New Books In Psychoanalysis

We are mostly familiar with the hermeneutics of suspicion. But what about a hermeneutics of curiosity? In his latest book Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Routledge, 2015), Dr. Donnel Stern discusses the ways in which a spirit of mutual curiosity between analyst and analysand can transform the field between them and alter their relationships to each other and themselves. Continuing the groundbreaking work of Unformulated Experience and the more recent Partners in Thought, Relational Freedom showcases Dr. Stern’s ability to arrange clinical case studies, a rich history of psychoanalytic thought, and contemporary theoretical critique in such a way as opens the reader’s mind to new conceptions of the priority of feeling in the interpersonal/relational field. Along the way, he paints a picture of enactment (the interpersonalisation of dissociation) and how the analytic dyad can handle enactments in a fashion that frees up the analyst and analysand to see their relationship in a

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the milli

What meaning does money have in psychic life? And where does clinical psychoanalytic work fall in the realm of commerce? Does money play an inherently alienating role with regards to the psychoanalytic subject? Or might it contain meaning crucial to the patient’s progress? In Money Talks in Therapy, Society, and Life (Routledge, 2011), Brenda Berger and Stephanie Newman present a collection covering a wide range on the topic from varied psychoanalytic perspectives. With contributions from Muriel Dimen, Robert Glick, Theodore Jacobs, and others, money is understood in terms of psychosexuality, greed, envy, narcissism, sexuality, loss, the economics among candidates in psychoanalytic training institutes, and its ever-present roll in the transference/countertransference matrix. In the interview Berger describes the ways in which money was split off and denied in clinical psychoanalysis in the years leading up to the economic crash of 2008, and how this was followed by a re-emergence within the field after 2008.

Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler reminded me of something very important and unsettling: I have a brush with madness every night. Most of us do – when we dream. Or fall in love; or write poetry; or free-associate. Madness resides within all speaking beings and erupts in the most ordinary activities. In fact, ordinariness, rationality, and normalcy can be the most maddening phenomena of all. In editing Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015) Gherovici and Steinkoler consciously employ the non-nosological, capacious — one might even say literary – term “madness” to resist normative and abjecting approaches to the insane and think in novel and flexible ways about both psychosis and neurosis. Eschewing diagnostic categories like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the editors embrace “madness” precisely because it exceeds the DSM and the clinic, does not lend itself easily to medication, and inspires controversy and innovative reflection. The volume brings together eighteen impressive L

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for a

Why would Bert Williams, famous African-American vaudeville performer of the early twentieth century, feel it necessary to apply burnt cork blackface make-up to his already dark skin, in order to emphasize “blackness”? According to Michelle Ann Stephens, this was one question about the space between realness, race, and performance that led her to write Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Stephens investigates the history of the concept of the skin, especially in relation to the notion of the flesh, and how they are both re-written by colonialization, and the idea of racial difference. Stephens turns to the work of four iconic black male stars whose careers span the twentieth century–including Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte  and Bob Marley–and explores the dynamic between the gaze, representation and technology, and how these performers challenged notions of race, sexuality, and skin/flesh in the act of performing. Stephens uses psychoanalyt

In The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process (Routledge, 2013), Frank Summers has written a wholly original work of theory, technique and cultural critique. Privileging terms not often used in psychoanalytic writing, among them romanticism, transcendence and futurity, Summers documents an as yet undocumented shift in the field. In an effort to buttress the standing of psychoanalysis as a science, psychoanalysts previously attempted to delineate certain laws pertaining to the psyche, ranging from the Oedipus complex to notions of the self; now, according to Summers, the majority of analysts attend primarily to the experience of their patients. As such, psychoanalysis has become a “science of the subjective.” Critiquing the field for reifying concepts like “the unconscious” and for perhaps unwittingly playing along with a culture that maximally commodifies humanity, Summers suggests we position psychoanalysis on the perimeter of the American mainstream. “An

Responding to a significant lacuna in psychoanalytic literature, Jean Petrucelli has put together an impressive book that approaches the eating-disordered patient from interpersonal and relational perspectives. Just as the papers within Body States:Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2014)animate the twin themes of dissociation and integration, so too do the authors illustrate how these forces shape interpersonal relationships, body-states, self-states, as well as, ultimately, the ability to functionally shift between selves. One may well agree with Philip Bromberg when he remarks in his Foreword, “Do not be fooled by the format. It is the groundbreaking perspective of Dr. Petrucelli that inspires each chapter, and my use of the word groundbreaking should not be taken lightly.” Indeed, the undeniable coherence of this volume springs from each writer’s affirmation of and convincing argument for the ability of interpersonal and relational analysis to uniqu

