New Books in Psychology

What is a good life? Traditionally, philosophers have seen it as an equation: The Good Life = Happiness + Meaning. But, if it's really that simple, why don't more of us achieve that truly "good" life?  In The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It (Balance, 2024), Lorraine Besser, Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College, offers insights d...

Why are BDSM practitioners so happy? It turns out, BDSM isn't just about whips and chains. With engaging stories and a warm, conversational tone, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Acacdemic, 2025) by Dr. Alicia M. Walker and Dr. Arielle Kuperberg reveals how BDSM practitioners use clear boundaries, enthusiastic consent, open dialogue, and a strong communit...

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....

In this episode of "Brainrot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds," the podcast explores the devastating effects of sextortion. The host, Dr. Karyne Messina along with co-host Dr. Harry Gill to discuss how digital platforms have become tools for exploitation, targeting individuals of all ages by preying on their fundamental needs for connection and affection. The conversation delves into the p...

The Grieving Body: How the stress of Loss Can be an Opportunity for Healing (Harper One, 2025)by Mary-Frances O’Connor, Ph. D. The follow-up to celebrated grief expert, neuroscientist, and psychologist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s The Grieving Brain focuses on the impact of grief—and life’s other major stressors—on the human body. Coping with death and grief is one of the most painful human experie...

Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments: there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these ways are. For many social scientists, social institutions are sets of rules about how to act, though theories differ about what the rules are, how they are established and maintained, and what makes some social institutions stable through social chan...

Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices. Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to understand this field, the book also explores its inter...

With a growing number of students entering college with an existing mental health diagnosis, College Mental Health 101: A Guide for Students, Parents, and Professionals (Oxford UP, 2025) offers hope and clear direction to those struggling with mental illness. There is an undeniable mental health crisis on campuses these days. More students are anxious, depressed, drinking, and self-harming than ev...

Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture (Swift Press, 2024) is a book about how you view the world. It's about the things that shape your thoughts, from what you notice and how you interpret it, to what you assume, believe and want. It's also about how, if you think in a radical way, you can look beyond your limited view of the world to see the bigger picture. This isn't one of those book...

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. How did we get here? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump" (Random House, 2025)Context (Random...

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...

What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two-, three-, or even ten-fold—in a short time, behaving like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far too quickly to result from genetic changes and affe...

The inside story of the CIA’s secret mind control project, MKULTRA, using never-before-seen testimony from the perpetrators themselves. Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s most cunning chemist. As head of the infamous MKULTRA project, he oversaw an assortment of dangerous—even deadly—experiments. Among them: dosing unwitting strangers with mind-bending drugs, torturing mental patients through sensory de...

Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older than language. In Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation (Norton, 2022), Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Kemp describes t...

Every good parent wants to create relationships with their children that are filled with joy, connection, and healthy attachment. Yet well-meaning but traumatized parents--those who suffered as children or who are dealing with traumatic events as adults--tend to see the world from a survival point of view. If that's you, you might suspect that your own trauma is negatively influencing your parenti...

There is a hidden addiction plaguing humanity right now: revenge. Researchers have identified retaliation in response to real and imagined grievances as the root cause of most forms of human aggression and violence. From vicious tweets to road rage, murder-suicide, and armed insurrection, perpetrators almost always see themselves as victims seeking justice. Chillingly, recent behavioral and neuroi...

The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we think about yesterday’s tennis final, or Aristotle, or unicorns. Naturalizing mental content has usually meant explaining how this is possible in terms that eliminate the mystery while retaining commitment to a substantive relationship between mind and...

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which the brain, in collusion with social and biological...

Today I sit down with Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl, the interdisciplinary team from Brown University that is responsible for the “Varieties of Contemplative Experience” study on the challenges and adverse effects of meditation. We talk about the design, findings, and outcomes of the study, and how it opened up a new field of interdisciplinary investigation. Along the way we ask: if someone...

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...

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...

In this 50th episode, your hosts, Jonathan Kay and Stephen Julich, reflect on the intersections that shape the evolving path of the scholar-practitioner. This episode traces a search for wholeness through three vital crossings: • the intersection of thinking and doing, where lived practice challenges the silos of classical knowledge production; the intersection of the arts and knowledge-making, wh...

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call brainwashing is more common than we think; it is not so much what happens to other people as what can happen to anyone. The Instability of Truth ex...