New Books In 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

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 focuse

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

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 Victoria

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

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 neuropsychoanaly

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 a

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

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

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 M

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 assoc

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.f

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 closel

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

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

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

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 anecdo

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

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 wit

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-conscio