New Books in Psychoanalysis

A fascinating introductory volume, Existential Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2025) integrates existential philosophy with psychoanalysis, drawing on key theorists from both areas and expertly guiding the reader on how to incorporate these two disciplines, which may appear disparate on the surface, into their clinical and theoretical work. This unique and access...

There is an academic interest in the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidm...

A new paradigm that honors the wisdom and wholeness of neurodivergent clients. Focusing on autism and what is medically known as ADHD, neurodivergent author Nyck Walsh takes readers on an anti-oppressive, intersectional journey into a new standard of care for neurodivergent clients and their therapists. Whether new to or well-versed in the neurodiversity paradigm, readers will learn how to best su...

Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (U Toronto Press, 2025) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of...

I spoke with author Aliza Einhorn about her new book Tarot of the Unconscious: Uncovering the Hidden Link Between Psychoanalysis and the Cards (Weiser Books, 2026) United States: Red Wheel Weiser. Aliza Einhorn is a Psychoanalyst in training at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York City. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a longtime tarot reader, tarot teacher,...

UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health (Policy Press, 2025) is the essential guide to the rise of digital therapy for anyone working in, researching or using mental health services. This timely book explores the emerging uberization of therapy through algorithmic control, datafication of despair and attrition by design. Analysing the deployment of e-commerce business models, this book make...

From the inside flap: “A rich resource of Deleuze’s research that is unavailable in his published writing Includes summaries of 216 seminar sessions available in transcripts and recordings Summaries are based on research for the Deleuze Seminars project (co-directed by Charles J. Stivale and Daniel W. Smith), where full transcripts and translations, to which readers will have access for simultaneo...

Addiction, Accommodation, and Vulnerability in Psychoanalysis: Circles Without a Center (Routledge, 2022) explores the compulsions and trauma that underlie addiction, using an intersubjective approach in seeking to understand the inspirations and challenges arising from the psychoanalytic treatment of addiction, compulsivity, and related dissociative conditions. Drawing on insights from his own an...

Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do - and fail to do - about actually getting them? In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the diffi...

The Concept of Emotional Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2025) is a philosophical and academic exploration of how society determines whether emotions are considered normal human experiences or emotional disorders. The book examines the concern that some ordinary emotions may be “over pathologized,” meaning they are increasingly treated as medical or psychiatric problems rather than understandab...

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren’t children incapable of liking “...

In Free Association: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2026), Barnaby Barratt presents a compelling and much-needed exploration of the method of free association within psychoanalytic treatment. This concise yet comprehensive book examines the historical roots, philosophical implications and transformative impact on the human psyche of free association, making it an essential resource fo...

Psychoanalysis is rising in popularity, but it’s not helping patients navigate the pressures and harms of modern capitalism. Instead, it continues to enforce oppressive structures, state power, and reactionary politics. In From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press, 2026) Dr. Lara Sheehi reimagines what psychoanalysis could be. She shows how it can help...

An essential guide to healing from oppression-based trauma, for everyone left outside of mainstream conversations There are many books on trauma healing that can change people’s lives. Yet when queer and trans people, people of color, and all of us living at the margins look for books that reflect our own experiences and that specifically name the oppression we experience as trauma, we’re left emp...

Erich Fromm, the prominent twentieth-century public intellectual and psychoanalyst, was recognized for his courageous stand against fascism, racism, and human destructiveness. Until now, however, little has been known about the extent to which Fromm's personal experience of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust shaped his outlook and work. In Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (O...

Tracy Morgan is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC seeing individuals, couples and groups. She is a member of the faculty at CMPS, a founding member of Das Unbehagen and the founding editor of the award winning podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis. She has published on a variety of subjects ranging from Gay and African American history, social movement theory, and psychoanalysis. Her most r...

When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there? In the intimate space of the consulting room, we meet the woman who can't post her wedding invitations but then, decades later, can't decide whether to get...

In this episode of the New Books Network, I sat down with the contributors of Psychoanalytic Explorations into the Primal Relationship in Japan and India (Routledge, 2025) to discuss the profound psychic textures of the East. Moving away from the traditional Eurocentric focus on the Oedipal complex, this volume investigates the "primal relationship"—the foundational bond between mother and infant—...

Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis (American Psychological Association, 2025) intricately weaves psychoanalytic and developmental theory to explain how we become who we are, and how we might grow beyond the places we get stuck. In recent decades psychological research and practice has focused heavily on cognitive domains, with far less attention paid to the nonverbal systems...

Why do certain women become icons of evil? Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Joanna Bourke offers the first comparative, non-sensationalist account of five of the most reviled women in the modern Anglophone world: Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Aileen Wuornos, Karla Homolka and Karla Faye Tucker. It examines their lives, crimes and cultural recept...

In their book The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism (Columbia UP, 2025) Mari Ruti and Gail N. Newman offer our beleaguered souls a breather. Together they tackle the question of what makes life worth living, and before you recoil at the sound of that question, which intentionally has a little neoliberal ring to it, emphasis mine, let me say that this book studies and challenges the neoliberal w...

Body as Shadow: Jung’s Method of Embodied Healing is Jungian analyst Erica Lorentz’s passionate, clinically grounded argument that Jung’s psychology was never meant to be “head-only.” It was always an embodied practice, one that asks us to meet psyche where it actually lives: in sensation, emotion, energy, imagination, and what Jung called the somatic unconscious or subtle body. At the heart of th...

Critical Consciousness: Beyond Impasses in Environmentalism, Psychoanalysis, and Education (Routledge, 2025) provides insight into the antagonism and disputative dialogue present in contemporary discourse. Our guest for this interview, author Joseph Scalia III, Psya. D. is a psychoanalyst, environmental activist, and Co-Director of the Institute for a Democratic Psychoanalysis. Co-authored with Ly...

Today I spoke with Dr. Louis Rothschild about his new book Rapprochement Between Fathers and Sons Breakdowns, Reunions, Potentialities (Karnac, 2024). Our conversation moved freely between theory, generational attitudes, thinkers, and personal vignettes. What is a good enough father? What is the difference between a man of achievement and a man of power? Who is the father of the mother’s mind? Wha...

Today I spoke with Juliane Maxwald abut her new book Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality (Taylor & Francis, 2025). Maxwald bridges psychoanalytic theory with contemporary sex therapy to demonstrate that sexual symptoms are rarely just about sex—they're embodied expressions of unconscious conflict, early attachment wounds, relational trauma, and unmet developme...