New Books in Psychology

In Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind. Demonstrating the way that a variety of fields influence and coproduce one another, Human Programming follows the metaphor of the automaton through news media, fiction, psychology, cybernetics, film, law and back again. Along the way, Selisker engages academic work on labor automation, posthumanism, affect and emotion, and techno-Orientalism. Through careful interpretation of books on American soldiers returning from the Korean War, the trial of Patty Hearst, the narrative logic of Snow Crash and Blade Runner, the central conflicts of Homeland and the Manchurian Candidate, and the baffled news reports on John Walker Lindh, Human Programming “offers a new literary and cultural context for understanding the human automaton figure” as it has appeared and reappeared over the half century, and explores how the metaphor of the automaton has “shaped American conversations about the self and other, the free and unfree, and democracy and its enemies, since World War II” (7, 8). Beginning with a prehistory in WWII propaganda, this timely study comes up to a present in which we replace our employees with touchscreens, rely on machine learning to translate our conversations, use proprietary software to plot our routes, and deny the human freedom of our fellow citizens. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the light of expectations of what those sensory inputs ought to be. On this view, only prediction errors are fed forward into the processing stream, and these are used to update subsequent predictions and guide action. In Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press 2016), Andy Clark explains the theory from the perspective of embodied cognition, addressing such questions as how it alters the classical view of cognition as sandwiched between perception and action and how attention is employed to modulate the sensory flow. Clark, who is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, also considers the current empirical support for the theory as well as its implications for traditional debates in epistemology, our understanding of schizophrenia and autism, and concerns about implicit bias. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Every night around the world, millions of people lie in bed at night, struggling to fall asleep. Experts suggest that about one in three people struggle with at least mild insomnia. Paradoxically, their efforts to control their sleep may actually result in digging them in even deeper into insomnia. Fortunately for people with insomnia, and the therapists and medical professionals who treat them, some behavioral interventions are helping many people to end the pattern of sleeplessness. In this interview, cross-posted from the new podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Alisha Brosse, who co-authored the book End the Insomnia Struggle: A Step by Step Guide to Get to Sleep and Stay Asleep (New Harbinger Publications, 2016) with Dr. Colleen Ehrnstrom. Dr. Brosse is a specialist in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which is considered the best treatment for chronic insomnia. Dr. Brosse is also the Associate Director of the Robert D. Sutherland Center for the Evaluation and Treatment of Bipolar Disorder, provides evidence-based treatment for a variety of mental health concerns and offers training for mental health professionals. Dr. Brosse explains how the cycle of insomnia develops and why our efforts to control sleep have paradoxical effects. Dr. Brosse then describes cognitive, behavioral and acceptance-based strategies in insomnia treatment. Specifically, Dr. Brosse explains two behavioral approaches that are key to CBT-Is effectiveness: Stimulus Control Therapy and Sleep Restriction Therapy. Dr. Brosse also shares how willingness is an important component to successful insomnia treatment. Read an excerpt from End the Insomnia Struggle here! Diana Hill, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist practicing in Santa Barbara, California, and a co-host of the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Anger has acquired a bad reputation in our culture. It is an emotional state that can lead us to say and do things we later regret, particularly when our emotion overrides reason. But anger has the potential for being used productively, as energy for positive change. Such is among the many lessons former Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese learned during his many years fighting for equal rights for LGBTQ people. He shares these lessons, and the personal experiences in which he learned them, in his new book, The Gift of Anger: Use Passion to Build Not Destroy (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016). In my interview with Mr. Solmonese, we talk about what inspired him to write a book about such a charged emotion as anger and how he manages to remain focused and goal-oriented in the face of staunch resistance to positive change. The lessons he shares are relevant and useful to anyone pursing an ambitious goal, especially for dealing effectively with challenges along the way. Joe Solmonese is former president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy organization, and former CEO for EMILY’s List, one of the nations largest political action committees. He is currently the managing director and founding partner of Gavin/Solmonese, an organizational consulting firm. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He regularly presents and writes about these topics, and you can view his work at www.eugenioduartephd.com and by following 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/psychology

If you have ever wondered what your therapist is really thinking, then my interview with Sherry Amatenstein will satisfy your curiosity. She sat down with me to discuss her new book, How Does That Make You Feel?: True Confessions from Both Sides of the Therapy Couch (Seal Press, 2016). This unique anthology of confessional essays, written by therapists as well as patients, gives readers a behind-the-scenes look into the world of psychotherapy. In our interview, Amatenstein reflects on what the stories in her book teach us about the day-to-day practice of psychotherapy and the myriad challenges and surprises that emerge when two strangers engage in a professional and deep kind of intimacy. Sherry Amatenstein, LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist practicing in New York City with expertise in relationships. Her prior books include The Complete Marriage Counselor: Relationship Saving Advice from Americas Top 50+ Couples Therapists, The Q&A Dating Book, and Love Lessons from Bad Breakups. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He regularly presents and writes about these topics, and you can view his work at www.eugenioduartephd.com and by following 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/psychology

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/psychology

All humans endure their private struggles, but rarely do we know what troubles our most famous public figures until now. In her recent book, Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Mind of History’s Great Personalities (National Geographic, 2016), award-winning journalist Claudia Kalb shares her research into the mental health histories of several well-known and much-loved people. She discusses Princess Diana’s struggle with eating disorder and severe loneliness; the impact of Frank Lloyd Wrights narcissism on his architectural masterpieces and personal relationships; and Andy Warhol’s penchant for holding onto and storing decades’ worth of day-to-day objects. In our interview, Kalb talks about her keen interest in these people and their stories, and we discuss the way such stories humanize these idealized figures and universalize the human quest for mental and emotional well-being. Claudia Kalb is an award-winning journalist who specializes in the fields of medicine, health, and science, former senior writer at Newsweek, and contributor to publications such as Smithsonian and Scientific American. Follow her on Twitter. 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 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/psychology

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/psychology

Why is our criminal justice system so unfair? How do innocent men and women end up serving long sentences while the guilty roam free? According to law professor and scholar Adam Benforado, our systems problems stem from more than occasional bad apples; they start with deeply rooted biases we all hold and which influence the course of justice. Eugenio Duarte sat with him to discuss how these biases shape every step along the way, from how a crime is initially investigated, through the process of indicting and trying suspects, to ultimate determinations of punishment. His revelations, coming from empirical investigations and first-hand experience, are shocking and sobering. He documents them in his new book, Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (Penguin Random House, 2016), and also compels readers to take action to right the wrongs in how we delivery justice. Adam Benforado is Associate Professor of Law at Drexel University. He has published numerous scholarly articles, and his op-eds and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Legal Times. Follow him on Facebook. 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 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/psychology

