New Books in Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud, has been, albeit perhaps implicitly, a theory of masculinity. Freud’s Oedipus Complex, for example, charts the development of masculine identity in the boy while leaving the girl’s pathway to femininity less fully explicated. And let yourself recall that Freud’s immortal question was not “what do men want” was it? Nevertheless, according to Donald Moss, contem...

What if analysts took steps to keep their analysands out of the hospital when they were beginning to breakdown? What would that look like? In Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown (Routledge, 2013), the eminent psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, walks us through that process. Beginning with his treatment of psychotic and manic depressive patients in the 1970s in London, Bolla...

In this interview, Canadian philosopher, psychologist, and psychoanalyst Jon Mills speaks with us about his book Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysiss (Routledge, 2011). In the book he discusses current tenets in North American psychoanalytic thinking and practice that he finds to be concerning and problematic. Focusing on the relational and intersubjective turn currently popular...

In Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career (Routledge, 2012), Sandra Buechler suggests that shame and loss are key components of a clinical career, and we would be best served to accept their presence and get used to their ongoing tug and pull. Indeed, clinical training is rife with shame. Buechler reminds us that in training to be a clinician, unlike most other professions,...

Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in A...

In Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Patricia Gherovici unpacks the ways in which hysteria, Lacanian-style, functions. Approaching her topic, transgenderism, from many angles, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the transgender turn is changing clinical thinking and practice. The person who comes into the consu...

In Intimacies and in this interview, Leo Bersani asks “does knowledge of the Other create a foundation for intimacy?” Troubling certain psychoanalytic models that survey the analysand’s past, gathering information about the vicissitudes of childhood, dreams, and other communications, he wonders if intimacy lies elsewhere. Reflecting on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between knowledge...

In this interview, the Lacanian inflected psychoanalyst, Dr. Jamieson Webster, speaks to NBIP about her new publication, The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation (Karnac Books, 2011), a text that offers the reader/listener an opportunity to think about the recurrent anxieties that perpetually face this “impossible” profession. Interweaving her training, dream...

What’s culture got to do with psychoanlaysis? According to Muriel Dimen and Stephen Hartman, a whole lot. Dimen, editor of With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (Routledge, 2011), and Hartman, a contributor to the same, note that “culture is always already there.” Therefore culture and the clinic cannot be two separate places but must be, as our guests say, “interimplicated,” or folded toge...

While the tragic tale of Marilyn Monroe has been written many times over, her impact on her psychoanalyst, the eminent Ralph Greenson has, until now, been largely unexplored. In The Misfit (RosettaBooks, 2011), Steven Poser tries to understand how Greenson treated Monroe by putting himself in Greenson’s milieu. He attempts to find out what Greenson knew, what he thought, what he felt and how he us...

“Why is the body the site of so much ongoing, current and growing attention in the West”? asks the feminist psychoanalyst and public intellectual Susie Orbach in her book Bodies (Picador, 2009). In this interview, the groundbreaking author of Fat is a Feminist Issue (inter alia)speaks to New Books in Psychoanalysis about how the body is “no longer a place we live from” but rather a place where the...

In this interview we revisit the complicated female oedipal constellation, as New Books in Psychoanalysis speaks with Dr. Lucy Holmes about her book The Internal Triangle: New Theories of Female Development (Jason Aronson, 2007). According to Holmes, the “Internal triangle” is the cornerstone of the female psyche. All of us, male and female, need to separate from our mothers if we are to move beyo...

Who knew there could be a “how to” book regarding the “impossible profession”? Well, Sheldon Bach has written one. In The How-to Book for Students of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac Books, 2011), Bach speaks plainly and with warmth about the many difficulties facing new clinicians ranging from setting and collecting fees to dealing with the sadomasochistic transference/countertransference...

In his book The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through an Analytic Lens (Routledge, 2009), the well-respected psychoanalyst Dr. Neil Altman explores what happens when one practices analysis outside the private practice frame and, instead, among the urban poor. Drawing on years of experience helping underprivileged groups, Altman discusses the impact of poverty on the analyst a...

This interview should be of interest to both a professional and lay audience. What analysand has not wondered to herself whether she just represents a paycheck in her analyst’s world? And what analyst has not kept a patient in treatment long after the analysis was brought to completion due to financial concerns? In his book Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self-Interest between An...

Who doesn’t want to know what women want, right? Well, in this interview with Hendrika Freud, we begin to get the idea that women often prefer not to know. As I sit in my private practice, many of my female patients put on a good smoke and mirror show, cloaking desires behind reaction formations, saying they are not angry when indeed they are, and feeling guilty when they venture to articulate wha...