New Books in Psychoanalysis

“Why is the body the site of so much ongoing, current and growing attention in the West”? asks the feminist psychoanalyst and public intellectual Susie Orbach in her book Bodies (Picador, 2009). In this interview, the groundbreaking author of Fat is a Feminist Issue (inter alia)speaks to New Books in Psychoanalysis about how the body is “no longer a place we live from” but rather a place where the capitalist marketplace has hit a sort of pay dirt. From trendy diets to vaginal recalibration to liposuction, the body is big business. Indeed, as women and men feel a greater and greater need to control their bodies, losing touch with our natural appetites, and attempting to look a certain way, the market that exploits our fears and anxieties is making a fortune. Meanwhile analysts are more and more likely to encounter patients with a plethora of what Orbach calls “bodily instabilities.” She argues that the profession should take a moment to rethink what is ailing the physically unstable analysand, suggesting that we are not looking at hysterical symptoms, but rather we are seeing bodies that never cohered in the first place. All the pressure on mothers in the past 30 years to police their own desires for food, for rest, for pleasure in the body, has produced a generation of offspring that inherited their caretakers’ sense that the body is not for living in, but rather the body is a project, and an ongoing one. Orbach describes “an internal body” that is often missing in those struggling with anorexia or bulimia or plastic surgeries. In this interview she describes how the analyst can listen to her own body to come to better tune into a pre-verbal and, in fact, a pre-physicalized, pre-body transference. Orbach is engaging, funny, and willing to step into one of the major social problems of today–living while having never developed bodily coherence. 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 we revisit the complicated female oedipal constellation, as New Books in Psychoanalysis speaks with Dr. Lucy Holmes about her book The Internal Triangle: New Theories of Female Development (Jason Aronson, 2007). According to Holmes, the “Internal triangle” is the cornerstone of the female psyche. All of us, male and female, need to separate from our mothers if we are to move beyond narcissistic merger as a way of life. Many theorists see the little boy’s “possession” of a penis as enabling him to see himself as absolutely different from his creator, whereas the little girl often has a harder time. She needs to be like her mother and yet also needs to be different from her in order to mature. According to Holmes, little girls create what she calls an “elegant solution” to the problem of separation by internalizing both mother and father. Yet, Holmes argues, this dual-internalization solution can lead to great problems later in life. Some women feel “both sides” to greatly and become hyper-empathic. Such a woman is in the dark about her own wants and needs and without a clue about how to finesse them. The wants and needs of others rule her world. Throughout a woman’s life, according to Holmes, women come face to face with their mothers through bodily changes–menstruation, pregnancy, birth, lactation, and menopause paramount among them. Each bodily and developmental encounter provides an opportunity for a woman to refine her relationship to the mother within. How each encounter goes is fateful for a woman. Holmes brings together long separated schools of Modern Analytic thought on the issue of female development, uniting the Drive Theory of Spotnitz and Meadow and the Object Relations Theory of Ormont in order to examine how women distort aggression so as to overshadow themselves, placing the comfort and connection to others above their own well being. Holmes is engaging, warm, and direct. In many ways one senses she has worked through for herself the three sides of the internal triangle and has, therefore, integrated her life as a woman, an analyst, a scholar, a teacher, and a mother and wife. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Who knew there could be a “how to” book regarding the “impossible profession”? Well, Sheldon Bach has written one. In The How-to Book for Students of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac Books, 2011), Bach speaks plainly and with warmth about the many difficulties facing new clinicians ranging from setting and collecting fees to dealing with the sadomasochistic transference/countertransference matrix. Bach is funny, opinionated, and ready to roll with the absurd. In this interview he gently dismantles many sacred ideas in the field and offers clinicians, whether seasoned or fledgling, a way to work that brings one back to the basics, to the transference, to the unconscious, and to the power of psychoanalysis as a useful technique for treating all forms of human suffering, including the psychoses and manias too commonly abandoned to medication. He is a beloved teacher; indeed, this book grew out of his students’ needs for clinical savoir faire and is, as he tells us, a collection of emailed nuggets and short reactions. In essence, these are his written responses to students’ requests for how to deal with clinical conundrums. Alas, when asked how he deals with patients who do not pay him, forgetting their checkbooks and so forth, he said he never had to deal with such problems. As a clinician, I’m eager to find out how he avoids them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In his book The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through an Analytic Lens (Routledge, 2009), the well-respected psychoanalyst Dr. Neil Altman explores what happens when one practices analysis outside the private practice frame and, instead, among the urban poor. Drawing on years of experience helping underprivileged groups, Altman discusses the impact of poverty on the analyst and patient alike, delineating what he calls the social “third” and its role in the treatment, all the while suggesting that clinicians must encounter and reckon with their own inevitable unconscious predispositions concerning “others.” In this interview, we hear an analyst think through the social with an eye towards the unconscious. Altman argues that psychoanalysis, by being in some ways elitist, especially when it has allied itself with the medical profession, has engendered considerable hostility in many quarters. He urges us to begin to address and take seriously critiques of our profession so that we might have a larger impact on the world at large. Altman says analysts are positioned to hear the other side of the hegemonic message, yet too often turn a deaf ear. Altman urges us to listen, and thereby make psychoanalysis politically relevant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

This interview should be of interest to both a professional and lay audience. What analysand has not wondered to herself whether she just represents a paycheck in her analyst’s world?And what analyst has not kept a patient in treatment long after the analysis was brought to completion due to financial concerns? In his book Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self-Interest between Analyst and Patient (Routledge, 2008), Dr. Hirsch explores how analysts can coast in a treatment, indulging patients and themselves via preferred modes of relating that leave the patient’s problems, usually thorny problems, untouched. As analysts who share interests with our patients–be it the Mets, the pork chop at The Little Owl, or Jonathan Franzen’s latest–we may find that we engage them in certain ways so as to keep other issues, such as their sadism, their capacity to demean, or their dependency needs, at bay. Our fears, as analysts, may prevent us from addressing pressing issues with our patients–and so we consciously coast away from, as the now-deceased group analyst Lou Ormont used to say, “the sound of the cannons.” And as we ended our fifty-minute hour, Dr. Hirsch helped this interviewer realize that there was an aspect of the book that she did not want to attend to, namely the analyst’s own character structure. Dr. Hirsch raised my awareness of my own capacity to coast.I suppose that is why he wrote this fine book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Who doesn’t want to know what women want, right? Well, in this interview with Hendrika Freud, we begin to get the idea that women often prefer not to know. As I sit in my private practice, many of my female patients put on a good smoke and mirror show, cloaking desires behind reaction formations, saying they are not angry when indeed they are, and feeling guilty when they venture to articulate what they prefer in bed, for breakfast, or as payment for services rendered. Indeed, when a woman says “no” she does often mean “yes.” In her book Electra vs Oedipus: The Drama of the Mother-Daughter Relationship (Routledge, 2010), Freud explores why being affirmative, embracing one’s desires, can be so vexatious for those deemed female. Finding a way to separate from the one whose gender identity we share, our mother, is a very complicated affair. According to Freud, a mother’s unconscious fantasies regarding her daughter are transmitted at a very young age. If a mother is narcissistically vulnerable, she is more prone to use her daughter as an extension of herself and so to be threatened by her daughter’s expressions of difference. If you have seen Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” you have witnessed an excellent depiction of how destructive such a set up is for the daughter, leading at its most extreme to florid psychosis. So what do women want? According to Hendrika Freud, “they want a woman with a penis.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis