New Books In Psychoanalysis

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others’ development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva’s appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America. Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali’s most famous paintings, The Enigma o

In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus

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

Despite remaining neutral on his personal religious beliefs, Freud’s commitment to empiricism and his determination in relegating psychoanalysis to a scientifically valid position has had a lasting impact. In some sense, its created a taboo against theological considerations. This taboo, Earl Bland and Brad Strawn, the editors of Christianity and Psychoanalysis: A New Conversation (IntraVarsity Press, 2014) argue, has been to the detriment of psychoanalysis as a clinical form of treatment and a philosophical system of meaning. Like religion, psychoanalysis attempts to ask what it means to live in the face of death. Psychoanalysis, in its traditions as vast and nuanced as those within the Christian faith, like religion, has moral imperatives about how subjectivity ought to be structured. Bland and Strawn observe that the culture is ripe for a new conversation, in that the turn toward rationalitywithin Christianity can be understood as a philosophical parallel to the turn in psychoanalytic theory toward unders

Calling into question common assumptions regarding the supposedly antagonist relationship between literary criticism and psychoanalytic reading, Jean-Michel Rabatepaints a picture of reconciliation rather than rift. Drawing from a vast store of cultural incident–from Sophie Calle’s modern art to the novels of Henry James–The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2014) argues that psychoanalysis and active literary reading are both implicated in the same process, one which engages the unconscious and makes one an “ambassador” thereto. In our interview, Rabate holds court on various issues, including the similarities between Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung, as well as the status of James Joyce as sinthome of literature. Moving beyond the textual, he also captivatingly considers not only the relationship between trauma and perversion but also the ways in which Lacan and Derrida differed in their interpretation of the “public intellectual” role and its responsibilities.

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

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, th

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 ar

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

Vamik D. Volkan, a native of Cyprus, was touched by ethnic/political violence at a very personal level when he was still in medical school: a very close friend was shot by terrorists during the Cypriat war. “I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it at the time, I was far from home.” Once he completed medical school and his psychoanalytic training, he noticed that he had become preoccupied with theoretical questions of mourning, and he realized he was motivated by his loss to address issues of ethnic violence and peace-making from a psychoanalytic angle. How are generations of families affected by historical trauma and loss? How does political violence and trauma become a chosen or disavowed element of identity across generations? With A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action (Karnac 2015), Volkan recounts a fascinating, riveting, theoretically powerful case history he supervises, of the grandson of a high level Nazi perpetrator, instrumental in de

There are theorists who seem to strive for integration and those who insist on fundamental differences, incompatibilities, and unbridgeable gulfs. Some write from an interdisciplinary position, exulting in hybridity and increased potentiality, while others, no less passionately, police disciplinary boundaries, urging seriousness and rigor. The argument to integrate is rooted in the assumption that a theory only can be enriched through the incorporation of varying perspectives; a multiple factor model is inherently more flexible and practicable. Proponents of disciplinary and theoretical purity counter that true integration is impossible: synthetic efforts often fall short, resulting in pastiche, lists of superficial similarities, or vitiated “middle positions.”Steven J. Ellman, in When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought (Karnac, 2010) unapologetically declares his allegiance to the first camp. As Ellman explains in his preface, the blending of various theoretic

Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell. First, he decided, he’d better read some Freud. This started a life-long engagement with psychoanalysis and leftist politics, and his new book Political Freud: A History (Columbia University Press, 2015) conveys the richness of his decades of reading Freud. Following his 2004 Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, Zaretsky’s latest book, some would call it a companion, is comprised of five essays analyzing the complexity of the mutual influencing of capitalism, social/political history, and psychoanalysis, with particular attention to how and whether people conceive of their own interiority as political. (Particularly timely is chapter two: “Beyond the Blues: the Racial Unconscious and Collective Memory” which explores African American intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding oppress

[NB:Please be forewarned, there is some brief audio difficulty at the beginning of the interview. It does clear up quickly, so please do listen through.] We are drawn to what is hidden. We are excited by what is mysterious whether we find it beautiful or repellant. Erotic experience is all about this urge. Sexuality, both in its defensive function and as an intrinsic part of being human, defines the ways in which we engage in the psychoanalytic situation. However, it can be very difficult – even taboo – for analysts to admit having erotic feelings towards a patient, and it can be equally thorny handling erotic transference when it arises in a treatment. In Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios (Routledge, 2014), Andrea Celenza discusses the importance of reclaiming sexuality as one of the many realms that are of central concern to our patients as she simultaneously observes the pervasive “desexualization” of the psychoanalytic field. She asserts that erotic transference and countert

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 rewa

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as ca

In this interview Dr. Theodore Jacobs discusses his book The Possible Profession: The Analytic Process of Change (Routledge, 2013) . Dr. Jacobs is a pioneer in the use of countertransference in the analytic setting and is regarded as the originator of the term “enactment” to describe the actions and emotions that occur within both the patient and analyst during treatment. In this interview we discuss how psychoanalytic technique has evolved and how Jacobs’ classical orientation has changed over his career. Dr. Jacobs also shared his views on self disclosure, current practice and the integration of one and two person psychologies. The interview concludes with Dr. Jacob’s thoughts on the current state of the profession, some of his favorite theorists, institute training, and the internecine battles that have occurred in psychoanalysis over the years. Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst as well as an adult analyst in private practice. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emerit

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway,

Lene Auestad, PhD, is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oslo, and affiliated with the Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo. She currently resides in the UK to pursuing long-standing interests in British psychoanalysis. Working at the interface of psychoanalytic thinking and ethics/political theory, her writing has focused on the themes of emotions, prejudice and minority rights. Her books include: Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac, 2015) Nationalism and the Body Politic. Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac, 2014) Psychoanalysis and Politics – Exclusion and the Politics of Representation (Karnac, 2012) Action, Freedom, Humanity – Encounters with Hannah Arendt (in Norwegian) Auestad founded and co-directs the interdisciplinary conference series “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” which aims to address how cr

Feeling exhausted, hopeless, and anxious? You might be suffering from symptoms of neoliberalism, according toPaul Verhaeghe. In What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (Scribe Publications, 2014), he takes on “Enron society,” demonstrating how the core insights and principles of psychoanalysis can be brought to bear on social relations, history, and ideology. The last 50 years have witnessed a staggering proliferation of psychiatric disorders — a bloated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) that has both reflected and caused the over-diagnosis, disciplining, and medication of individuals afflicted with social rather than mental problems. How can you not feel dejected and panic-stricken, asks Verhaeghe, when you live in a “meritocracy” that ensures some an obvious advantage? When you are evaluated incessantly and told you are not trying hard enough? When your work environment and community lack authority figures who take responsibility and set limits, leavin

Alison Bancroft has written a book with a refreshingly straightforward title: Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self (I. B. Tauris, 2012). One immediately suspects that it reflects the author’s two most enduring obsessions and this suspicion is confirmed within the first quarter of our interview. Yet, as it turns out, both “psychoanalysis” and “fashion” demand qualification.By “fashion” Bancroft means adornment that assumes an innovative form – creativity applied to the surface of the body.The psychoanalysis she has in mind is Lacanian theory.If, then, you are expecting a condemnation of fashion as a frivolous pursuit or a Kleinian explanation for shifting hemlines and anorexic models, Bancroft will not satisfy. But if you are curious about what fashion as art and corporeal style might express about fundamental Freudian and Lacanian concepts like identification, femininity, and the unconscious, you will be delighted and edified.Readings of fashion and its sociocultural resonances teach us a great deal a