New Books In 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