New Books in Psychoanalysis

The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis: Diverse Perspectives on the Psychosocial (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)is an edited volume. Its chapters document the central place of psychoanalysis in American sociology in the 1950s and sketch the backstory to that relationship. The core chapters expose the campaign waged by leading sociologists to discredit psychoanalysis as they sought legitimacy for the discipline through the adoption of positivist research paradigms. Some of that story is told through biographical and autobiographical accounts. The co-editors are among the authors of the book’s 18 chapters as are Neil Smelser, Nancy Chodorow, George Steinmetz, and Jeffrey Prager. In this interview, the volume’s editors, Lynn Chancer andJohn Andrews, respond to questions about the political climate surrounding “the divorce” and add their reflections on the standing of psychoanalysis in sociology in the early years of the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

How up to date are you on the projected impact of climate change on human civilization in the next 100 years? Once you look at latest predictions, quickly come back and listen to this interview with Sally Weintrobe, because she brings a much-needed, yet realistic sense of hope to what most people consider a dire picture. Weintrobe, a practicing psychoanalyst and Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, organized an interdisciplinary conference of psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists, and sociologists to address a burning question: why is knowledge of climate reality being so resisted? (The conference in its entirety is posted online in 6 parts here.) Weintrobe contributed to and edited this book of essays by 23 authors, and it is an important document of current psychoanalytic thinking on the nexus of splitting, denial, reintegration– and love- in the context of how we conceive of nature. How are we split-off from our childlike affection for nature? How does neo-liberal capitalism promote alienation from nature and from others? What would it mean to engage with a realistic– and not grandiose– experience of nature and the impact of climate change, which allows for mourning and care? In discussion, Weintrobe offers touching examples of processing these questions, while also going in unexpected directions, such as analyzing sound production in “nature” films. All in all, Weintrobe’s project promises to inspire new perspectives on climate change and hope for action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Conventional psychoanalytic views of narcissism focus on familiar character traits: grandiosity, devaluation, entitlement and a lack of empathy. In his new book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Routledge, 2013), Daniel Shaw explores narcissism from a relational perspective, concentrating on the effect that the traumatizing narcissist can have on others. Shaw defines the traumatizing narcissist as the parent of a child, a leader of a cult, a partner in a couple or others who abuse their power, use their charisma and knowledge of human nature to subjugate. This power dynamic can lead to maladaptive patterns such as compliance, dissociation and the taking on of the abusive behaviors of the narcissist by thepatient. To elucidate his conceptualization, Shaw writes chapters on clinical theory, his practice with patients effected by narcissism and his own past history as a cult member. Shaw illustrates how the therapeutic relationship can be healing by helping the patient reclaim a sense of subjectivity that has been lost. Our interview concludes with an exploration of traumatizing narcissism in the psychoanalytic profession, both in the consulting room and the institute setting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Bruce Fink joins me for a second interview to discuss Volume 2 of Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014). We talk about everything from desire, jouissance, and love to variable-length sessions and “why anyone in their right mind would pay for analysis.” Just like one might go to a personal trainer to shed some pounds, one goes to an analyst to lose something. We often enter analysis against our will and immediate interests, kicking and screaming, to have our symptoms – the sources of our most precious satisfaction and exquisite misery — taken away. We pay, in other words, to be castrated. This is a better deal than it initially seems: we cede self-pity related to primordial loss – the loss of something we never had in the first place – in order to be able to pursue our desire and derive more joy from our enjoyment. In the second volume of Against Understanding, the initial chapters on practice and technique cover fundamental questions like the goal of analysis, ethics, diagnosis and fantasy. Next there are several close readings of Lacan’s papers and seminars on Kant and Sade, semblance, personality, and love. The Cases section takes up the themes of the earlier chapters, demonstrating Fink’s talent for communicating complex ideas in a direct and remarkably limpid style. He wades through Lacan’s explanation of why and how both sadists and masochists seek to stage the other’s anxiety; discusses the role semblance-as-ideology might play in fantasy; and interpolates Freud’s phases of “a child is being beaten” to get at the specific ways several of his analysands fantasize and enjoy. True to Lacanian theory and practice, Fink does not lay emphasis on affect and empathy as central facets of technique in the book. Yet, during our interview, as he discusses