of James Grotstein, published in 2015. She maintains a private practice in Beverly Hills, California. 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

If you steered yourself away from books about brain science because you were interested in something completely different–psychoanalysis–then this is the book for you! This book will renew your appreciation for the revolutionary discovery and urgent need for psychoanalysis, as argued by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Mark Solms invented the word “neuropsychoanalyis” twenty years ago because he believed that brain science at that time was still in a primitive state of learning about “wetware,” when in fact the brain gives rise to a mind which has critical things to teach us about the brain. Psychoanalysis is the science of the mental that challenges the arrogant self-sufficiency of a purely biological approach that excludes the subjective phenomena that characterizes the healthy brain. The brain is not just an object, it is also a subject. The Feeling Brain (Karnac, 2015) is a collection of previously published papers that were selected to provide an introduction to the field of neuropsychoanalysis. Solms’ oeuvre constitutes the most impressive “return to Freud” since Lacan. Students of psychoanalysis will benefit from a re-visioning of Freudian concepts that brings them back to life in faithful devotion to Freud’s enduring commitment to the embodied nature of the mental apparatus. 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

There are many fronts in the argument against the existence of a god or gods and veracity of religious narratives. Some familiar approaches are to critique the philosophical underpinnings of religious ideology or to make a case from the perspective of scientific evidence and the physical laws of reality. Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (Routledge, 2016), written by Dr. Jon Mills, argues from the perspective of psychology and posits that god is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. In other words, He is the ultimate wish fulfillment, the forgiving all-powerful father you always wanted, the absolution of all your fears, the antidote to death. Mills writes that the conception of god is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation. He promotes secular humanism and a personal search for the numinous as a positive, life-affirming alternative. Dr. Jon Mills is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, active clinical psychologist, as well as Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto. He is the author and editor of many books and recipient of awards, including the the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 2015, given by the Canadian Psychological Association. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is interested precisely in these vicissitudes of the primal shower scene–what he calls the “Psycho Effect”–as it is taken up and therapeutically transformed by subsequent slasher and splatter films. It is not an accident that Hitchcock chose the shower stall as the site for his most famous moment of Schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Traumatized American soldiers returning from World War II, dubbed “psychos,” were transposed into filmic psycho murderers straddling psychosis and psychopathy. Norman was perhaps the first such hero of variegated diagnosis. In the 1970s and 1980s we encountered less exalted figures, like the cannibal Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Still less sophisticated mass murderers followed: the zombies revived post-9/11 and, eventually, motive-less serial killers captured with the aid of “objective” forensics. All these characters address the difficulty of separation and mourning, the pull toward fusion with Mother, the trauma of the cut, survival, and industrial killing–the intimate violence of Nazi doctors and the impersonal push-button battles of the Gulf War. Many slasher and splatter films also tell the story of a newly emergent social category, subgenre, and audience member–the teen. Rickels devotes parts of the book to the postwar invention of adolescence, reading closely D. W. Winnicott’s papers on antisocial teenagers and juvenile delinquency. We all experience adolescence as a brush with psychopathy, Rickels tells us; for many it is the path not taken. Perhaps this explains the appeal of the psycho, our “near-miss double.” In psychoanalytic terms, “there but for the grace of the good object go I.” [5] Other topics covered in our interview and in The Psycho Records include vampirism, the couple and the crowd, scream memories, laughter, and substitution. As those familiar with Rickels’ books might expect, we often touch on one of the great themes of his oeuvre: mourning. Listen in! Laurence A. Rickels, PhD is a psychotherapist and scholar of literature, film, and psychoanalysis. He is Sigmund Freud Professor of Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School (EGS) and most recently was professor of art and theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Todd McGowan‘s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016) elegantly employs psychoanalytic thinking to unpack the lure of capitalism. He argues that we are drawn to capitalism because, under an overt promise to bring us what we want, it gives us what we need: lack. Every commodity disappoints. And that’s the point. Satisfaction, that moment when all is well and good, flutters rapidly, blessedly away. What is so great, so crucial, about lack? Though we pine for relief, nothing kills desire like abundance. (Spoiler alert: should there be an equitable redistribution of wealth, we would still suffer a hunger for the lost object which, according to McGowan, not employing Kleinian thinking, was never attainable in the first place.) If we did not experience ourselves as missing something we might never get out of bed–and, as clinicians know, why it can be purely ruinous to gratify a depressive patient. You buy those boots, the ones you had to have, and within moments of wearing them, your heart sinks. That car you finally got your hands on? Driving it out of the lot you wonder, “should I have just leased it?” Desire is an engine best run on less than half a tank. The paradox of capitalism, the way it lets us down, gets a full treatment here. Capitalism reclines on McGowan’s couch and he offers it a few interpretations that shake loose its obsessional and hysterical tendencies. He works with capitalism effectively, not arousing its defenses, because he understands it as caught in a trap of its own making. Embracing Beyond The Pleasure Principle and Lacanian thinking, he asks capitalism how come the ends are more important than the means, and doesn’t it miss the sublime? He also treats the reader, reminding us that we need to not have what we want in order to get what we need. The interview sails along, if I say so myself, and, given the political surround, offers a good conversation to get into. The author would love to hear from us and has asked that I post his email right here, [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

Literature and training in diversity and multiculturalism typically emphasize cultural differences–how to identify them, and the importance of honoring them. But does such an emphasis neglect other important dimensions of cross-cultural relating? Brent Willock, Lori Bohm, and Rebecca Curtis, editors of the book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide (Routledge, 2017), argue that finding similarities in our universal human longings and experiences are also key. Their book contains contributions from various experts describing how they navigate the divide of difference, with patient, everyday people, and within themselves. In our interview, we delve into these topics and discuss clinical and non-clinical examples to illustrate how these concepts come to life. Our discussion, and the book, are timely and relevant to our universal struggle to understand and connect with one another. Brent Willock is president of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Board Member of the Canadian Institute for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and on the faculty of the Institute for the Advancement of Self Psychology. Lori Bohm is Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute, and former Director of their Center for Applied Psychoanalysis and Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Programs. Rebecca Curtis is Professor of Psychology at Adelphi University, as well as Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Pragmatism, as a philosophical concept, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Philip Rosenbaum, psychoanalyst and editor of the book Making our Ideas Clear: Pragmatism in Psychoanalysis (Information Age Publishing, 2015)about what pragmatism really is and how it informs clinical theory and praxis. We discuss how pragmatisms influence reaches far back to the beginnings of psychoanalysis, in Sigmund Freud’s original ideas, and up through the ways clinicians conceptualize their work in the present. Dr. Rosenbaum’s book and our discussion raise prescient questions about how we evaluate our ideas, questions that will be relevant to clinicians and non-clinicians alike. Philip Rosenbaum is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst trained at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology. He serves as Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Haverford College, co-editor of The Journal of College Student Psychotherapy, and associate editor for the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. (www.eugenioduartephd.com) is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The Interpersonal School of psychoanalysis developed independent of the classical tradition in the United States early in the twentieth century, and was a harbinger to the relational thinking of the current day. Yet, the contributions of interpersonal analysts have often been glossed over or ignored completely. In his new book of collected papers, The Interpersonal Tradition: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity (Routledge, 2015) Dr. Irwin Hirsch, writes in depth of the contributions of interpersonalism to psychoanalysis, including a fuller understanding of key concepts such as countertransference enactments and the impact of the analysts subjectivity on the therapeutic relationship. In this interview we discuss some of the key figures in interpersonal thought, how Dr. Hirsch became an analyst (and a writer) and his provocative and honest opinions on many aspects of current psychoanalytic theory and practice. Find Chris Bandini on Twitter @cebandini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean to promote lay analysis, A.A. Brill, president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was preparing to divorce the International Psychoanalytic Association. Brill, driven by a fear that psychoanalysis might be seen as quackery and so discredited, sought to guarantee that the only people allowed to practice psychoanalysis in America were medical doctors. Then came the Anschluss: humanitarian efforts were made to bring the very-same IPA members the Americans sought to separate from onto American soil. This is a pretty well known