New Books In Psychoanalysis

In this interview, Anna Fishzon, co editor with Emma Lieber on The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), discusses her thinking about temporality, queer theory, psychoanalysis and childhood with Tracy Morgan who concomitantly calls time on her own work with the podcast. Together these two friends and colleagues and former hosts, laugh, maybe choke up a bit, reminisce and riff. Morgan, in a first in her over thirteen years as host and founding editor of the channel, ends the interview and her work with NBiP, with a song. About the book: This book represents a meeting of queer theorists and psychoanalysts around the figure of the child. Its intention is not only to interrogate the discursive work performed on, and by, the child in these fields, but also to provide a stage for examining how psychoanalysis and queer theory themselves interact, with the understanding that the meeting of these discourses is most generative around the queer time and sexua

Today I talked to Michaela Chamberlain, author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) Chamberlain’s book is a product of “cumulative trauma” whose original starting point was an interest in in menstruation where, in psychoanalytic literature filled with papers on “micturition and feces”, there is a “startling lack of writing on the monthly passing of menstrual blood.” Chamberlain realized that this absence was a symptom of something bigger. That something is misogyny. Working with a definition attributed to Kate Manne[1] misogyny is seen as “the law enforcement branch of sexism” and Chamberlain argues that we really have “to grapple with the law enforcement of the male gaze. The minute you free yourself from this or at least know what you’re fighting it means you can think all sorts of things. The more we straightjacket ourselves with the laws of Freud the more we are lessening the possibilities for creativity, which surely has to be the point of psychoanalysis.” “We need to take on th

The monumental sense of dislocation we experience after losing a loved one can be life-altering. There is no script for grieving–each individual passes through their own phases of mourning. In Don't Be Sad When I'm Gone': A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires (Toplight Books, 2020), psychologist Beatriz Dujovne documents how she grieved the loss of her husband and sought therapy during an extended stay in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recounting her healing process day-to-day, from shock through recovery, this book traces her navigation of the uncertainty and devastation that often engulfs those who have suffered profound loss. A profound read! Lexa Rosean is a licensed psychoanalyst with private practice in New York City. I am a graduate of New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis (NYGSP) and Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f

In this episode, Bita Moghaddam discusses the emergence of ketamine as a combat anesthetic in the Vietnam war, its transformation into a recreation drug central to club culture, and its current transition into a treatment for depression.  Ketamine, approved in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of depression, has been touted by scientists and media reports as something approaching a miracle cure. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series chronicles the ascent of a drug that has been around for fifty years--in previous incarnations, a Vietnam-era combat anesthetic and a popular club drug--that has now been reinvented as a treatment for depression. Bita Moghaddam, a leading researcher in neuropharmacology, explains the scientific history and the biology of ketamine, its clinical use, and its recently discovered antidepressant effects, for the nonspecialist reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! h

In Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair. We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. This book brings together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis to help us understand fear as a relational practice so that we can see that our relationships with other fearers shape what we fear, what fear feels like, how we identify and understand our fears, and how we cope with them. Growing as moral agents involves coming to grips with what kinds of fearers we want to be and become, and with what we owe each other when facing what we cannot control. At the heart of this book are the moral quandaries and complexities of relational

Clients often seek therapists’ input for dealing with ethical dilemmas in their lives, but there is little guidance for therapists in how to do this. The Ethical Lives of Clients: Transcending Self-Interest in Psychotherapy (APA, 2021) shows therapists how to serve as ethical consultants who help clients balance their personal needs with their sense of responsibility to others. Dr. Bill Doherty blends decades of clinical experience with personal and philosophical insights to frame the skills and knowledge therapists need to act as ethical guides while respecting client autonomy. He calls for a shift from psychotherapy’s individualistic focus towards a more relational one that includes ethical connections to others. Doherty presents the LEAP‑C model, a framework for ethical consulting that utilizes the traditional therapeutic skills of listening, exploring, affirming, and offering perspective, while also challenging clients to recognize ethical issues they don't perceive. Using detailed case examples, Doherty