his reluctance to display mastery in case presentations and reveals his willingness to stretch (and not only scand) sessions of patients in crisis, his compassion and humility are very much in evidence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Liran Razinsky’s book, titled Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2014) came out of a decade’s long attempt to reconcile Liran’s personal search for meaning within two areas of professional inquiry: philosophy, and psychology.These two fields are intimately related in that each asks essential questions about what it means to be a human subject that lives always in the face of death. However divergent in their systems of logic, each runs the risk of loosing its subject to its own ethos.Psychoanalysis is more functional theoretically when thought of as a philosophical system, but its applications were intended to be clinical.For Razinsky, psychoanalysis succumbs to the split in these two fields in its conception of death. Those who lived to be intellectually killed by Freud as he claimed their ideas as his own, knew that Freud had no limits in refusing the limit of his life.He would destroy individual egos–and entire careers–in building a legacy that would outlast him.He got what he wanted but at what cost?Where is death to be found in a system structured by a man who refused loss?Those psychoanalytic thinkers who have survived him have had to live with his legacy and its confusing logic. Razinsky reads Freud’s conceptualizations of death against themselves, at different places in his body of work, and against those that came after him. He argues that there is an essential problematic in the way Freud considers death which, for psychoanalysis to survive as a philosophical system with clinical applications must be addressed. Beyond this, however, the book raises a discussion about the limits of subjectivity: both literal, as in the case of death, and symbolic, as in the ways in which we imagine ourselves in relationship to it. Liran Razinsky is a lecturer at The Program for Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar Ilan University in Israel where he conducts research at the disjuncture between philosophy, and psychoanalysis, life and death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors, and journalists who search in her book for the exotic Iranian subject and the trauma of the Eastern Other. She turns a critical eye on the expectation that she perform an unveiling and reveal knowledge about the Other’s otherness. Insisting that “pain is pain” everywhere and that the Other’s foreignness also resides in oneself, she instead talks about her own sense of dislocation and loss upon returning to Tehran to start a clinical practice after twenty years in the United States. Iranian patients face problems specific to their country’s politics and culture, to be sure, but for Homayounpour, experience in the consulting room confirms the universality of the Oedipus complex. In response to a colleague in Boston who questioned whether “Iranians can free associate,” Homayounpour quips that “they do nothing but, and that is their problem.” While in the United States neurotics are rumored to have disappeared from psychoanalytic couches, replaced by patients with supposedly more “primitive” narcissistic organization and borderline personality disorders, in Tehran, claims Homayounpour, consummately neurotic analysands dominate the clinical landscape, speaking constantly of sex, sexuality, and typically Oedipal conflicts. The resemblance of Iranian analysands to the patients of Freud’s Vienna has nothing to do with Eastern essence or backwardness, of course, and everything to do with collective fantasy, analytic training, cultural structures, and varying iterations of capitalism. In the book as well as in our interview, Homayounpour’s poetics and politics brim with warmth and hospitality – not a humanitarian hospitality, or altruism, that too easily transforms into guilt and then sadism, she hastens to clarify, but one that emerges from gratitude and an ability to be with the other’s difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

What happens when a Kleinian psychoanalyst wants to write an intelligent self-help book for the general reader? First, she recognizes that one must have an online platform from which to launch, so she starts a blog called “The Headshrinker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Then she sets about writing her debut book, Wisdom From the Couch: Knowing and Growing Yourself from the Inside Out (Central Recovery Press, 2014). Dr. Jennifer Kunst began to write not only to fulfill a personal dream but to help her patients and the public at large ponder the question: how is it that perfectly intelligent people do such obviously counterproductive things so much of the time? Vis a vis Klein these answers reside in the unconscious, in our internalized object constellations and in at least some recognition of how difficult it is to live in the world with its inevitable pain, loss, disappointment and imperfection.  Many of the concepts that Klein felt were central to the human condition are laid out in the book: omnipotence, mania, splitting, projective identification, ambivalence, the paranoid/schizoid and the depressive positions to name a few. In this interview Kunst explains that above all, Melanie Klein was intensely concerned with love. And she was passionate about making sense of the process by which people learn to love one another in all its forms: parental, platonic, romantic and analytic.  It goes something like this: we are designed as highly emotional creatures who love and hate in equal measure. For Klein, the question of how we remain in loving connection with one another while accepting loss, hurt and inevitable disappointment was key. Kunst writes, “Aggression and desire, envy and gratitude, hope and dread are all roommates in the inner world.” One of the tasks of mature development is getting these opposing parts of our self in dialogue with one another achieving a kind of working harmony. Enter Kunst’s translation of the depressive position: all roommates are welcome at the table. Dr. Jennifer Kunst has an uncanny knack for translating Melanie Klein’s complex theory of the mind into psychically nutritious bits. In Kleinian parlance, it’s a proper feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014), he argues that since understanding is part of the Lacanian imaginary, it often leads to fixed assumptions and projections on the part of both analyst and analysand, inhibiting change, or the curative in psychoanalysis. Many of us probably have heard ourselves and others say that understanding why we do something hurtful or destructive does not seem to stop us from doing it; again and again and again. In the clinical vignettes, case studies, and theoretical papers compiled in this volume Fink suggests that rather than understanding, clinicians ought to strive to bring the unconscious to speech – to help analysands communicate knowledge once residing in the unconscious. Such knowledge is generated not through narrative, insight, or meaning making but parapraxes, slurred speech, and mixed metaphors – the non-sense produced by the subject of the unconscious. Speaking that which was previously unsymbolizable shakes the ego at its foundation and enables therapeutic change. A section of Against Understanding is devoted to interviews conducted with the author about his translations of Lacan and the work of translation generally. We touch on issues of translation in our interview as well, highlighting the creativity, pleasures, frustrations, and compromises involved in the process. Bruce Fink and I have only begun to explore his theoretical and clinical writings. Please stay tuned for the next installment in a few months, when we will discuss volume 2of this incisive and thought-provoking collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In a wide ranging and courageous interview that touched on the creative process, personal history, memoir and self-disclosure, the psychoanalyst and writer Sophia Richman explored the connections between trauma and the creative process. Although many have written about the arts and psychoanalysis, utilizing contemporary relational thinking, Richman brings the discussion vividly into the present day. In Mended By the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma (Routledge, 2014), Sophia Richman skillfully uses her own history as a holocaust survivor and writer to illustrate the healing power of the creative process. In addition to her own experience, Richman writes about artists she has interviewed, as well as theorists that have been influential to her such as Winnicott and Jung. Richman believes that the creative process allows one to “bear witness” to the unspeakable, and that the arts can lead to growth both inside and outside of the consulting room. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Being human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one,” so writes psychiatrist and practicing Buddhist Dr. Mark Epstein. Epstein illustrates this truth by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the life of the Buddha in his latest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). It’s a brilliant psychobiographical single-case study. Think Erik Erikson’s Ghandi’s TruthorYoung Man Luther. A little known detail of the Buddha’s biography is that his mother died when he was just seven days old. The book investigates the nature and repercussions of this early loss as a foundation of the Buddha’s life and salvation. Epstein writes that “primitive agony” (ala Winnicott) lay in the Buddha’s implicit memory coloring his experience in ways he could feel but never know. The unmetabolized grief plays out into Buddha’s young adulthood as he abandons his wife and own young child in renunciation of his cushy and privileged life. The ghosts and psychic ancestors that haunt the Buddha as well as his separation-individuation drama are familiar to modern day clinicians. Epstein describes a Buddha in the throes of repetition compulsion as well as enacting practices of starvation and self-harm—dissociative defenses that serve to ward off potential fragmentation. Epstein writes that the rhythm of this early trauma and the defenses the Buddha employed run through Buddhism like a “great underground river.” Buddha’s salvation comes about via the discovery of mindfulness which ultimately infuse his life and spiritual teaching. Within the meditative practice of mindfulness, a holding environment is created in which unknown and unexamined aspects of the past can be experienced for the first time in the here and now. Like the psychoanalytic encounter, therein lies its transformative power. In his detailed depictions of the Buddha as a human subject in formation and borrowing from Winnicott’s metapsychology, Epstein draws the parallel to the psychoanalytic space. Ultimately the book asks whether trauma itself can be transformational. According to Epstein, yes. Life itself is already broken and since we can’t control the essential traumas of life (whether they be big “T” or little) we must transform our relationship to them to go on being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis