New Books in Psychoanalysis

Today I spoke with Anna Fishzon about her new book The Impossible Return - Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning (Routledge, 2025). The Impossible Return is a hybrid work of cancer memoir, psychoanalytic theory, and Soviet history that explores the author's experience with breast cancer through the lens of mourning, loss, and identity. Fishzon weaves together her person...

Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account (Bloomsbury, 2023) brings together the first English translations of Why Lacan, Betty Milan's memoir of her analysis with Lacan in the 1970s, and her play, Goodbye Doctor, inspired by her experience. Why Lacan provides a unique and valuable perspective on how Lacan worked as psychoanalyst as well as his approach to psychoanalytic theory. Milan's testimony show...

How well do we understand our relationship to sex? According to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the new book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), we tend to overlook the “unpleasurable pleasures” that are integral to sex. Sex undoes us, destabilizes us, takes us out of ourselves. Many of our 21st century cultural products—Queer Theory, traumatology, intersectional studies—secr...

Drawing on deep reserves of experience and theoretical and research knowledge, Nancy McWilliams presents a fresh perspective on psychodynamic supervision in this highly instructive work. In Psychoanalytic Supervision (Guilford Publications, 2021), McWilliams examines the role of the supervisor in developing the therapist's clinical skills, giving support, helping to formulate and monitor treatmen...

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers...

The first collection of essays from the author of the Life and Death of Psychoanalysis, Stay, Illusion! with Simon Critchley and Conversion Disorder, Disorganisation & Sex (Divided Publishing, 2022) is as much about our resistance to sexuality as it is about sex itself. Jamieson Webster continues to excite and disturb, turning to Lacan and the autotheoretical in her exploration of the deep roots o...

WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through neuroscience, psychoanalysis, history, and philosophy that challenges readers to reconsider their most basic assumptions...

Psychoanalysts Jamieson Webster and Jordan Osserman discuss the recently republished, revised translation of Françoise Dolto's Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent. While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in...

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes? Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the settin...

Step into the unsettling world of E.T.A. Hoffmann with translator Peter Wortsman to explore “The Sandman”—a tale that haunted Freud enough to spark his famous psychoanalytic analysis of “The Uncanny,” examining familiar things that unsettle and disturb us for no clear reason. What makes this bizarre story so deeply disturbing, even today? And how does Hoffmann’s genius, in all of his writing, cont...

The difficulty of Jacques Lacan's thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, jargon-free approach to understanding it. The book describes Lacan's life, the context from which he emerged, and the reception of his theory. Readers will come away with an understanding of concepts such as jouissance, the objet a, and the big Other....

Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field. His work bounds the world of philosophy and psychology, focusing upon both individual human behavior and the manifestation of the collective behavior in the social context. He is the author and/or editor of over 30 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy,...

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis' often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanaly...

This episode of “A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Racism in America” takes a deep dive into the disturbing legal outcomes of state-sanctioned violence. The host and co-host, Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams, analyze the Department of Justice's sentencing recommendation for Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved in the raid that led to Breonna Taylor's death. The episode uses...

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 mo...

Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2022) presents an accessible introduction to the conceptualization and treatment of eating disorders from a psychoanalytic perspective. Each of the chapters offers a different perspective on these difficult-to-treat conditions and taken together, illustrate the breadth and depth that psychoanalytic thinking can offer both seasoned clinician...

Host Pierce Salguero sits down with Richard Saville-Smith, an independent scholar of madness, religion, and psychiatry. We discuss Richard’s book Acute Religious Experiences (2023), which argues that frameworks from Mad Studies can get us out from under the academy’s current habit of either pathologizing or sanitizing religious experiences. Along the way, we talk about the power struggle between p...

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...

Both new and seasoned psychotherapists wrestle with the relationship between psychological distress and inequality across race, class, gender, and sexuality. How does one address this organically in psychotherapy? What role does it play in therapeutic action? Who brings it up, the therapist or the patient? Daniel José Gaztambide addresses these questions by offering a rigorous decolonial approach...

In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psychological toll of being a Black woman…can never be underestimated. There is a low value placed on Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level and yet we feel the need t...

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest and most loyal supporter. In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalys...

Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams, the host and co-host of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Racism in America” sponsored by The American Psychoanalytic Association explored how employing mechanisms of defense perpetuates racial injustice’s movement forward and the resistance it faces as a tug of war, i.e., progress followed by backlash. They examined the symbolic removal of Dr. Mar...

Sitting on a Suitcase: Psychoanalytic Stories (Karnac Books, 2025) contains eighteen moving tales of disparate Jewish lives from Eliat Aram, Leslie B. Brissett, Louisa Diana Brunner, Halina Brunning, Leila Djemal, Shmuel Erlich, Mira Erlich-Ginor, Franca Fubini, Stan Gold, Larry Hirschhorn, Susan Kahn, Alicia E. Kaufmann, Olya Khaleelee, James Krantz, Vega Zagier Roberts, Edward R. Shapiro, Mannie...

In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy. Democracy, as you may dimly recal...

Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears (Lexington Books, 2024) explores the intersection of sport and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the often-overlooked psycho-social dimensions underpinning the experience of sport. In this podcast, Jordan Osserman speaks to editors Jack Black and Joseph S. Reynoso about the book and their wider, ongoing wor...