New Books in Psychology

In this episode my co-host and I had planned to talk about how the new Trump administration could create unity in America. The episode title had been, “Starting with a Clean Slate: How the Trump administration could create unity in America.” By starting anew, without a political agenda, we intended to explore how a new sense of community and pride in America could evolve. However, after the group...

Today I spoke to Dr. Carl Waitz about his new book Youth Mental Health Crises and the Broken Social Link: A Freudian-Lacanian Perspective (Routledge, 2024). “The kids are not ok” blurbs Patricia Gherovici in her endorsement of Dr. Waitz’ necessary new book. We know this. On the weekend we recorded this interview (February 9, 2025) the New York Times published research[1] showing national trendline...

The idea that there is a distinct phenemenology of thought – that there is thinking experience just as there is visual experience or auditory experience – is a radical position in philosophy of mind. David Pitt is one of its foremost proponents.  In The Quality of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2024), Pitt provides an extended defense of the position and its implications: if thinking is a kind...

“Brain Rot,” the 2024 Oxford word of the year captures the essence of our new podcast that is being created as a special series on the New Books Network (NBN). The full title is “Brain Rot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds.” In this second podcast Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and NBN host discusses the problems the emerge when children watch screens and digital...

Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency (Routledge, 2024) illuminates what the pathways from emotions to social change look like--and how they work--so we can recognize and inform our collective attempts to avert further climate catastrophe. Debra J. Davidson engages with how our act...

The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing...

A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Narcissistic Parenthood and its Ramifications: The Forgotten Echo (Routledge, 2024) proposes a new perspective on narcissism, focusing on its destructive impact within relationships. Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Hila Yahalom discusses the patterns and ramifications of traumatizing upbringing by narcissistic parents, exploring the resulting development of a defensiv...

AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use...

Life Studies in Psychoanalysis: Faces of Love (Routledge, 2023), by Dr. Ahron Friedberg, consists of four psychoanalytic studies each representing a patient's course of treatment over several years. These studies demonstrate how love, in an array of forms, is refracted through the process of psychoanalysis, which unfolds over time and reveals the complexities of human desire. The cases presented h...

Udo Hock's Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen. Zum Werk Jean Laplanches (The enigmatic messages of the other. On the work of Jean Laplanche), came out in 2024 with Psychosozial-Verlag, and collectes nine essays that Hock published over the past twenty years. Published in 2024 to celebrate Laplanche's centennial, these papers are a crucial contribution to Laplanche studies from one of its key...

In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche's work to engage with the French psychoanalyst's...

Led by Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and host of NBN’s “New Books in Psychology” and “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Racism in America,” this podcast covers the effects of too much screen time. Dr. Messina talks about this topic with Dr. Harry Gill, a renown psychiatrist who also has a PhD. in neuroscience. They discuss one of the greatest difficulties they see in their...

Why are women's friendships so deep yet so fragile? Friendship coach and educator Danielle Bayard Jackson unpacks the latest research about women's cooperation and communication, while sharing practical strategies to preserve and strengthen these relationships. Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships (Hachette, 2024) is one part textboo...

Clinician and psychoanalyst Jan Abram proposes and elaborates the dual concept of an intrapsychic surviving and non surviving object. She extends Winnicottian technique by highlighting the centrality of the analysand playing with the object. Across eight chapters she develops this theory of survival, while also exploring the terror of non-survival, and its implications for psychic health, the fear...

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Roberta Satow about her new book Our Time Is Up (Ipbooks, 2024). In 1895 Freud noticed that his case histories “read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.” What Dr. Satow has written works in the other direction; a novel that reads like case histories. She has accomplished the difficult task of represent...

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways. In The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health (Princeton UP, 2024), Nord explains how o...

Your mental health is as important as your physical health and, in times of stress, it's vital to have enhanced cognition and reserves of resilience. Brain Boost: Healthy Habits for a Happier Life (Cambridge UP, 2025) is packed with practical tips, based on scientific evidence, that will teach you how to implement lifestyle strategies that will improve your brain health, cognition, and overall wel...

The 9/11 attacks, as well as the ones in Madrid, London, Paris and Brussels; the genocides in Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Cambodia; the torture in dictatorial regimes; the wars in former Yugoslavia, Syria and Iraq and currently in Ukraine; the sexual violence during periods of conflict, all make us wonder: why would anyone do something like that? Who are these people?  Drawing on 30 years of research...

We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory. The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and...

New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative.  In Blue: A His...

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring t...

James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experiences alternate between his present-day struggles with impotence and his memories of racial violence. As the narrative unfolds a pivotal childhood memory of a lynching, sets the tone and comes to represent the fundamental weakness of white supremacy. Hi...

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.  Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy fo...

The key to a life well-lived is prioritization, but people rarely explain how to do it effectively.   In Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions (Rosenfeld Media, 2024), Harry Max provides a useful guide.  He explains how learning to prioritize is helpful in life as well as at work. He explains how he - and his clients - feel a sense of freedom, as though a weigh...

How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps th...