tale–told by Gay, Hale, Roazen and others; enter Orna Ophir’s book, On the Borderland of Madness: Psychosis, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry in Postwar USA (Routledge, 2015), offering a much needed explanation of how psychoanalysis in America lost its patina. This intellectual history closely studies, via a reading of key journals, the way two professions, for years dancing in close embrace, began to fall out of step. In the same way that the birth of a child with developmental disabilities can reveal a cleavage in what was once thought to be a secure marital bond, debates over the treatment of psychosis led to the eventual separation of two longstanding bedfellows: psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Ophir pieces together the confusing, and previously untold, tale of how psychoanalysis came to be marginalized–and what role psychosis played therein, for its role was key. To carry the conflicted parent metaphor a little further, when a child suffers from psychic distress one member of a couple might seek to understand that suffering in genetic terms while the other spouse might examine the kind of care shown that child: the story of psychiatrically influenced psychoanalysis and non-psychiatrically influenced psychoanalysis line up similarly. While it is commonly known that the release of new medications to treat psychotic pain beginning in the late 1950s, and the birth of community psychiatry in the 70s, and of course the release of the anti-psychodynamic DSM-III in the 80s all played a role in arguments for the superfluity of analytic treatment for psychosis, Ophir argues that psychoanalysis got sidelined because American psychoanalysts, given their long-standing embrace of psychiatry, were duly handicapped. How to let go of the safety-net of psychiatry–that which is deemed irrefutable, scientific and biologically bound–and still survive was their question. Using ideas from the sociology of the professions/knowledge, Ophir argues that analysts engaged in jurisdictional turf wars that the treatment of psychosis brought to the fore. In a profession largely populated by psychiatrists, during a time when psychosis came to be largely seen as a brain disorder rather than a defense or a remnant of pre-oedipal disturbance, analysts had to decide which side they were on. Analytic clinicians, attempting to stay relevant, began to employ the language of psychiatry, supporting what Ophir calls “the neosomatic revolution” only to find that by doing so, they had thrown out the (psychotic) baby with the bathwater. Discursive shifts, be it in politics or a profession, have deep impacts–(when we hear analysts using the language of brain as opposed to mind we are in the presence of the data produced by that impact) and we see proof of this today: very, very few analysts treat psychosis. As in most every divorce that involves children, custody is not usually distributed evenly. Ophir tells the story of how analysts handed over their psychotic patients ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016), Psychoanalyst Jill Gentile explores the intersection between Freuds fundamental rule of free association and freedom of speech in a democracy, two subjects with obvious connections; however, as Gentile points out, surprisingly few writers have attempted to linked the two. In this interview, which spans the history of psychoanalysis and the U.S. Constitution, Gentile describes how both the psychological discipline and the political system aim at common goals, and that both psychoanalysis and democracy situate freedom in a particular space, a space governed by what Gentile calls a feminine law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The life of the German-born, pioneering American psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, is intriguing enough in itself, but in the biography, To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (Other Books, 2005), we learn that Fromm-Reichmann played an integral role in mid-century psychoanalysis. In this interview, with the author, psychologist, and historian, Gail Hornstein, we trace not only Fromm Reichmann’s many accomplishments, but also the history of Chestnut Lodge where she worked for many years, her relationships with Erich Fromm and Harold Searles, as well as the cultural impact of the book written by her patient Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World is essential reading for anyone interested not only in the history of American psychoanalysis, but also psychoanalysis in general. You can find Chris Bandini on Twitter @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 Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jonathan Garb, the Gershom Scholem Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the rich psychological tradition in modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism. Tracing Kabbalistic writing from sixteenth-century Safed to contemporary New York, he shows how both psychoanalysis and modern Kabbalah have been expressions of the process of modernization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Why do relationship partners so often feel isolated and unsatisfied despite all their efforts to show love and caring to one another? And how do they break out of the self-defeating cycles that get them there? In their new book, Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy (Central Recovery Press, 2015), Mark Borg, Grant Brenner, and Daniel Berry address these daunting questions. They explain how parental disappointments during childhood can set one up for a life of compulsive caregiving at the expense of true human connection, which they call “irrelationship.” They address a growing epidemic by which, in later adulthood, partners use those well-honed caregiving skills to hide from one another rather than become closer. Drawing from cutting-edge neuroscience, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical experience, the authors address how these habitual patterns take shape in the brain and in the soul, and how partners can find their way out of them. The book is full of relatable anecdotes and practical suggestions that any reader who has ever struggled with love and intimacy will find illuminating and helpful. I spoke with two of the authors, Mark Borg and Grant Brenner, about how they arrived at the idea of “irrelationship” and how their skill-based approach has improved the lives of their patients and readers. I hope you enjoy the interview. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating andbody image problems, and working with cultural minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The rediscovery of trauma in the analytic field coupled with the the development of the concept of dissociation is the focus of a new book edited by two preeminent clinicians, Sheldon Itzkowitz and Elizabeth Howell— The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working with Trauma (Routledge, 2016). In this interview, we discuss how this edited book was undertaken and current and historic views of the role of trauma. The authors contend that the concept of trauma itself has been dissociated in the profession, essentially since the disavowal by Freud of infant sexuality. It is only since the relational turn in psychoanalysis that trauma has once again moved to the forefront of clinical work. Here we discuss some of the historic implications as well as several of the twenty two authors’ chapters in this well edited and concise book. Christopher Bandini, LCSW, is in private practice in New York City. Twitter: @cebandini. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice and founder of The Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where she is a training analyst, is a prolific writer and thinker celebrated for integrationist approach to Object Relations thinking. The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and their Demon Lovers, originally published by Routledge in 1993 and recently re-published by ORI Academic Press in 2013, is Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s first of five published book a labor of her love for the creative process which earned her an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Ignatius University. Dr. Kavaler-Adler calls into question the myth that one must be crazy to be creative and raises concern about the implication that therapeutic intervention is a deterrent to creative growth. For Dr. Kavaler-Adler, the therapeutic process is an inherently creative process. Like the artists encounter with her work, the subject’s encounter with the couch involves an engagement with the unconscious. A comprehensive analysis of Object Relations theory organizes this study around the the Demon Lover theme which appears in both literature and psychoanalysis. Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s own definition emerges from her theory that mourning is an important developmental process, one which, when stunted due to pre-oedipal arrest, leads to what she calls The Compulsion to Create a state of psychological and creative compulsion which hinders psychic and creative growth. Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s The Compulsion to Create is a psycho-biographical examination of esteemed women writers, among them, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, and most comprehensively, the famed Bronte sisters. Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s unique psycho-biographical approach considers not just the relationship between one work and another, but also the relationships between the biographical context which each work proceeds from as it is created, as well as the biographical context it intervenes in when published. In this way, Dr. Kavaler-Adler explicitly connects the manifestation of the writers object relations in her life as well as in her art. Her exquisitely researched book clearly insights the meaningful and inherent engagement between the woman writers life and art at the level of the unconscious. She poetically explains an author’s work is a reflection of the authors internal world just as dreams are. Above all, Dr. Kavaler-Adler encourages a positive engagement between the creative and therapeutic process, arguing that profound creative developments can proceed from effective therapeutic interventions which revive the subject from a state of psychic arrest and the creative collapse which results from it. Dr. Susan Kavaler’s list of publications including her most comprehensive contribution to Object Relations thinking The Klein-Winnicot Dialectic (Karnac 2014) can be found on her website where opportunities to study the Object Relations approach from a clinical standpoint and seek treatment in individual and group settings can also be found, including a group for writers which has been held monthly for 21 years. She has previously been interviewed on New Books in Psychoanalysis by Claire-Madeline Culkin about her later publication The Anatomy of Regret (Karnac 2013). Claire-Madeline Culkin is an analytically minded author. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and holds a BA in Psychology from Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. If you’re an author interested in joining the discussion,... 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 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the most balanced Negro open to anxiety.” In Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Cornell University Press, 2015), Gabriel Mendes undertakes an engaging study of race and mental health in the 20th century through the lens of an overlooked Harlem clinic. While providing the first in-depth history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-58), the book focuses on the figures who came together in a seemingly unlikely union to found it: Richard Wright, the prominent author; Fredric Wertham, a German Jewish emigre psychiatrist now known for his advocacy for censorship of comic books; and The Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an important Harlem pastor. Wright’s literary prowess, work for the Communist party, and brush with Chicago School sociology met with Wertham’s socially-conscious and uncompromising brand of psychoanalysis to challenge mainstream psychiatric theory and its discriminatory practices in the Jim Crow North. Those who could afford it were charged 25 cents for sessions in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal church in Harlem, and 50 cents for court testimonials. A thoroughgoing grassroots effort, ignored by philanthropists and state funding, the Lafargue Clinic throws mid-20th Century mental health and race relations into relief, and is sure to stir interest in the untold stories of projects like it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others’ development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva’s appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America. Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali’s most famous paintings, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, from 1929. Discoursing upon his creation, also in an interview, Dali had this to say: “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait, since one can perfectly well love one’s mother and still dream that one spits upon her . . . now go and try to make people understand that.” Atlas’ book takes up Dali’s demand for work (as well as Andre Green’s plea for the re-establishment of sexuality as central to psychoanalysis), emphasizing sexuality and its many emanations in the clinic as speaking a language of its own. A clinically rich book, Atlas’ work schools its readers in a new way of listening for that which is inchoate and ineffable and worth hearing. Her thinking takes us on a trip beyond the mother-infant dyad, stopping to drink at the house of Laplanche with a little Ruth Stein only to deposit us closer to the drives, opening the door to the land of the autoerotic. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as an historian, she writes about many things. 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, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Bodies, both the patient’s and the analyst, has been a neglected area of investigation in psychoanalysis for many years, despite it’s presence in Freud’s early theories and clinical work. In this interview with the Gradiva award winning author Jon Sletvold, we discuss his recent book The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality (Routledge, 2016). In a lively discussion, Dr. Svetvold describes not only his motivation for writing this book, but the history of the body in psychoanalysis, especially the contributions of the often maligned psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich. Drawing from his own experience as a Norwegian psychoanalyst, Dr. Sletvold elaborates on embodied subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and how the training and supervision of psychoanalysts might “incorporate” some of these concepts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Despite remaining neutral on his personal religious beliefs, Freud’s commitment to empiricism and his determination in relegating psychoanalysis to a scientifically valid position has had a lasting impact. In some sense, its created a taboo against theological considerations. This taboo, Earl Bland and Brad Strawn, the editors of Christianity and Psychoanalysis: A New Conversation (IntraVarsity Press, 2014) argue, has been to the detriment of psychoanalysis as a clinical form of treatment and a philosophical system of meaning. Like religion, psychoanalysis attempts to ask what it means to live in the face of death. Psychoanalysis, in its traditions as vast and nuanced as those within the Christian faith, like religion, has moral imperatives about how subjectivity ought to be structured. Bland and Strawn observe that the culture is ripe for a new conversation, in that the turn toward rationalitywithin Christianity can be understood as a philosophical parallel to the turn in psychoanalytic theory toward understanding the human subject as being in relationship. To initiate this conversation, they have gathered a group of practitioners and people of faith from across the spectrum, to engage in this exchange: one that breaks the taboo that has prevented these two domains of knowledge from sharing the same conversational space. Speaking from perspectives across both disciplines, this book features authors ranging from contemporary Freudian psychoanalysis to Attachment-Based psychoanalytic therapy on the psychoanalytic spectrum and from traditional Catholicism to faiths rooted in the Charismatic tradition across the Christian spectrum. In each chapter, the authors mutually invoke a theoretical consideration together with a clinical demonstration. Their voices are informed, critical, and personal in equal measure. Together with the editors, they candidly and humbly demonstrate not just the value of, but also the necessity of, acknowledging the dialogical influence of religious beliefs in the clinical setting, both on the side of the patient, as someone who may organize his or her subjectivity in relationship to faith, as well as on the side of the clinician, whose religious beliefs may consciously or unconsciously mediate the treatment. Claire-Madeline’s interests lie at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Catholic theology, which are often at the fore of her discussions with the authors she is privileged to interview for the New Books Network. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and holds a BA in Psychology from Eugene Lang College, The New School for liberal arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Calling into question common assumptions regarding the supposedly antagonist relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalytic reading, Jean-Michel Rabatepaints a picture of reconciliation rather than rift. Drawing from a vast store of cultural incident–from Sophie Calle’s modern art to the novels of Henry James–The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2014) argues that psychoanalysis and active literary reading are both implicated in the same process, one which engages the unconscious and makes one an “ambassador” thereto. In our interview, Rabate holds court on various issues, including the similarities between Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung, as well as the status of James Joyce as sinthome of literature. Moving beyond the textual, he also captivatingly considers not only the relationship between trauma and perversion but also the ways in which Lacan and Derrida differed in their interpretation of the “public intellectual” role and its responsibilities. A startling intellectual himself, Rabate illuminates and enthralls in his conversation as much as in his writing. Michael Mungiello is interested in the implications psychoanalysis has on broader cultural studies, ranging from literature to politics to television and film. He lives in Washington, DC and is originally from New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Affect is a weighty and consequential problem in psychoanalysis. People enter treatment hoping for relief from symptoms and their attendant unbearable affects. While various theorists and schools offer differing approaches to “feeling states,” emotions, and affects, Lacan, despite devoting an entire seminar to anxiety, often is charged with completely ignoring affect. This misperception stems in part from a caricatured understanding of Lacanian technique – a suspicion that it consists mainly of punning and interminable wordplay. And there is another, more sound reason for the accusation: the tendency of relational, interpersonal, and Kleinian models to locate truth in affects and regard emotions as inherently revelatory – as the most direct communications by and about the subject. By contrast, the question, “How did that make you feel?” is heard infrequently in the Lacanian clinic. Following Freud, Lacan believed that affects are effects. He shared Freud’s skepticism toward manifest emotional states, doubting not their importance but rather their transparency. The royal road to the unconscious is the deciphering of dreams and not the affects they produce. Nevertheless, Lacan’s views on affect increasingly diverged from those of Freud, offering much that was new. Colette Soler’s pioneering Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, translated by Bruce Fink (Routledge, 2016) is the first book to examine Lacan’s theory of affect and its clinical significance. While Lacan focused more on the structural causes of affect in his earlier theoretical elaborations, an initial reversal came in his seminar Anxiety (1962-63), where he deemed anxiety the only affect that “does not lie” because it refers to and partakes of the real rather than the signifier. Another reversal, Soler explains, culminated in Encore (1972-73), where Lacan declared that certain “enigmatic affects,” though puzzling to the subject, are carriers of knowledge residing in the real unconscious – a knowledge that is not on the side of meaning but of jouissance. Soler’s book is wide-ranging, covering affects such as shame and sadness, as well as many others we did not have time to discuss in our interview: hatred, ignorance, the pain of existence, mourning, “joyful knowledge,” boredom, moroseness, anger, and enthusiasm. Perhaps most fascinating is Soler’s chapter on Lacan’s enigmatic affects: anxiety (translated in the book as “anguish”), love, and the satisfaction derived from the end of an analysis. Annie Muir kindly translated during the interview. 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 Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (Norton, 2014), the psychoanalyst and innovative historian, George Makari speaks to us about the dramatic history of the invention of the concept of the mind. Beginning at the origins of modernity, Makari takes the reader on a wild ride across the European continent in a search for answers about the nature of human inner life. Hardly a sedate academic debate, the history of the mind is a history soaked in blood. Heretical ideas challenged religious and political authority, toppled governments and fomented revolution. In the shift from an ethereal, God-given soul to a material, thinking mind, humanity found itself freed from the authoritarian rule of the church and the need for a monarch; however, with this newfound freedom to reason and self-govern, man needed to contend with the limits of reason, with unbridled passions, and with madness. Makari has written a history of ideas with powerful implications for the field of psychoanalysis. First, there was the secularization of the soul. Now we are witnessing the supplanting of the mind by neuroscience, biology, and brain. This raises questions about the role psychoanalysis can play in keeping a focus on the mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

For a couple of decades, scholars have moved toward a broad consensus that context, rather than ideology, is most important in pushing ordinary men and women to participate in mass murder. The “situationist paradigm,” as Abram de Swaan labels this, concludes from studies by psychologists, sociologists, historians and others, that individuals are malleable, easily influenced by their surroundings, easily enough that they can be moved to do things that, in other contexts, would be easily recognizable as morally bankrupt. de Swaan rejects this conclusion. He asserts instead that most people would not participate in mass murder without a much deeper set of framing events and incentives. His book The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2015) lays out an alternate theory for the participation of both regimes and individuals in cases of mass murder. de Swaan brings his decades of experience in sociology to bear in crafting a thoughtful, well articulated and well-constructed argument. In particular, he argues that we should place more weight on the life-histories of perpetrators than has been common in recent discussions. As de Swaan points out early in the book, what is modern about mass violence is not that it happens, but that we are embarrassed about it. This reminds us of the importance of the debate he has so vigorously engaged. 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 second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are intimately intertwined with the treatment of psychosis, the ways in which this early exposure colors all of his clinical thinking becomes apparent. Indeed, in psychoanalysis we could say that there are two kinds of clinicians–those who treat psychosis and those who don’t. Bollas is clearly in the former camp. One wonders, given the centrality of psychosis in his theoretical work, if he would have been drawn to analytic work had he not started with the most primitive of human experiences? We meet him as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, studying history, working at a program for autistic and psychotic children presumably to pay the bills. We follow him to SUNY-Buffalo where, while pursuing his PhD in literature, he encounters psychotic students in a class he is teaching, walks across the campus to the clinic, asks if he might work there as a clinician and is brought on staff. (Those were the days…) It is worth noting that Bollas, one of the most renown thinkers in psychoanalysis, began as a lay practitioner (he has an MSW which I presume he acquired so as to practice in this country). His longing for a clinical life, pursued while completing his studies in the humanities, seems to have been piqued by his encounters with psychosis. While Bollas is one of the profession’s strongest critics of the medicalization of psychosis, he always works with a team that includes an MD, a social worker and others when treating schizophrenia. His role on the team is to help the person suffering from psychosis to talk and also, crucially, to historicize. (Interestingly, the book includes a chapter that shows him at work as an American historian.) He reminds us that seeing psychosis as “other” places those who begin to have nascent-to-florid psychotic experiences at ever greater risk of being lost to us and to themselves, forever. He minces no words as he argues on behalf of the psychotic persons need for speech. “We all know the wisdom of talking. In trouble, we turn to another. Being listened to inevitably generates new perspective, and the help we get lies not only in what is said but in that human connection intrinsic to the therapeutic process of talking that promotes unconscious thinking.” Indeed the barrage of medications on offer alongside treatment modalities that give short shrift to speech, run the risk of increasing isolation and blurring the mind which in turn increases psychosis. As is his wont, Bollas turns common treatment logic on its head: “the loss of un-selfconscious participation in the everyday …constitutes the gravest tragedy for the adult schizophrenic.” There is a way back, he argues, but, and here I riff on his thinking, only if the culture comes to understand anew what it means to be human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Vamik D. Volkan, a native of Cyprus, was touched by ethnic/political violence at a very personal level when he was still in medical school: a very close friend was shot by terrorists during the Cypriat war. “I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it at the time, I was far from home.” Once he completed medical school and his psychoanalytic training, he noticed that he had become preoccupied with theoretical questions of mourning, and he realized he was motivated by his loss to address issues of ethnic violence and peace-making from a psychoanalytic angle. How are generations of families affected by historical trauma and loss? How does political violence and trauma become a chosen or disavowed element of identity across generations? With A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action (Karnac 2015), Volkan recounts a fascinating, riveting, theoretically powerful case history he supervises, of the grandson of a high level Nazi perpetrator, instrumental in developing the forced euthanasia of people with disabilities. The grandfather’s program was called “T4”, and he was responsible for introducing the technique of killing groups of people with gas, which went on to be used on the large scale in the camps. He was later killed on the Eastern Front. When the grandson, the subject of the case, Victor, is born, his parents are deeply preoccupied with the possibility that Victor may have a disability. Victor is haunted by the memory of a tonsillectomy at three years old, of his struggling and resisting being “gassed” by the pediatrician. As an adult, he presents for therapy with the problem that he has episodes at night of waking in a dissociative state in his room and trying to escape through the window. A complication for the treatment is that Victor’s future analyst is the daughter of a Nazi soldier… A Nazi Legacy is challenging, moving, but also useful as a presentation of clinical technique. Volkan strongly advocates for psychoanalysts to be more aware of the effects of social and political violence on the internal world of their patients, but also to be aware of how these events affect analysts themselves, and play out in enactments of disavowal. As Victor begins to work through his family history and the truth of his grandfather’s atrocities, he has a pivotal reaction to seeing the film “Twelve Years a Slave”: “he recalled the film dealing with racism and thought he might be like white people in the United States.” Vamik D. Volkan is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center, and an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington DC Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Volkan is also president of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), a nonprofit organization that brings together unofficial representatives from various parts of the world, such as Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, UK, U.S.A, and the West Bank to examine world affairs from a psychopolitical angle. The IDI develops a common language between psychoanalysts and those who are diplomats, politicians or from other disciplines. Dr. Volkan is a 2015 Winner of the prestigious Sigourney Award, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. 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 theorists who seem to strive for integration and those who insist on fundamental differences, incompatibilities, and unbridgeable gulfs. Some write from an interdisciplinary position, exulting in hybridity and increased potentiality, while others, no less passionately, police disciplinary boundaries, urging seriousness and rigor. The argument to integrate is rooted in the assumption that a theory only can be enriched through the incorporation of varying perspectives; a multiple factor model is inherently more flexible and practicable. Proponents of disciplinary and theoretical purity counter that true integration is impossible: synthetic efforts often fall short, resulting in pastiche, lists of superficial similarities, or vitiated “middle positions.”Steven J. Ellman, in When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought (Karnac, 2010) unapologetically declares his allegiance to the first camp. As Ellman explains in his preface, the blending of various theoretical models in the service of expanding and deepening clinical practice has long been his preoccupation, one might even say, his ethical stance. When Theories Touch is divided into three loosely delimited sections (“Freud Chapters,” “Major Post-Freudian Theorists,” and “Contemporary Issues in Psychoanalysis”) and eighteen chapters featuring readings of an array of psychoanalytic giants, including Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Melanie Klein, W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, Wilfred Bion, and Stephen Mitchell. Most of the integrative labor is contained in the commentary sections of each chapter, as well as the concluding chapter, modestly titled, “A Tentative Developmental Model.” In many ways, Ellman is building on the work spurred by the baby observers of the 1980s and 1990s. Those decades not only witnessed the challenge to classical technique by relational theorists but also epistemic convergences founded on object relations theory and the studied infant-caregiver dyad. Insights from Klein, Kohut, Bion, and Winnicott were framed and woven together by shared assumptions about the structuring influence of early mother-infant interactions. Ellman echoes and enlarges these prior efforts. He includes clinical material, indexing implications for technique. He also introduces the relational viewpoint of Mitchell while maintaining a place for drives (or what he prefers to call “endogenous stimulation”), both in his developmental model and his practice. With surprising ease Ellman is able to stake out a theoretical position that complicates (or, arguably, obviates!) age-old psychoanalytic debates about object-seeking vs. pleasure-seeking infants, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, the timing and necessity of transference interpretation, and a host of metapsychological and clinical questions. The relevance and value of Ellman’s book, I believe, rests less in its integration (which is partial by the author’s own measure) than in its brave and convincing advocacy of the merging of causes that previously have done violence to one another. During our interview and in the book, Ellman approaches each body of theory with rare openness and curiosity. He enables theorists as discordant as Stephen Mitchell and Charles Brenner to enter into productive conversation, enhancing the contributions of both through new and unexpected syntheses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis