New Books in Psychoanalysis

We are mostly familiar with the hermeneutics of suspicion. But what about a hermeneutics of curiosity? In his latest book Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Routledge, 2015), Dr. Donnel Stern discusses the ways in which a spirit of mutual curiosity between analyst and analysand can transform the field between them and alter their relationships to each other and themselves. Continuing the groundbreaking work of Unformulated Experience and the more recent Partners in Thought, Relational Freedom showcases Dr. Stern’s ability to arrange clinical case studies, a rich history of psychoanalytic thought, and contemporary theoretical critique in such a way as opens the reader’s mind to new conceptions of the priority of feeling in the interpersonal/relational field. Along the way, he paints a picture of enactment (the interpersonalisation of dissociation) and how the analytic dyad can handle enactments in a fashion that frees up the analyst and analysand to see their relationship in a new light. Meditating on the influence of interpersonal and relational thinkers, such as Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, Dr. Stern highlights the tension between the evidence-based, scientific idea of psychoanalysis and the broader, less empirical takes on this protean practice. Incorporating the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer, he proposes that we “recognize that the hermeneutic position about the study and evaluation of psychoanalytic treatment is a valid way of thinking about these problems, and one that contradicts the objectivist agenda of systematic empirical research.” Aware of the challenges this recognition may entail, Dr. Stern spends a portion of this interview discussing an issue many humanistic analysts may face: namely, that of insurance providers requesting objective measures of improvement of health. While illuminating his theory of the mind as it exists within the field, Dr. Stern also discusses the personal aspect of his career. We learn about his educational journey to psychoanalysis, as well as his love for literature. Dr. Stern emphasizes the creative aspect of psychoanalysis in a fashion appropriately creative, and consequently engaging.​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia’s present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

What meaning does money have in psychic life? And where does clinical psychoanalytic work fall in the realm of commerce? Does money play an inherently alienating role with regards to the psychoanalytic subject? Or might it contain meaning crucial to the patient’s progress? In Money Talks in Therapy, Society, and Life (Routledge, 2011), Brenda Berger and Stephanie Newman present a collection covering a wide range on the topic from varied psychoanalytic perspectives. With contributions from Muriel Dimen, Robert Glick, Theodore Jacobs, and others, money is understood in terms of psychosexuality, greed, envy, narcissism, sexuality, loss, the economics among candidates in psychoanalytic training institutes, and its ever-present roll in the transference/countertransference matrix. In the interview Berger describes the ways in which money was split off and denied in clinical psychoanalysis in the years leading up to the economic crash of 2008, and how this was followed by a re-emergence within the field after 2008. Berger offers compelling clinical examples to illuminate the ways in which landscape shifted dramatically after the crash, as money became, more and more, a container for psychic meaning. We discuss the ways in which the loss of money often facilitated deepening shifts within the treatment, as well as the psychic implications of financial fallout and what the current economic realities might mean for psychoanalysis in general. Brenda Berger is Assistant Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology in Psychiatry and Senior Associate Director for Psychology at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr. Berger is in private practice in New York City and Larchmont, NY, working with couples, individuals, and groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler reminded me of something very important and unsettling: I have a brush with madness every night. Most of us do – when we dream. Or fall in love; or write poetry; or free-associate. Madness resides within all speaking beings and erupts in the most ordinary activities. In fact, ordinariness, rationality, and normalcy can be the most maddening phenomena of all. In editing Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015) Gherovici and Steinkoler consciously employ the non-nosological, capacious — one might even say literary – term “madness” to resist normative and abjecting approaches to the insane and think in novel and flexible ways about both psychosis and neurosis. Eschewing diagnostic categories like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the editors embrace “madness” precisely because it exceeds the DSM and the clinic, does not lend itself easily to medication, and inspires controversy and innovative reflection. The volume brings together eighteen impressive Lacanian theorists and analysts and invites them to ponder encounters with madness in the clinical setting and in the everyday. Several offer fresh perspectives on the category of psychosis – “ordinary,” atypical, melancholic, and otherwise; a few allow madness to elicit new technique and modes of listening in the clinical setting; others focus on madness in contemporary culture.Some of the most daring chapters describe and interpret the creative ways authors, both famous and unknown, stave off madness or convert it into art. While maintaining that we cannot choose to go crazy, most authors insist that we can direct madness to productive ends. The volume asks difficult questions. Is madness dire oppression or radical freedom? The abyss or the pinnacle of subjectivity? Darkness or the repository of truth and knowledge?Both in print and in this interview, the contributors and editors of Lacan on Madness provide varied, paradoxical, and inspiring answers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for anyone interested in the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Why would Bert Williams, famous African-American vaudeville performer of the early twentieth century, feel it necessary to apply burnt cork blackface make-up to his already dark skin, in order to emphasize “blackness”? According to Michelle Ann Stephens, this was one question about the space between realness, race, and performance that led her to write Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Stephens investigates the history of the concept of the skin, especially in relation to the notion of the flesh, and how they are both re-written by colonialization, and the idea of racial difference. Stephens turns to the work of four iconic black male stars whose careers span the twentieth century–including Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte  and Bob Marley–and explores the dynamic between the gaze, representation and technology, and how these performers challenged notions of race, sexuality, and skin/flesh in the act of performing. Stephens uses psychoanalytic theory to understand the role of the viewer and the viewed and how the gaze operates as a racial and racializing object. Calling on the work of cultural theorists, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, and Sylvia Winter among so many others, Stephens takes the reader along on a bold new attempt to relate psychoanalysis, race, and gender identity in fresh, optimistic, and clinically promising ways. Michelle Stephens teaches in the Departments of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies and teaches courses in African American, American, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005).She is currently in training at the The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process (Routledge, 2013), Frank Summers has written a wholly original work of theory, technique and cultural critique. Privileging terms not often used in psychoanalytic writing, among them romanticism, transcendence and futurity, Summers documents an as yet undocumented shift in the field. In an effort to buttress the standing of psychoanalysis as a science, psychoanalysts previously attempted to delineate certain laws pertaining to the psyche, ranging from the Oedipus complex to notions of the self; now, according to Summers, the majority of analysts attend primarily to the experience of their patients. As such, psychoanalysis has become a “science of the subjective.” Critiquing the field for reifying concepts like “the unconscious” and for perhaps unwittingly playing along with a culture that maximally commodifies humanity, Summers suggests we position psychoanalysis on the perimeter of the American mainstream. “Any view of analysis that presupposes a norm,” he writes, “may justifiably be labeled wild analysis, irrespective of theoretical content.” In fact he cogently argues that there may be a new divide among analysts that has nothing to do with metapsychology but rather more to do with technique. The new “classical” analyst applies theory to their clinical work deductively, using the patient to prove a theory right rather than exploring with the patient what constitutes their sense of things. Influenced by Loewald, Benjamin, Stern, Heidegger, Husserl and Winnicott, among others, Summers has nevertheless developed his own clinical metier. When he turns his trenchant eye to the culture and the impact of new technologies upon us, one shivers with recognition. It is high time that psychoanalysts begin to take on the culture industry, assessing its powerful impact on what it means to be human. In this interview Summers does this and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Responding to a significant lacuna in psychoanalytic literature, Jean Petrucelli has put together an impressive book that approaches the eating-disordered patient from interpersonal and relational perspectives. Just as the papers within Body States:Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2014)animate the twin themes of dissociation and integration, so too do the authors illustrate how these forces shape interpersonal relationships, body-states, self-states, as well as, ultimately, the ability to functionally shift between selves. One may well agree with Philip Bromberg when he remarks in his Foreword, “Do not be fooled by the format. It is the groundbreaking perspective of Dr. Petrucelli that inspires each chapter, and my use of the word groundbreaking should not be taken lightly.” Indeed, the undeniable coherence of this volume springs from each writer’s affirmation of and convincing argument for the ability of interpersonal and relational analysis to uniquely – and perhaps best – treat eating-disordered patients in an integrative fashion. Such is the groundbreaking thesis Dr. Petrucelli presents in Body-States and discusses at length in her interview. Bringing together myriad voices, Dr. Petrucelli manages to strike a harmonious but nonetheless sophisticated cord while adding her own voice to the mix. Beginning with a description of the psychoanalytic climate of the 1990s, she goes on to explain how she and others had to fight in order to convince the psychoanalytic establishment to consider eating-disorders seriously. Dr. Petrucelli then examines the notion of “participant-observer” and argues that eating-disordered patients find it especially difficult to exist in the spaces between being the subject-who-desires and the object-who-is/isn’t-desired. Thoughout the course of our conversation, she addresses not only the aforementioned points but many more, including the origins of eating-disorders as well as the role culture may play in transmitting body-states from mother to daughter. In fact, near the close of this interview, the author expertly handles the question of what sort of wellness can women achieve living in an ill society (where aggressive systems of sexual/body-based objectification pervade)? Dealing with big questions, Dr. Petrucelli provides answers well worth savoring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The metaphorical construction of Susan Kavaler-Adler‘s Anatomy of Regret: From Death Instinct to Reparation and Symbolization through Vivid Clinical Cases (Karnac, 2013)evokes the complexities that have wrought psychoanalysis since its beginning of talking about the mind in the language of the body.As it subtitle tells us, the anatomy of this book is structured by the case study. If there is something that informs Alder’s approach to understanding psychoanalysis and how she intervenes in the psychoanalytic encounter, its that where theory fails, the body succeeds. Regret, for Kavaler-Adler, is a bodily experience that orients us in some way to the unconscious consequences of our relationships – of the actions of other bodies in our lives. In telling the stories of these case studies, Kavaler-Adler performs a kind of surgical suturing of theory along the sinews of loss – the scars left at the site of the aggression of the other. She begins with the important insight that something was at stake in Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia – something that had to do with the aggressive ties that bind the self to the other and the impossibility of distinguishing the two but leaves Freud here, his theory having already become arrested in the language of the body and the physical laws a theory of the drive drive must adhere to. In her thinking, Kavaler-Adler stitches Freud to the British psychoanalytic thinker Melanie Klein (and to Object Relation theorists after her) who situates mourning in a developmental context. In doing so, she stiches boundary of the anatomical to the symbolic, through the language of her cases. The Anatomy of Regret serves to articulate an affect theory that is uniquely its own, but for those new to psychoanalysis, or those who want a new way of thinking of psychoanalysis, informs about the theory it draws from in a meaningful way. Dr. Susan Kavaler Adler is a psychoanalyst in private practice and the founder of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and an ABBP for Diplomat status from the American Professional Board of Psychology and the Division of Psychoanalysis. For her work analyzing the language of mourning, loss, and regret, through bodily language, in the work of iconic women writers, Dr. Kavaler-Adler was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In a captivating discussion, Paul Geltner, an experienced psychoanalyst based in NYC, delves into his book on countertransference and emotional communication. He challenges traditional notions, suggesting that analysts' feelings are often induced by patients. Geltner categorizes countertransference and emphasizes its role in therapy beyond mere words, advocating for a deeper emotional connection. He also explores the evolution of emotional induction and the complexities of narcissistic countertransference, highlighting its potential for addressing patients' unmet needs.