The metaphorical construction of Susan Kavaler-Adler‘s Anatomy of Regret: From Death Instinct to Reparation and Symbolization through Vivid Clinical Cases (Karnac, 2013)evokes the complexities that have wrought psychoanalysis since its beginning of talking about the mind in the language of the body.As it subtitle tells us, the anatomy of this book is structured by the case study. If there is something that informs Alder’s approach to understanding psychoanalysis and how she intervenes in the psychoanalytic encounter, its that where theory fails, the body succeeds. Regret, for Kavaler-Adler, is a bodily experience that orients us in some way to the unconscious consequences of our relationships – of the actions of other bodies in our lives. In telling the stories of these case studies, Kavaler-Adler performs a kind of surgical suturing of theory along the sinews of loss – the scars left at the site of the aggression of the other. She begins with the important insight that something was at stake in Freud’s the

With Emotional Communication: Countertransference Analysis and the Use of Feeling in Psychoanalytic Technique (Routledge, 2013), Paul Geltner has written the definitive textbook on countertransference. No book, to my knowledge comes even close to this accomplishment. Most analysts are taught that countertransferences are the idiosyncratic feelings of the analyst. Geltner begins with the radical assumption that all of the analyst’s feelings should be considered inductions by the patient until proven otherwise. Geltner describes the many ways in which emotional communications can be induced and expands concept of countertransference into discrete observable categories with clinically useful examples. In this interview, Dr. Geltner discusses the Modern Psychoanalytic underpinnings of his thinking about emotional communications, the field founded by Hyman Spotnitz. He describes the different types of countertransference and how understanding what the patient is inducing in the analyst is a main focus of the Mode

The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis: Diverse Perspectives on the Psychosocial (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)is an edited volume. Its chapters document the central place of psychoanalysis in American sociology in the 1950s and sketch the backstory to that relationship. The core chapters expose the campaign waged by leading sociologists to discredit psychoanalysis as they sought legitimacy for the discipline through the adoption of positivist research paradigms. Some of that story is told through biographical and autobiographical accounts. The co-editors are among the authors of the book’s 18 chapters as are Neil Smelser, Nancy Chodorow, George Steinmetz, and Jeffrey Prager. In this interview, the volume’s editors, Lynn Chancer andJohn Andrews, respond to questions about the political climate surrounding “the divorce” and add their reflections on the standing of psychoanalysis in sociology in the early years of the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How up to date are you on the projected impact of climate change on human civilization in the next 100 years? Once you look at latest predictions, quickly come back and listen to this interview with Sally Weintrobe, because she brings a much-needed, yet realistic sense of hope to what most people consider a dire picture. Weintrobe, a practicing psychoanalyst and Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, organized an interdisciplinary conference of psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists, and sociologists to address a burning question: why is knowledge of climate reality being so resisted? (The conference in its entirety is posted online in 6 parts here.) Weintrobe contributed to and edited this book of essays by 23 authors, and it is an important document of current psychoanalytic thinking on the nexus of splitting, denial, reintegration– and love- in the context of how we conceive of nature. How are we split-off from our childlike affection for nature? How does neo-liberal capitalism promote ali

Conventional psychoanalytic views of narcissism focus on familiar character traits: grandiosity, devaluation, entitlement and a lack of empathy. In his new book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Routledge, 2013), Daniel Shaw explores narcissism from a relational perspective, concentrating on the effect that the traumatizing narcissist can have on others. Shaw defines the traumatizing narcissist as the parent of a child, a leader of a cult, a partner in a couple or others who abuse their power, use their charisma and knowledge of human nature to subjugate. This power dynamic can lead to maladaptive patterns such as compliance, dissociation and the taking on of the abusive behaviors of the narcissist by thepatient. To elucidate his conceptualization, Shaw writes chapters on clinical theory, his practice with patients effected by narcissism and his own past history as a cult member. Shaw illustrates how the therapeutic relationship can be healing by helping the patient reclaim a sense of

Bruce Fink joins me for a second interview to discuss Volume 2 of Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014). We talk about everything from desire, jouissance, and love to variable-length sessions and “why anyone in their right mind would pay for analysis.” Just like one might go to a personal trainer to shed some pounds, one goes to an analyst to lose something. We often enter analysis against our will and immediate interests, kicking and screaming, to have our symptoms – the sources of our most precious satisfaction and exquisite misery — taken away. We pay, in other words, to be castrated. This is a better deal than it initially seems: we cede self-pity related to primordial loss – the loss of something we never had in the first place – in order to be able to pursue our desire and derive more joy from our enjoyment. In the second volume of Against Understanding, the initial chapters on practice and technique cover fundamental questions like the goal of analysis, ethic

Liran Razinsky’s book, titled Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2014) came out of a decade’s long attempt to reconcile Liran’s personal search for meaning within two areas of professional inquiry: philosophy, and psychology.These two fields are intimately related in that each asks essential questions about what it means to be a human subject that lives always in the face of death. However divergent in their systems of logic, each runs the risk of loosing its subject to its own ethos.Psychoanalysis is more functional theoretically when thought of as a philosophical system, but its applications were intended to be clinical.For Razinsky, psychoanalysis succumbs to the split in these two fields in its conception of death. Those who lived to be intellectually killed by Freud as he claimed their ideas as his own, knew that Freud had no limits in refusing the limit of his life.He would destroy individual egos–and entire careers–in building a legacy that would outlast him.He got what he w

In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors, and journalists who search in her book for the exotic Iranian subject and the trauma of the Eastern Other. She turns a critical eye on the expectation that she perform an unveiling and reveal knowledge about the Other’s otherness. Insisting that “pain is pain” everywhere and that the Other’s foreignness also resides in oneself, she instead talks about her own sense of dislocation and loss upon returning to Tehran to start a clinical practice after twenty years in the United States. Iranian patients face problems specific to their country’s politics and culture, to be sure, but for Homayounpour, experience in the consulting room confirms the universality of the Oedipus complex. In response to a colleague in Boston who questioned whether “Iranians can free associate,” Homayounpour quip

What happens when a Kleinian psychoanalyst wants to write an intelligent self-help book for the general reader? First, she recognizes that one must have an online platform from which to launch, so she starts a blog called “The Headshrinker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Then she sets about writing her debut book, Wisdom From the Couch: Knowing and Growing Yourself from the Inside Out (Central Recovery Press, 2014). Dr. Jennifer Kunst began to write not only to fulfill a personal dream but to help her patients and the public at large ponder the question: how is it that perfectly intelligent people do such obviously counterproductive things so much of the time? Vis a vis Klein these answers reside in the unconscious, in our internalized object constellations and in at least some recognition of how difficult it is to live in the world with its inevitable pain, loss, disappointment and imperfection.  Many of the concepts that Klein felt were central to the human condition are laid out in the book: omnipotence, mania, sp

What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014), he argues that since understanding is part of the Lacanian imaginary, it often leads to fixed assumptions and projections on the part of both analyst and analysand, inhibiting change, or the curative in psychoanalysis. Many of us probably have heard ourselves and others say that understanding why we do something hurtful or destructive does not seem to stop us from doing it; again and again and again. In the clinical vignettes, case studies, and theoretical papers compiled in this volume Fink suggests that rather than understanding, clinicians ought to strive to bring the unconscious to speech – to help analysands communicate knowledge once residing in the unconscious. Such knowledge is generated not through narrative, insight, or meaning making but parapraxes, slurred speech, and mixed met

In a wide ranging and courageous interview that touched on the creative process, personal history, memoir and self-disclosure, the psychoanalyst and writer Sophia Richman explored the connections between trauma and the creative process. Although many have written about the arts and psychoanalysis, utilizing contemporary relational thinking, Richman brings the discussion vividly into the present day. In Mended By the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma (Routledge, 2014), Sophia Richman skillfully uses her own history as a holocaust survivor and writer to illustrate the healing power of the creative process. In addition to her own experience, Richman writes about artists she has interviewed, as well as theorists that have been influential to her such as Winnicott and Jung. Richman believes that the creative process allows one to “bear witness” to the unspeakable, and that the arts can lead to growth both inside and outside of the consulting room. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi

Being human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one,” so writes psychiatrist and practicing Buddhist Dr. Mark Epstein. Epstein illustrates this truth by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the life of the Buddha in his latest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). It’s a brilliant psychobiographical single-case study. Think Erik Erikson’s Ghandi’s TruthorYoung Man Luther. A little known detail of the Buddha’s biography is that his mother died when he was just seven days old. The book investigates the nature and repercussions of this early loss as a foundation of the Buddha’s life and salvation. Epstein writes that “primitive agony” (ala Winnicott) lay in the Buddha’s implicit memory coloring his experience in ways he could feel but never know. The unmetabolized grief plays out into Budd