Time and resources are scarce for many teachers. Often times, these same teachers are under immense pressure to produce higher test scores and severely constrained with the actions they can take in their own classrooms. What are the consequences of working under conditions in which you have increasing responsibilities without sufficiently corresponding support and professional autonomy? Teachers may only prioritize the content that appears on standardized assessments and rarely address other worthwhile knowledge and skills. They may also work excessively long hours, ultimately undermining their personal well-being and their professional effectiveness. What if teachers were instead incentivized to model mindfulness and teach practices to students? Could we avoid more situations like the ones described above? In The Way of Mindful Education: Cultivating Well-Being in Teachers and Students (W. W. Norton and Company, 2014) and The Mindful Education Workbook: Lessons for Teaching Mindfulness to Students (W. W. Norton and Company, 2016), Daniel Rechtschaffen provides a definition for mindfulness that clearly distinguishes it from other similar or related ideas and articulates its unique benefits for teachers and students by drawing on classroom dilemmas and corresponding practices. Rechtschaffen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @mindfuleducate. During our conversation, he also recommended the following books: Mindful Games: Sharing Mindfulness and Meditation with Children, Teens, and Families by Susan Kaiser Greenland The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate by Susan Kaiser Greenland Building Emotional Intelligence: Techniques to Cultivate Inner Strength in Children by Linda Lantieri Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Illness, and Pain by Jon Kabat-Zinn Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Many people carry around unresolved feelings and thoughts tied to difficult experiences, with no idea what to do with them. When left unattended for too long, these pent up feelings can lead to a variety of physical and mental health issues: sleep problems, depression, and even physical illness. Therapy can help, but its not always available for various reasons. Fortunately, long-time researchers and writers James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth have developed expressive writing as an innovative approach for expressing ones emotions and achieving better health and wellness. They sat down with psychologist Eugenio Duarte to discuss various expressive writing strategies anyone can use as well as the research that backs up their methods. They’re all contained in their new book, Opening Up by Writing it Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain (3rd edition; Guilford Press, 2016). 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 and body image problems, and relationship problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how complex is revealed in Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care? (Oxford University Press, 2016), Kenneth Schaffner’s assessment of the impact of recent biological research on the genetic contribution to behavior. Among the developments he considers are the sequencing of the human genome and the development of a model organism, the nematode C. Elegans, for exploring the relationship between genes, neural function, and development. Schaffner, who is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, discusses the methodologies for determining genetic influence and the challenges by developmentalists and others of gene-focused research. He also defends a “creeping” form of reduction in which multilevel mechanistic explanations are possible in local, specific areas of biology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Greg Eghigian, author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, answers that question and more about the evolution of incarceration in modern Germany. Eghigian’s background is in both German history and the history of science, and his expertise in the latter shines through as he explores discourses of criminality among professionals in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, criminology, and medicine. He has done extensive previous work on the understanding and treatment of madness in modern Europe, and shows that many of the same concerns that motivated physicians, psychoanalysts, and reformers in the emerging field of psychology occupied criminologists in twentieth-century Germany, as well. Perhaps most importantly, the book provides a chronicle of how carceral norms emerge and evolve, one particularly instructive for an America which currently imprisons nearly 2.5 million of its people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (ICU) settings. Schulman is a classical guitar player and performer and author of Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador, 2016). Schulman did not receive training as a music therapist and only began working in ICUs after he had a near-death experience at one. Waking the Spirit offers a gripping account of his medical journey and his decision to give back to others. As a result of his collaboration with his former doctors, Schulman became what he terms, a “medical musician.” During the podcast, Schulman briefly describes his journey and reflects upon what he has learned about music from working in the ICU. He also talks about how his work in the ICU has made him a better concert performer. In our conversation, we explore how music heals, what forms of music seem most suited for healing, and the role of musicians and music therapists in ICUs. Andrew Schulman is the resident musician in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital in New York City and Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He is the founder and artistic director of the Abaca String Band. He is also a solo guitarist and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Improv Comedy Club, and the White House. He lives in New York City with his wife, Wendy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities, whether or not those match what’s on their birth certificates. But the journeys of these gender creative children are often bumpy, as they encounter psychological, physical, and even legal challenges. This all raises important question for these children’s parents, teachers, doctors, and therapists, such as: What are the best ways to support these children’s gender paths? How do we help them face the challenges ahead with courage and authenticity? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we deal with our own fear, ignorance, or resistance to currents of change that we don’t always understand? Dr. Diane Ehrensaft tackles these issues in her prescient and essential new book, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes (TheExperiment, 2016). She is a developmental and clinical psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with gender-nonconforming children and their families. She joined me on New Books in Psychology to discuss her book and topics such as the difference between gender-dysphoric “persisters”versus “desisters,” the dangers of making children wait and see before undergoing gender transition, and the cutting-edge gender-affirmative treatment model used by doctors and therapists working with these children. 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 and body 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/psychology

Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In fact, our day-to-day lives are saturated with inducements not only to become angry, but to embrace the idea that anger is morally righteous. However, at the same time, were all familiar with the ways in which anger can go morally wrong. We know that anger can eat away at us; it can render us morally blind; it can engulf our entire lives. So one might wonder: What exactly is the point of anger? In Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016), Martha Nussbaum argues that, in its most familiar forms, anger is not only pointless, but morally confused and pernicious. Drawing lessons from the Stoics, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Nussbaum advocates replacing anger with forms of generosity, friendship, justice, and kindness. She develops her critique of anger across the spectrum of human experience, from the intimate, to the interpersonal, and eventually the political. Along the way, she proposes important revisions to common ideas about punishment, justice, and social reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What exactly is ADHD, and is it time to update our ideas about it? In her new book, Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD (Balboa Press, 2016), Carol Gignoux turns our ideas about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder on their head and introduces a strengths-based rather than deficits-based perspective on this brain type. In her forty-plus years coaching individuals with ADHD, Gignoux has witnessed how ADHD stigma stymies these individuals’ creativity and self-esteem. They often adopt views of themselves predominated by what they can’t do rather than what they can. But these “innovators,” as she calls them, have unique capacities for creative problem-solving and productive risk-taking that others often envy. Look no further than Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, and Jonas Salk–innovators whose unique brain type helped them make extraordinary contributions to modern society. To make best use of their gifts, innovators need help with their very real limitations and greater understanding and appreciation for their assets. As she explains in our interview, Gignoux has made it her mission to help innovators find such understanding and support. In her book, she advances a paradigm shift in our conceptions of ADHD and outlines specific strategies for dealing with day-to-day challenges. This celebratory and useful first book from a decades-long advocate is a long-awaited update to our long-standing ideas about these unique individuals. I spoke with Gignoux about her book and her coaching experiences with individuals and their loved ones. 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 and body 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/psychology

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/psychology

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/psychology

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and personal context must be negotiated. In Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human (Oxford University Press, 2016), Samuel Morris Brown approaches the problem of end-of-life care with a clinician’s eye and a scholar of religion’s touch. The book places advance directives in the clinic in their historical context while unpacking their ethical and legal nature, describes the psychological aspects of medical decision-making and how moral distress clouds judgment, and provides recommendations on how to heal the process of healing in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). An ICU physician himself, Brown’s account is interwoven with powerful stories that render his argument for humanistic care particularly salient. As such, Through the Valley of Shadows offers as much to dyed-in-the-wool humanists as it does to those focused on measuring and improving outcomes. This is the second of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, preceded by Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care, by Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting account of a decade of research on improving outcomes by incorporating patients’ individual life contexts into planning of care. Their groundbreaking studies showed that physicians, while getting the biological details largely correct, frequently disregard personal circumstances that lead to medical errors. Such an assertion might appear intractable or unfit for empirical study, but Listening for What Matters describes a series of creative experiments that strongly support it. From placing fake patients into real clinical contexts to measure the appropriateness of recommendations, to recording interactions between real patients and doctors (for which they developed a system, Content Coding for Contextualization of Care), and finally training groups of medical students to ask about individual context, Weiner and Schwartz build a case for the existence of a widespread problem while simultaneously offering compelling solutions. This is the first of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, to be followed by Samuel Morris Brown’s Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of a disease to an instance of sexual abuse. How might creative expression help with the healing process? What can we learn and teach others from the writing and artwork that emerge from these traumas? How might we come to value personal writing as worthy of increased scholarship? In Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image (Parlor, 2015), Roy Fox, shares his reflections based on years spent developing a graduate course that asks students to come to terms with the most difficult moments in their lives. Fox joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at [email protected]. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. 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/psychology

In her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work after all this time? It’s a good question. Even today, Kafka’s fiction retains a felt strangeness, the “Kafkaesque,” a quality Dr. Troscianko calls “both compelling and unsettling.” His stories have had an enduring readership, sustaining critical attention for over a century. This was what Troscianko wanted a better explanation for. In the book, Troscianko finds that explanation from theories current in the cognitive sciences. She approaches Kafkas fiction (and what is Kafkaesque about it) as a realistic depiction of visually perceived space. In other words, for Troscianko, Kafka’s fiction works by simulating fictional places, people and phenomena as real, as happening in real visual space, according to how vision actually works. This seems, in part at least, to explain Kafka’s hold on us. And think: If the fictional realities of Kafka are lifelike in their fidelity to real lived experience, how strange when they gradually warp, and shift to become something more dreamlike, or unbelievable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While unique in scope, Kaplan’s project can be characterized as the culmination of efforts to apply techniques of personality capture–projective testing, dream analysis, and life history–in cross-cultural research on indigenous peoples, an effort to account for the full spectrum of human life amidst the encroachment of modernity upon cultures based, for example, in oral traditions. Richly documenting the entanglements of Kaplan and others in their attempts to render subjects as data, Lemov throws the transactional nature of anthropology into relief. A data point for an ethnographer can be many things for a research subject: cash for buying American niceties, a beer, a dream lost in the act of recounting, even a permanent mark of distrust. The book is also a history of a technology which never came to fruition: the futuristic reader for Kaplan’s Microcards was never realized, and the boxes of cards became dispersed and lost their value as a total archive of human personality. Lemov argues that we would do well to regard the fate of Kaplan’s database as a parable for our age by calling attention to the information loss upon which the technologies of documentation that saturate our present rely. What, then, will become of our compressed audio files, forgotten social media accounts, and backup hard drives stashed in the back corners of drawers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Should the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakdown, reactions will likely be much more complex and awkward. In her fascinating book, Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Baylor University Press, 2015), Dr. Heather Vacek examines how American Protestants have struggled with the problem of mental illness, and how their relationship with it has changed over time. Vacek reveals in her well-organized and sensitive work the thought of five Protestants whose lives were deeply touched by mental illness: Cotton Mather, Benjamin Rush, Dorothea Dix, Anton Boisen, and Karl Menninger. Vacek then ends this well-researched book with a historically-informed theological reflection of how Christians can help those afflicted with mental illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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/psychology

My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generative perspective, not linguistics). With a few notable exceptions, it’s my impression that researchers tend either to keep quiet about their skepticism about some foundational matters, or to gravitate towards fields in which those issues are moot. In this respect,Prakash Mondal‘s approach inLanguage, Mind and Computation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) is an interesting and perhaps somewhat unusual one: his work attempts to interrogate rather closely the consequences of adopting some rather innocuous and widespread assumptions or axioms about the nature of language. In doing so, Mondal finds much to criticise, and ultimately argues for quite substantial departures from these assumptions. In this interview we only scratch the surface of his arguments, but I hope we get a decent impression of how his approach relates to the wider field, as well as a sketch of how it plays out in practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an engaging combination of scientific exploration and personal memoir. In recounting the life of his older brother, Jim, who was a bright young graduate student at UCLA when his episodes began to intensify, Chase tells the story of how the treatment of schizophrenia has changed since the 1950s, connecting events in his own life to research on the causation and treatment of schizophrenia. He grapples with difficult questions about why the condition persists from an evolutionary perspective, and the stigma associated with it. Chase takes a hard line on the physical nature of schizophrenia; only by accepting it as a disorder of the biological brain, rather than the moral mind, can we begin to find the right, albeit complex answers and accommodate those who suffer from the condition. Though individuals with schizophrenia can live long lives, Chase’s meetings with Jim call upon the reader to ask themselves how we, as a society, can help make these lives more meaningful. This book is essential reading for those interested in the stories behind brain disorders, and those who want to learn more about how mental illness has changed over the last 50 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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/psychology

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/psychology

In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire. Linstrum explores the careers of scientists sent to the South Pacific, India, and Africa to verify and define characteristics of white racial superiority. Far from confirming the inferiority of the colonized, psychologists exposed flaws in Britain’s civilizing mission, often doubting or subverting its underlying assumptions. Linstrum exposes a fundamental tension between the authoritarian goals of state and the role of science, showing how expert knowledge could be adapted as a tool of colonization just as it could be undermined by scientific discovery. Despite its critics, Linstrum shows how psychology mobilized to take part in Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya. Colonial administrators borrowed tools from psychology to conduct interrogations and suppress dissent. The colonial state attempted to cast doubt on the psychological maturity of the colonized, articulating Third World nationalism itself as a kind of pathology. Britain’s representatives aimed to actively reshape thoughts and feelings in their quest to win “hearts and minds.” Linstrum’s book challenges rigid definitions of scientists in the service of empire, complicating earlier narratives which portrayed psychologists as powerful supporters of colonial discourse. Psychology’s intended role was to aid the technocratic administration of a waning empire. While attempting to make the colonized knowable and predictable, British psychologists unintentionally exposed the dysfunctions inherent in European society, challenging the notion of an irrational, inferior “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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/psychology

To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growing elasticity of bipolar disorders. For about the last twenty years, argues Leader, the bipolar spectrum has been tailored to a pharmaceutical industry eager to shift attention away from ineffective antidepressants and toward newly developed mood stabilizers. A household word since the mid-1990s, “bipolar” is now widely considered to be biological and hereditary. Its loosened parameters have saddled large swaths of the population with a chronic illness requiring life-long medication. Strictly Bipolar (Penguin, 2013) is a trenchant case for the reexamination of the “bipolar revolution” and for a return to the older diagnosis of manic depression. Leader points out that while bipolarity is at the center of modern capitalist subjectivity – the principal feature of twenty-first-century worklife, which encourages and rewards herculean productivity and exuberant all-nighters — manic depression is a structural, much narrower and less frequent problem. The highs and lows of manic depression are not merely behavioral or ominously genetic but, rather, rooted in an individual’s early history: relationships with primary caregivers, fantasies regarding one’s symbolic place within the family. Manic depression also has common motifs that reflect its structural basis and identifications. Mania announces itself, for example, in fits of housecleaning, shopping sprees, and grand gestures of altruism. Manic episodes often begin with a steady stream of words – extravagant metaphors and brilliant rhetorical leaps — a levity in the symbolic, as Leader puts it. These great themes of mania are traced in Strictly Bipolar to personal stories of guilt, responsibility, and debt; distant or inconsistent parents and grandparents who expected too much or overwhelmingly little and elicited (split off) aggression and hate. We learn that manic-depressives struggle with the overproximity of the Other, attempting to keep the Other separate and safe from all that is bad, from murderous rage, from oneself. Strictly Bipolar offers compelling clinical material and vivid biographical descriptions of the “signature motifs” of manic-depression. In reading the book, I could see how one might be tempted to lean too heavily on surface behaviors and mood states in thinking and diagnosing manic depression. Yet, as Leader points out, manic-depressives have a troubled relationship with time and find it difficult to integrate their own histories. It therefore behooves therapists not to join them in this, redoubling the problem. In the interview, Leader characterizes manic depression and other psychoses without the usual prognostic pessimism – not as problems of subjectivization resulting in social exclusion, medication, or institutional scrutiny but as “ways of being in the world.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is morally wrong, even unacceptable. In such cases, morality requires what is impossible: no matter what one does, one acts as one ought not to act. In Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lisa Tessman proposes an original account of impossible moral demands, and forcefully argues for an approach to moral theory that can recognize their normative authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English language learners. Whatever our opinions are, they are founded on the perceived immediate impact on students in school. But how might the way we use language with children years before they enter school affect their academic potential? Does it have the ability to improve more than their vocabulary? Can it foster creativity, empathy, and perserverence? In Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain (Dutton, 2015), Dr. Dana Suskind outlines research on the critical language period and connects it to an early-childhood curriculum and a series of public policy solutions. Suskind joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with the Thirty Million Words Initiative on its website. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with heron Twitter at @DrDanaSuskind. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, and exchange. In editorial departments such as “In the Journals” and “Web Roundup,” authors distill recent scholarly contributions across disciplines and spaces. More recently, the editors have incubated creative digital endeavors such as Commonplaces, a “collaborative cabinet” that itemizes the technological present, with entries devoted to topics such as the petri dish, the brain, and the waiting room. Book Forum invites commentary from a range of authors, representing not only different scholarly disciplines but offering intriguing, timely, and often original angles on recent important texts. Thanks to its editorial vision and the palpable energy of its contributors, Somatosphere has become informative, creative, and essential reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What are the multiple meanings, ambivalences, possible risks, and potentials for transformation that arise from interrogating empathy on a transnational scale? Carolyn Pedwell (University of Kent) thinks through these complex questions in her new book, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The book ambitiously traverses multiple disciplinary and intellectual boundaries, drawing together feminist and anti-racist social theory, media and cultural studies, international development texts and practices, scientific studies of empathy, the political rhetoric of Barack Obama, business books on empathy, and more. In doing so, Pedwell queries empathy as a social and political relation that cannot be separated from power, conflict, oppression, and inequality. This book explores the ways that empathy is a contested term employed transnationally in various ways and on behalf of various political and social interests, traces the ways that empathy might be translated and felt differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, critically investigates this question. The book offers skepticism towardsthe demand that economy and society be happy, skepticism founded in an interrogation of the practices of contemporary government and businesses. A whole range of our everyday experiences, including ‘nudges’ for citizens and staff, the perverse incentives of metrics, through tothe consequences of how psychiatry classifies depression, are subject to critical scrutiny.Moreover, the book acts as a primer on economics, psychology and organizational theory, clearly articulating the roots and the consequences of our current economic and social settlement. The book concludes with the possibility of a more democratic way of organizing the world, in contrast to our impersonal, oppressive, and data driven present. Dr Davies is a co-director of Goldsmiths’ Political Economy Research Centre and blogs at Potlatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on historical and contemporary figures and continental and analytical traditions, he defends an embodied view of ostension in which we directly perceive intentions in ostension rather than infer to them, and gives an account of how we are able to disambiguate gestures through the joint presence of objects in a shared environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also consider whether theism provides a good reason for the pervasiveness of religious belief across human societies across time, and argue that the seemingly obvious conclusion that a naturalistic explanation of religious beliefs debunks these beliefs is not at all obvious. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we should consider happiness when determining the best ways to effectuate law. In this podcast Buccafusco, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College, shares some of the following aspects of the book: * How hedonic psychology measures human happiness and some of the things these studies have revealed * The author’s new approach to evaluating laws called “well-being analysis” * Ways the new data on happiness has revealed a need to rethink criminal punishment * What the future holds for happiness research Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and practice during the decolonization of European empires in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The decolonization of psychiatry, Heaton argues, had an “intensely cross-cultural, transnational, and international character that cannot be separated from local, regional, and national developments” (5). Heaton shows how, amid these contexts and changes, Nigerian psychiatrists actively participated in negotiating postcolonial modernity and the place of global psychiatry within it. The book begins by tracing the larger story from colonialism to postcolonialism: the first chapter offers an essential, incisive account of “Colonial Institutions and Networks of Ethnopsychiatry”; the second chapter lays out the decolonizing of psychiatric institutions and networks in the 1950s and 1960s, a story told mainly through the fascinating figure of Thomas Adeoye Lambo. In the remaining four chapters, Heaton narrows the aperture of historical lens to explore particular cases: Nigerian migrants in the UK who experienced psychiatric issues; debates about culture-bound syndromes such as “brain fag disease” and universality of psychiatric diseases; encounters between psychotherapists and “traditional” healers; and the ambivalence around the use and meaning of drug therapies by Nigerian psychiatrists. Black Skin, White Coats persuasively shows us that postcolonial psychiatry in particular and postcolonial modernity more broadly are best understood in terms of connectivity and interrelatedness rather than provincial dichotomies. In so doing, he also succeeds in bringing together scholarly areas such as African Studies, the history of medicine and psychology, and postcolonial studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try to text and drive at the same time, and our attention is captured when we suddenly hear our name pop out from the conversational hubbub of a noisy party. But what is attention? How seriously should we take this or other metaphors as giving us insight into the nature of attention? In Attention (Routledge, 2014) Wayne Wu argues for the view that attention is selection for action and is distinct from consciousness. This controversial position pits him against more common views that attention is in some sense essentially connected to consciousness – for example, that it is a kind of gatekeeper for consciousness. Wu, an Associate Professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, draws on empirical literature from psychology and neuroscience to develop his view while acknowledging how difficult it is to interpret results so as to support one theory or another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

DMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Rick Strassman‘s first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, showcases his research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, during which he injected several volunteers with DMT as part of a government-sanctioned research project. During the trials, volunteers experienced a number of similar phenomena, such as communication with other-than-human beings, out-of-body experiences, and geometrically complex closed-eye visuals. DMT and the Soul of Prophecy complements Strassman’s first book, but it also stands on its own and gives enough context of his DMT research to make sense of his arguments about prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. The new monograph aims to further interpret the data from Strassman’s experiments in the 90s, by arguing that the notion of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible offers a compelling model for what happens in the DMT state. One might ask, then, if the Hebrew prophets were affected by DMT. Although it’s not possible to know for sure, and Strassman doesn’t claim that they were, he nonetheless draws significant parallels between DMT experiences and prophetic states in the Hebrew Bible. At the cross-section of biology, psychology, and religious studies, Strassman’s monograph is sure to spark provocative conversations about the relationship between religion, drugs, and the politics of research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s scientific approach. The book examines his career and method of gathering vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and interpretation that was critical to his most influential works Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Beginning with Kinsey’s study of the animal world, Drucker examines how he transferred natural science methods to sex education in his Marriage Course at Indiana University, and ultimately to the massive study of human sexual behavior. He brought into the interdisciplinary science of sexology a thoroughly naturalist approach and believed that taxonomy – collecting, classifying and describing patterns, revealed truths about the natural world and worked against what he considered the prejudice of misclassification. Kinsey was committed to scientific objectivity, free of moral judgment he believed possible through unprejudiced observation, the recording of mass data sets, and the application of biometrics. Nevertheless, Kinsey sex research had significant implications for understanding sexual difference between men and women, sexual preference tied to economic class, and the consideration of normal sexual behavior against standing societal norms. Drucker’s work brings attention to the historical contingency of the social and technological process, which produces, encodes and relays information over time. Drucker’s close attention to method and the role of data gathering technology again raises the question regarding the role of science in value formation and recovers Kinsey’s contribution to scientific practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions, in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014), Evan Thompson draws on neuroscience and these meditative traditions to illuminate consciousness and the nature of the self while avoiding both neuro-reductionist and spiritualist agendas. Thompson, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, develops a view of our sense of self as an emergent process of “I-making” that is constructed in relation to our environment and the body on which it depends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2014) Joelle Proust considers the nature of metacognition from a naturalistic perspective, drawing on recent psychological research as well as a range of philosophical work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. In this erudite and comprehensive volume, Proust – a director of research at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris – defends an evaluative or procedural account of metacognition over a metarepresentational account. The former is the most general kind of metacognition, available to at least some non-human animals as well as humans, while the latter mind-reading view is a distinct, more sophisticated capacity that humans also possess. Proust also articulates an intriguing view of mental agency and the epistemic norms that govern mental action, and considers the implications of her positions for some cognitive disorders associated with schizophrenia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology