New Books in Psychoanalysis

Vamik D. Volkan, a native of Cyprus, was touched by ethnic/political violence at a very personal level when he was still in medical school: a very close friend was shot by terrorists during the Cypriat war. “I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it at the time, I was far from home.” Once he completed medical school and his psychoanalytic training, he noticed that he had become preoccupied with theoretical questions of mourning, and he realized he was motivated by his loss to address issues of ethnic violence and peace-making from a psychoanalytic angle. How are generations of families affected by historical trauma and loss? How does political violence and trauma become a chosen or disavowed element of identity across generations? With A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action (Karnac 2015), Volkan recounts a fascinating, riveting, theoretically powerful case history he supervises, of the grandson of a high level Nazi perpetrator, instrumental in developing the forced euthanasia of people with disabilities. The grandfather’s program was called “T4”, and he was responsible for introducing the technique of killing groups of people with gas, which went on to be used on the large scale in the camps. He was later killed on the Eastern Front. When the grandson, the subject of the case, Victor, is born, his parents are deeply preoccupied with the possibility that Victor may have a disability. Victor is haunted by the memory of a tonsillectomy at three years old, of his struggling and resisting being “gassed” by the pediatrician. As an adult, he presents for therapy with the problem that he has episodes at night of waking in a dissociative state in his room and trying to escape through the window. A complication for the treatment is that Victor’s future analyst is the daughter of a Nazi soldier… A Nazi Legacy is challenging, moving, but also useful as a presentation of clinical technique. Volkan strongly advocates for psychoanalysts to be more aware of the effects of social and political violence on the internal world of their patients, but also to be aware of how these events affect analysts themselves, and play out in enactments of disavowal. As Victor begins to work through his family history and the truth of his grandfather’s atrocities, he has a pivotal reaction to seeing the film “Twelve Years a Slave”: “he recalled the film dealing with racism and thought he might be like white people in the United States.” Vamik D. Volkan is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center, and an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington DC Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Volkan is also president of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), a nonprofit organization that brings together unofficial representatives from various parts of the world, such as Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, UK, U.S.A, and the West Bank to examine world affairs from a psychopolitical angle. The IDI develops a common language between psychoanalysts and those who are diplomats, politicians or from other disciplines. Dr. Volkan is a 2015 Winner of the prestigious Sigourney Award, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

There are theorists who seem to strive for integration and those who insist on fundamental differences, incompatibilities, and unbridgeable gulfs. Some write from an interdisciplinary position, exulting in hybridity and increased potentiality, while others, no less passionately, police disciplinary boundaries, urging seriousness and rigor. The argument to integrate is rooted in the assumption that a theory only can be enriched through the incorporation of varying perspectives; a multiple factor model is inherently more flexible and practicable. Proponents of disciplinary and theoretical purity counter that true integration is impossible: synthetic efforts often fall short, resulting in pastiche, lists of superficial similarities, or vitiated “middle positions.”Steven J. Ellman, in When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought (Karnac, 2010) unapologetically declares his allegiance to the first camp. As Ellman explains in his preface, the blending of various theoretical models in the service of expanding and deepening clinical practice has long been his preoccupation, one might even say, his ethical stance. When Theories Touch is divided into three loosely delimited sections (“Freud Chapters,” “Major Post-Freudian Theorists,” and “Contemporary Issues in Psychoanalysis”) and eighteen chapters featuring readings of an array of psychoanalytic giants, including Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Melanie Klein, W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, Wilfred Bion, and Stephen Mitchell. Most of the integrative labor is contained in the commentary sections of each chapter, as well as the concluding chapter, modestly titled, “A Tentative Developmental Model.” In many ways, Ellman is building on the work spurred by the baby observers of the 1980s and 1990s. Those decades not only witnessed the challenge to classical technique by relational theorists but also epistemic convergences founded on object relations theory and the studied infant-caregiver dyad. Insights from Klein, Kohut, Bion, and Winnicott were framed and woven together by shared assumptions about the structuring influence of early mother-infant interactions. Ellman echoes and enlarges these prior efforts. He includes clinical material, indexing implications for technique. He also introduces the relational viewpoint of Mitchell while maintaining a place for drives (or what he prefers to call “endogenous stimulation”), both in his developmental model and his practice. With surprising ease Ellman is able to stake out a theoretical position that complicates (or, arguably, obviates!) age-old psychoanalytic debates about object-seeking vs. pleasure-seeking infants, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, the timing and necessity of transference interpretation, and a host of metapsychological and clinical questions. The relevance and value of Ellman’s book, I believe, rests less in its integration (which is partial by the author’s own measure) than in its brave and convincing advocacy of the merging of causes that previously have done violence to one another. During our interview and in the book, Ellman approaches each body of theory with rare openness and curiosity. He enables theorists as discordant as Stephen Mitchell and Charles Brenner to enter into productive conversation, enhancing the contributions of both through new and unexpected syntheses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

[NB:Please be forewarned, there is some brief audio difficulty at the beginning of the interview. It does clear up quickly, so please do listen through.] We are drawn to what is hidden. We are excited by what is mysterious whether we find it beautiful or repellant. Erotic experience is all about this urge. Sexuality, both in its defensive function and as an intrinsic part of being human, defines the ways in which we engage in the psychoanalytic situation. However, it can be very difficult – even taboo – for analysts to admit having erotic feelings towards a patient, and it can be equally thorny handling erotic transference when it arises in a treatment. In Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios (Routledge, 2014), Andrea Celenza discusses the importance of reclaiming sexuality as one of the many realms that are of central concern to our patients as she simultaneously observes the pervasive “desexualization” of the psychoanalytic field. She asserts that erotic transference and countertransference (of various manifestations) should be explored in every thorough analysis and she means to bring sex squarely back into psychoanalytic theorizing. Celenza offers careful consideration of the use and perils of embodied erotic countertransference as well as dilemmas surrounding self-disclosure, guilty pleasure and the “slippery slope” towards sexual boundary transgression (the subject of her earlier writing.) Celenza and I discuss writing about patients, mutuality, asymmetry, embodiment, re-eroticization, multiplicity and contradictory gender considerations proposing ways in which the binary (e.g., “feminine” and “masculine”) poses constraints that may be transcended. Finally, Celenza reclaims the term “perversion” as a mode of relating vs. a descriptor of behavior thereby restoring its usefulness in the psychoanalytic lexicon. Among other points, she posits that perverse scenarios are attempts to construct a one-person fantasy/universe thereby defending against dangerous subjectivities (either within one’s self or in the other.) Dr. Andrea Celenza, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and an Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts and is a proud and avid soccer player. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growing elasticity of bipolar disorders. For about the last twenty years, argues Leader, the bipolar spectrum has been tailored to a pharmaceutical industry eager to shift attention away from ineffective antidepressants and toward newly developed mood stabilizers. A household word since the mid-1990s, “bipolar” is now widely considered to be biological and hereditary. Its loosened parameters have saddled large swaths of the population with a chronic illness requiring life-long medication. Strictly Bipolar (Penguin, 2013) is a trenchant case for the reexamination of the “bipolar revolution” and for a return to the older diagnosis of manic depression. Leader points out that while bipolarity is at the center of modern capitalist subjectivity – the principal feature of twenty-first-century worklife, which encourages and rewards herculean productivity and exuberant all-nighters — manic depression is a structural, much narrower and less frequent problem. The highs and lows of manic depression are not merely behavioral or ominously genetic but, rather, rooted in an individual’s early history: relationships with primary caregivers, fantasies regarding one’s symbolic place within the family. Manic depression also has common motifs that reflect its structural basis and identifications. Mania announces itself, for example, in fits of housecleaning, shopping sprees, and grand gestures of altruism. Manic episodes often begin with a steady stream of words – extravagant metaphors and brilliant rhetorical leaps — a levity in the symbolic, as Leader puts it. These great themes of mania are traced in Strictly Bipolar to personal stories of guilt, responsibility, and debt; distant or inconsistent parents and grandparents who expected too much or overwhelmingly little and elicited (split off) aggression and hate. We learn that manic-depressives struggle with the overproximity of the Other, attempting to keep the Other separate and safe from all that is bad, from murderous rage, from oneself. Strictly Bipolar offers compelling clinical material and vivid biographical descriptions of the “signature motifs” of manic-depression. In reading the book, I could see how one might be tempted to lean too heavily on surface behaviors and mood states in thinking and diagnosing manic depression. Yet, as Leader points out, manic-depressives have a troubled relationship with time and find it difficult to integrate their own histories. It therefore behooves therapists not to join them in this, redoubling the problem. In the interview, Leader characterizes manic depression and other psychoses without the usual prognostic pessimism – not as problems of subjectivization resulting in social exclusion, medication, or institutional scrutiny but as “ways of being in the world.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as case studies. The book is both compelling and readable, and argues that the fantasy and depiction of torture play a role as an ideology in national politics and policy, and that it’s all more complicated than it seems–once you stop averting your eyes. Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is also the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In this interview Dr. Theodore Jacobs discusses his book The Possible Profession: The Analytic Process of Change (Routledge, 2013) . Dr. Jacobs is a pioneer in the use of countertransference in the analytic setting and is regarded as the originator of the term “enactment” to describe the actions and emotions that occur within both the patient and analyst during treatment. In this interview we discuss how psychoanalytic technique has evolved and how Jacobs’ classical orientation has changed over his career. Dr. Jacobs also shared his views on self disclosure, current practice and the integration of one and two person psychologies. The interview concludes with Dr. Jacob’s thoughts on the current state of the profession, some of his favorite theorists, institute training, and the internecine battles that have occurred in psychoanalysis over the years. Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst as well as an adult analyst in private practice. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Institute for Psychoanalytic Education. Dr. Jacobs is also a past president of The Association for Child Psychoanalysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway, of course, if you have used it, eye contact is actually impossible on Skype. We can see each other but we cannot lock orbs. Our interview, as you will hear, is full of the same kinds of problems that one might have when working with a patient over the ether. At one point there is a bizarre reverb and everything Isaacs Russell says comes out in triplicate. We did not lose the connection though this has happened to me on several occasions while playing my interlocutory part. And of course we both had our anxieties about the capacity of the technology to connect us and to keep us connected but do bear in mind that we are not analyst and patient. Our relationship is layered with much less meaning or significance than that of the analytic couple. If the technology disconnected us, we would not wonder if it was something that one of us said. No one would have hurt feelings. We could keep it impersonal. In Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2015), Isaacs Russell asks a key question of psychoanalysts: what might be lost in working this way? The interview explores reasons why analysts have jumped in to use Skype and explores what the implications might be of the loss of two bodies in a room together. Her thinking is clear and the ideas she pits forth I found haunting. The age old question of what makes a treatment psychoanalysis came to mind when reading this book as I wondered if you can’t smell the patient, if there is not the risk of touch that is not acted upon, if there is not the walk out the door when the session is over, is essential grist for the mill irreparably lost? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Lene Auestad, PhD, is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oslo, and affiliated with the Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo. She currently resides in the UK to pursuing long-standing interests in British psychoanalysis. Working at the interface of psychoanalytic thinking and ethics/political theory, her writing has focused on the themes of emotions, prejudice and minority rights. Her books include: Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac, 2015) Nationalism and the Body Politic. Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac, 2014) Psychoanalysis and Politics – Exclusion and the Politics of Representation (Karnac, 2012) Action, Freedom, Humanity – Encounters with Hannah Arendt (in Norwegian) Auestad founded and co-directs the interdisciplinary conference series “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” which aims to address how crucial contemporary political issues may be fruitfully analyzed through psychoanalytic theory and vice versa – how political phenomena may reflect back on psychoanalytic thinking. In the book we’ll be discussing today, Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac, 2015), Auestad brings together psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and sociology to create a bold and lively study of prejudice and its causes and effects at personal and social levels. The scope of her work is thrilling, moving from a clear investigation of how the unconscious and primary process play out in the phenomena of racism and prejudice; to the ethical issues of hate speech; to an exciting mash-up of Adorno and Bion on the implications of the authoritarian personality. But, following the example of Hannah Arendt, Auestad does not rest in the realm of detached theory, rather, she draws lessons from experience and current news headlines, exploring abuses and prejudice related to treatment of asylum seekers and migrants. Auestad is rigorous and thorough intellectually, but also uncommonly willing to consider how everyone plays a role in the workings of prejudice– including philosophers and psychoanalysts. During the interview, we attempt both to consider the content of Auestad’s study, but also to tell the intellectual story of her efforts to work across disciplines in ways that hold great promise for using psychoanalytic theory to understand social space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Feeling exhausted, hopeless, and anxious? You might be suffering from symptoms of neoliberalism, according toPaul Verhaeghe. In What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (Scribe Publications, 2014), he takes on “Enron society,” demonstrating how the core insights and principles of psychoanalysis can be brought to bear on social relations, history, and ideology. The last 50 years have witnessed a staggering proliferation of psychiatric disorders — a bloated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) that has both reflected and caused the over-diagnosis, disciplining, and medication of individuals afflicted with social rather than mental problems. How can you not feel dejected and panic-stricken, asks Verhaeghe, when you live in a “meritocracy” that ensures some an obvious advantage? When you are evaluated incessantly and told you are not trying hard enough? When your work environment and community lack authority figures who take responsibility and set limits, leaving you to compete with coworkers and friends for scarce resources; and your creativity and passionate labor are immediately quantified and assessed for market value? You might even be relieved, argues Verhaeghe, to be diagnosed with an illness — and to incorporate it into your identity in order to excuse your inability to measure up. With so few options and so much pressure to fill the very limited number of slots designated for “winners,” having a neurologically determined ailment often feels better than being a failure. Using a psychiatric disorder as a shield from guilt is not malingering since the pervasiveness of neoliberal logic really has made you sick! What About Me? traces notions of identity historically, providing an instructive overview of the shifts in Western thinking about the self. The story proceeds from Aristotelian immanence to Christian transcendence: the ancient Greek view that ethics are innate and need to be cultivated through self-care to the Christian belief that ethics are external and divine and inherently sinful humans can only aspire to goodness through spiritual communion. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, European and American neoliberal norms again have turned to the individual but without the classical period’s interest in citizenship or religious references to authority and God. Neoliberalism instead promotes a hyper-individualism supported by narrow positivism (quantitative measurement) and meritocracy (for the privileged classes) applied across a wide range of disciplines and professions, including academia and healthcare. Neoliberal success is equated with profit and human beings are understood “naturally” to be competitive, selfish, and unethical (hence the avalanche of evaluation and rules). But, following behavioral biologist Frans de Waal, Verhaeghe suggests that altruism as well as aggression inhere to higher primates and the cultural environment determines whether empathy or egotism predominates. The neoliberal obsession with the individual at the expense of the community ignores the fundamental human craving for love and hospitality – affects and behavior that are necessary for our wellbeing. What, then, do we do about all this? How do we alter dominant ideology and social organization? With the help of clinical experience and psychoanalytic ethics, Verhaeghe invites us to think through a solution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Alison Bancroft has written a book with a refreshingly straightforward title: Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self (I. B. Tauris, 2012). One immediately suspects that it reflects the author’s two most enduring obsessions and this suspicion is confirmed within the first quarter of our interview. Yet, as it turns out, both “psychoanalysis” and “fashion” demand qualification.By “fashion” Bancroft means adornment that assumes an innovative form – creativity applied to the surface of the body.The psychoanalysis she has in mind is Lacanian theory.If, then, you are expecting a condemnation of fashion as a frivolous pursuit or a Kleinian explanation for shifting hemlines and anorexic models, Bancroft will not satisfy. But if you are curious about what fashion as art and corporeal style might express about fundamental Freudian and Lacanian concepts like identification, femininity, and the unconscious, you will be delighted and edified.Readings of fashion and its sociocultural resonances teach us a great deal about the delimitation and radical questioning of the twentieth-century human subject.  By bringing fashion into dialogue with the Lacanian notions of object a, the sinthome, desire, and jouissance, Bancroft unearths its disruptive potential: the capacity of fashion — like that of literature, painting and psychoanalysis — to give fleeting glimpses into unconscious truths and the feminine abyss of subjectivity. The main body of Fashion and Psychoanalysis consists of four chapters that are discrete psychoanalytic explorations of fashion-as-protest, moving chronologically through Lacan’s teaching and spotlighting some of its key concepts.The first chapter considers the fashion photography of Nick Knight, whose presentations of fragmented, fractured bodies confound imagined ego boundaries and invite hysteric identifications from viewers.The second chapter discusses the work of the two most celebrated enfants terribles of 2000s fashion: John Galliano (formerly head designer at Dior) and Alexander McQueen.Bancroft analyzes a few of their best-known collections in order to demonstrate couture’s function as object a, driving desire and signaling feminine jouissance.Chapter 3 is about the courageous performance artist and fashion icon Leigh Bowery.Bancroft argues that his self-abjection and simultaneous embodiment of feminine and masculine positions prompted a painful pleasure in his audience – a transgressive jouissance brought out by masculinity’s violent destabilization.The final chapter investigates the similarities between Hussein Chalayan’s highly conceptual designs and Lacan’s sinthome.Is fashion, like the sinthome, a blurring of language and corporeality, the collapse of the Symbolic into feminine logic, the apex of aesthetic self-invention?Listen in and find out! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis