New Books in Psychoanalysis

Why would a twin sacrifice her own needs to make sure her same-age sibling is always cared for? What would cause a twin to have panic attacks when he and his brother go away to separate colleges? Why do some twins find it so difficult to develop friendships and romantic relationships? The "twin mystique" and twins' own expectations of their relationship contribute to their difficulties. A therapis...

Many scholars have struggled with Irigaray’s focus on sexuate difference, in particular with her claim that it is “ontological,” wondering if this implies a problematically naïve or essentialist account of sexuate difference. As a result, the ethical vision which Irigaray elaborates has not been taken up in a robust way in the fields of philosophy, feminism, or psychoanalysis. By tracing the notio...

Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Humanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice (Routledge, 2023) brings together a global community of mental health professionals to offer an impassioned defense of relationship-based depth psychotherapy. Expressing ideas that are integral to the mission of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), the authors demonstrate a shared vision of a world w...

Today we have a  group session (read: an hour and a half) with the authors Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michal Levin discussing their new book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). Acknowledging that “We’re not the first to think about music in the clinical situation” the authors focused on the analytic project “as a kind of music in its own rig...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

Dr. Richard Waugaman is an emeritus supervising and training analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. He is also a well-respected author. With regard to his career he has said, “I have practiced clinical psychoanalysis for over 40 years. Initially, my publications were mostly on psychoanalysis.” In 2002, he made a discovery when he learned that the traditional theory about wh...

Johanna Dobrich, author of Working with Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: Ability and Disability in Clinical Process (Routledge, 2021), is the recipient of the 2023 Sandor Ferenczi Award. The award is given for the best published work in the realm of psychoanalysis related to trauma and dissociation in adults and/or children. Survivor Siblings in Psychoanalysis: (Ability and Disability in Clini...

In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society,...

In the unconscious, coincidence does not exist. A bizarre tragedy drives ten-year-old Paul from his dysfunctional home, leaving his younger sister, Bethany, behind. Paul flees to his estranged father’s apple orchard where he discovers comfort and parenting for the first time. Two decades later, the long-lost siblings settle separately in NYC where a gifted psychoanalyst, Lillian, develops independ...

Michael J. Diamond's book Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times (Phoenix Publishing, 2022) describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he...

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Mo...

In The Psychoanalytic Encounter and the Misuse of Theory (Routledge, 2022), Lee Grossman addresses the disjuncture between analytic literature and clinical work in an effort to render analytic theorizing more representative of clinical experience. Pointing out the ways in which analytic literature can fail to capture the intensity of feeling and the stumbling, lurching, working in the dark that ca...

In Schizophrenia: Science, Psychoanalysis, and Culture (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022), Kevin Volkan and Vamık Volkan present a comprehensive study of schizophrenia using a psychoanalytic lens on the existing interdisciplinary research. Over the last seventy years, mainstream research on the causes, prevalence, and treatment of schizophrenia has greatly diverged from psychoanalytic thinking. Howe...

In this episode, JJ Mull discusses Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) with co-authors Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Weaving together a variety of influences -- ranging from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to trans of color critique and queer theory -- Gender Without Identity formulates a theory of gender formation adequate to the radical complexity of trans and...

Today I interview Bob Falconer about his new book, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). Falconer’s book is the result of a decade-long journey to understand a phenomenon that raises questions not only about how we, as a contemporary Western culture, understand ourselves. It’s also a challenge to the limits of how we understa...

Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets ​​Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Here language is influenced not by the manifest and the conscious, but the unconscious or void, as understood in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. This work is the basis for his hope for a reorganization of thought in contemporary...

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,...

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.” Chamb...

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 e...

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 appr...

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 show...

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 bl...

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...

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...

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...