If you have ever gotten excited over buying a new object only to feel let down once you acquire it, then today’s discussion will be relevant to you. My guest is Todd McGowan, author of the book Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016, Columbia University Press). We discuss his critique of capitalism as a system that encourages us to forever chase satisfactions that never come. And we explore his suggestion that true satisfaction lies in the wanting, not the acquiring. It’s a fascinating conversation that will radically change the way you approach everyday consumption and how you think about your own satisfaction. Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of several other books, including Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013, University of Nebraska Press), Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017, Northwestern University Press), and Universality and Identity Politics (2020, Columbia University Pr

Psychoanalytic encounters are filled with the unknowability of two unconscious minds meeting. Here one may forge a link that enables the process of meaning-making, or else it can become the space for destruction, perversion, evacuation, regression, and stasis. The area that lies between the mind of the analyst and that of the analysand is thus the liminal area of psychoanalysis - of growth, change, turbulence, as well as that of impasse, bastion, and failure. This latter could be what Bion meant by minus links. It seems that the primitive part of the mind is always looking for ways to evade psychic pain and emotional truth is always in peril. Analytic links are always fraught with danger. Minus links share with each other the quality of evading truth and therefore inhibiting emotional growth and the capacity to give meaning to experiences. Blind spots may be enabled by analytic allegiance to our particular schools, our inability to forge a technique in the face of the protomental apparatus which can breed arr

On this episode, J.J. Mull speaks with Richard Billow and Tzachi Slonim about Richard M. Billow’s Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis and Group Process: Changing Our Minds (Routledge, 2021). This volume presents Billow’s unique contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalytic group therapy, along with introductions and explications by Slonim, the volume’s editor. Weaving together various theoretical traditions and thinkers (Bion, Laplanche, the relational school, etc.), Billow extends and complicates what we ordinarily think of as constituting the “relational” in psychodynamic group work. In addition to these theoretical contributions, what remains most alive in the book is its fidelity to clinical experience. Throughout the book, vivid clinical vignettes give us a window into the dynamic, unfolding process of a clinician at work. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and b

Traditionally, trauma has been defined as negatively impacting external events, with resulting damage. This book puts forth an entirely different thesis: trauma is universal, occurring under even the best of circumstances and unavoidably sculpting the very building blocks of character structure. In Traumatic Experiences of Normal Development: An Intersubjective, Object Relations Listening Perspective on Self, Attachment, Trauma, and Reality (Routledge, 2020), Dr. Carl Shubs depathologizes the experience of trauma by presenting a listening perspective which helps recognize the presence and effects of traumatic experiences of normal development (TEND) by using a reconstruction of object relations theory. This outlook redefines trauma as the breach in intrapsychic organization of Self, Affect, and Other (SAO), the three components of object relations units, which combine to form intricate and changeable constellations that are no less than the total experience of living in any given moment. Bridging the gap betw

Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame-Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022) provides a psychoanalytic perspective to the global implications of the populist movement in the U.S. and its relationship to other parts of the world, particularly focusing on the presidency and legacy of Donald Trump. The book explores Trump's use of psychological form of manipulation known as projective identification and how his use of this defense mechanism has influenced global institutions, political discourse, and quality of life in the long term. Messina explores the correlation between Trump's rhetoric and an increase in reported racism and prejudiced violence worldwide, disintegration of global values, and a radicalized political climate. She analyzes the dynamics between Trump and his supporters, political opponents, and successors, considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a study of Trump's views of the world, and considers the roles of social and televisi

In Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Gila Ashtor “strives to draw out the discipline’s conceptual underpinnings by putting them in conversation with Laplanche’s comprehensive innovations.” Ashtor engages with “the broadest and most fundamental concerns of psychoanalysis.” What is the nature of psychoanalytic theory? What is the unconscious? What causes mental suffering? Why does psychic life develop? Acknowledging that while contemporary practitioners may work “flexibly across a range of different schools” they leave fundamental theories of mind “intact”. “What are we clinging to?” Ashtor asks. “The grammar of our discourse is filled with constructions we do not believe anymore yet we cannot bring ourselves to use a language other than the one Freud taught us”. Laplanche believes we lost sight of the “true revolution” which is that “we revolve around others.” “There’s so much appreciation in Laplanche of the actual other person” Ashtor told me. “The core of Lap

Vincenzo Bonaminio, the Italian psychoanalyst and ambassador to the Winnicottian tradition offers us a clinical feast in his new publication, Playing at Work: Clinical Essays in a Contemporary Winnicottian Perspective on Technique (Routledge, 2022). At a moment when, as he argues, much writing in the field is driven by theory and theorizing, this book offers a veritable cornucopia of clinical description. Bonaminio shares his errors and his “almost but not quite” moments with patients. As such, he depicts the psychoanalytic quotidian—the bread and butter, the unexceptional, and the boring that make up most of the clinician’s day—and does so with humor and intelligence. He also shares with us the impact Winnicott has on his thinking in the consulting room and that impact is nothing less than total, from hill to vale. It is interesting to witness what immersion in a way of clinical thinking looks like clinically, and it is hard to discern where DWW begins and Bonaminio ends. It seems he has integrated the entir

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility.  In On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know (Duke UP, 2022), Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon

Annie Reiner’s introduction to Wilfred Bion’s theories of mind presents Bion’s intricate ideas in an accessible, original way without compromising their complexity. Reiner uses comparisons to painting, literature and philosophy, and detailed clinical examples, to provide an experience of Bion’s work that can be felt as well as thought. The book explores many of Bion’s theoretical and clinical innovations, and examines the controversy surrounding his concept of O. Reiner provides evidence of a continuity between Bion’s early ideas and his later, more esoteric work. W. R. Bion’s Theories of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2022) will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic candidates, as well as students of psychoanalytic and psychological history, and anyone looking for a readable introduction to Bion’s work. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm

A Study of Malignant Narcissism: Personal and Professional Insights (Routledge, 2022) offers a unique insight into malignant narcissism, exploring both its personal and professional aspects and constructing a theoretical framework that renders its origins and manifestations more accessible. With reference to his own family dynamic and to 45 years of professional experience, Richard Wood explores the psychology of malignant narcissism, positing it as a defense against love. The book first offers an overview of existing literature before examining relevant clinical material, including an analysis of Wood’s relationships with his own parents. Wood presents vignettes illustrating the core dynamics that drive narcissism, illustrated with sections of his father’s unpublished autobiography and with his patient work. The book makes the case for malignant narcissism to be considered a subtype of psychopathy and puts forth a framework setting out the key dynamics that typify these individuals, including consideration of

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future. Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that

A clear and engaging call-to-arms to Freudians everywhere and a fresh diagnosis of the major problem confronting psychoanalysis today, Austin Ratner's book The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof (Ipbooks, 2018) presents exciting new ideas that could help psychoanalysis reclaim its eminent place among the mental sciences. By showing how and why Freudians have avoided proving their theories, The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof charts a new future of growth and engagement in which psychoanalysis fulfills its promise: to rescue humanity from its own irrationality. Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium memb

Sigmund Freud is probably best known as the founder of psychoanalysis. In his clinical practice, he established theories on how the human psyche develops and behaves, and his 1905 text Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is an analysis of humans’ relationship to sex. At the time, doctors and researchers were curious how “non-normative” sexualities and genders developed. Instead of looking for biological or hereditary traits, Freud looked at the development of the human psyche, eventually questioning our relationship to notions of normativity and perversion. His questions laid a foundation for the later development of queer theory. George Paul Meiu is an associate professor of anthropology and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya and the upcoming book Queer Objects: Intimacy, Citizenship, and Rescue in Kenya.  See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about

Hatred of Sex (U Nebraska Press, 2022) links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a range of fields and institutions, including queer studies, attachment theory, the #MeToo movement, and “traumatology,” demonstrating how hatred of sex has been optimized and exploited by neoliberalism. Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious. Matthew Pieknik is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Learn more