New Books in Psychoanalysis

Michael J. Diamond's book Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times (Phoenix Publishing, 2022) describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he continues to hold cult-like status, exerting a strong influence not only on many individuals but also on numerous elected officials, despite his defeat in 2020? Why does his character continue to be an object of fascination even among anti-Trumpists, and why will Trumpism continue to play a major role in the American sociopolitical landscape even now he has left the presidential stage? Diamond ponders these questions through the lenses of American history and culture, political theory, social phenomena, group dynamics, and psychoanalysis. In exploring the relationship between large-group regression, cultism, destructive populism, delusional thinking, conspiratorial beliefs, authoritarianism, and leadership characterised by narcissism and paranoia, psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to group dynamics, malignant regression, and leadership are brought into play. Prominent psychoanalytic thinkers who have addressed these topics and whose work usefully contributes to the discussion include Bion, Freud, Fromm, Bollas, Kernberg, Lifton, Rosenfeld, and Volkan, as well as Bleger, Jaques, and several more recent Kleinian/Bionian-influenced analysts.Most important, the book makes use of these understandings to reestablish a sufficiently containing frame that strengthens the body politics' nonpathological elements in order to come to grips with these disturbing factors. Whatever their political beliefs, psychoanalysts in the US and worldwide will find much to think about in reading this book's application of their discipline to today's sociopolitical environment. In addition, the book's insights extend beyond arguments targeting a strictly psychoanalytic audience in order to reach social and political thinkers, as well as activists, who are deeply concerned about dangers threatening the very foundations of democracy in the US and worldwide. And finally, the thoughtful lay person will appreciate the accessibility to all these fields that the book provides, and will come away with a much deeper understanding of just what motivates us to take a stand for or against a given political figure. In short, conceptual tools are provided that lead to greater understanding as well as effective strategies and tactics for containment of destructive forces - largely unconscious ones - that imperil our society.Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves?In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (Routledge, 2018), Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter.Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work.Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period 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 Encounter and the Misuse of Theory (Routledge, 2022), Lee Grossman addresses the disjuncture between analytic literature and clinical work in an effort to render analytic theorizing more representative of clinical experience.Pointing out the ways in which analytic literature can fail to capture the intensity of feeling and the stumbling, lurching, working in the dark that captures much of clinical engagement, Grossman shows how incomprehensibility is sometimes mistaken for wisdom. As an alternative, Grossman shows how attention to what he calls the syntax of thought can naturally define three different broad categories of life experience: the omnipotence of the neurotic, the wishful, short-sighted thinking of the perverse, and the concrete, disordered thinking of the psychotic. Using rich clinical material, interspersed with detailed exposition and artful satire, Grossman departs from conventional theoretical writing to provide new ways of conceptualizing analytic therapy.Addressing analytic therapy as an encounter between two people, both governed by forces about which they know very little, this book provides essential insights for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other clinical practitioners both in training and in practice.Jacob Goldberg is an incoming Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University. He can be reached at goldbergj1@duq.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In Schizophrenia: Science, Psychoanalysis, and Culture (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022), Kevin Volkan and Vamık Volkan present a comprehensive study of schizophrenia using a psychoanalytic lens on the existing interdisciplinary research. Over the last seventy years, mainstream research on the causes, prevalence, and treatment of schizophrenia has greatly diverged from psychoanalytic thinking. However, the emergence of the field of neuro-psychoanalysis brings hope that psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical theory may once again provide valuable insight into understanding schizophrenia.Psychoanalytic treatment may not be appropriate for many sufferers but psychoanalysis does provide insight to inform and improve treatment. It can also illuminate what aspects of schizophrenia are common across cultures, where they present unique characteristics, and just how cultural variations occur. For any future improvement in understanding and treating schizophrenia, the cultural underpinnings and expressions of schizophrenic illness need to be made clear.For clinicians in the field, the authors’ aim is to deepen insight and promote the use of psychotherapy and integrated treatments, while increasing sensitivity to cultural variations in schizophrenic disease. Accordingly, this book is divided into four sections. The first gives a brief overview and outline of the mainstream understanding of schizophrenia. The second drills down to focus on general psychoanalytic ideas about schizophrenia, culminating with a focus on problems with early object relations. The third looks at how psychoanalytic treatment can be successful in some cases. The fourth and final part discusses how views of the disorder and the disorder itself are affected by culture.The authors hope to generate insight and understanding of schizophrenic disorders which could lead to new approaches to treating and possibly preventing schizophrenia. It is a must-read for all clinicians and trainees working in the field and presents interesting ideas to anyone with an interest in the subject.Karyne Messina is a psychologist and a psychoanalyst with the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. She is on the medical staff at Suburban Hospital of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is author of Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

"Gender Without Identity" featuring Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini challenges static notions of gender identity, advocating for a more nuanced and complex understanding of gender. The authors discuss the ethical importance of recognizing gender as emerging from processes of self-theorization, while also addressing the ongoing attacks faced by the LGBTQ+ community within psychoanalysis. They explore topics such as the impact of trauma on gender, the figure of the child in clinical work, and the need for creating a therapeutic space for patients to define their own identities. With a focus on gender improvisation and experimentation, this podcast delves into radical new ways of working with gender diversity psychoanalytically.

Today I interview Bob Falconer about his new book, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). Falconer’s book is the result of a decade-long journey to understand a phenomenon that raises questions not only about how we, as a contemporary Western culture, understand ourselves. It’s also a challenge to the limits of how we understand—the models of self and mind that we assume to be true. In The Others Within Us, Falconer offers a paradigm-shifting vision of what it means to be human and how therapists who work within the model of Internal Family Systems can help to relieve human suffering. Falconer offers both a methodology for therapists as well as an intellectual and transcultural history of the farther reaches of our inner worlds. Falconer himself is a long-time practitioner and trainer of Internal Family Systems (or IFS) and has previously co-written a book with the founder of the IFS model, Richard Schwartz, entitled Many Minds, One Self. Enjoy my conversation with Bob Falconer.Show notes:* Interview with Richard Schwartz* Interview with Tanya Luhrmann Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets ​​Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Here language is influenced not by the manifest and the conscious, but the unconscious or void, as understood in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. This work is the basis for his hope for a reorganization of thought in contemporary ecocriticism around a politics of degrowth instead of additive policies that serve to greenwash capitalist economies.Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. His research interests include early modern literature, contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the environmental humanities, and sexuality and film studies. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and co-author, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, under contract). He is currently working on two books: Unknowing Sex: Shakespeare against the Historicists and Destituent Ecology: Libidinal Politics for the Environmental Left.Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu 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, Anna Fishzon, co editor with Emma Lieber on The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), discusses her thinking about temporality, queer theory, psychoanalysis and childhood with Tracy Morgan who concomitantly calls time on her own work with the podcast. Together these two friends and colleagues and former hosts, laugh, maybe choke up a bit, reminisce and riff. Morgan, in a first in her over thirteen years as host and founding editor of the channel, ends the interview and her work with NBiP, with a song.About the book:This book represents a meeting of queer theorists and psychoanalysts around the figure of the child. Its intention is not only to interrogate the discursive work performed on, and by, the child in these fields, but also to provide a stage for examining how psychoanalysis and queer theory themselves interact, with the understanding that the meeting of these discourses is most generative around the queer time and sexualities of childhood. From the theoretical perspectives of queer theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and gender studies, the chapters explore cultural, aesthetic, and historical forms and phenomena that are aimed at, or are about, children, and that give expression to and make room for the queerness of childhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Today I talked to Michaela Chamberlain, author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022)Chamberlain’s book is a product of “cumulative trauma” whose original starting point was an interest in in menstruation where, in psychoanalytic literature filled with papers on “micturition and feces”, there is a “startling lack of writing on the monthly passing of menstrual blood.” Chamberlain realized that this absence was a symptom of something bigger. That something is misogyny.Working with a definition attributed to Kate Manne[1] misogyny is seen as “the law enforcement branch of sexism” and Chamberlain argues that we really have “to grapple with the law enforcement of the male gaze. The minute you free yourself from this or at least know what you’re fighting it means you can think all sorts of things. The more we straightjacket ourselves with the laws of Freud the more we are lessening the possibilities for creativity, which surely has to be the point of psychoanalysis.”“We need to take on the trauma that’s been caused by past analytic gods and really examine the continued use of psychoanalytic terms owned by a man to apply a man-made theory to women” and a discipline that has historically had “no trust in women to adequately understand their own experience.” Chamberlain references her training where the phrase “Bowlby said” was a way to remind her “to pay respect to her male elders and keep to my place. The analyst expected me to swallow the comment as truth in much the same was as Freud quotes are given to remind everyone of the rules of play.”After reviewing the foundations of psychoanalysis and the continued reification of the clearly misogynistic Oedipus complex, Chamberlain turns her focus to how this misogyny gets played out in the clinical setting. Chapter 4 “The misogynistic introject – a case study” is a painful story of a mother whose insight into the struggles of her child are rapidly dismissed “because she is the mother”.In this interview, recorded in May of 2023, Chamberlain observes that psychoanalytic institutes have yet to engage with the public protests around misogyny, the Women's Safety Movement, #MeToo, and #ReclaimTheseStreets. Whereas the Black Lives Matter movement has finally entered psychoanalytic institutes in the form of trainings, conferences, supervisions, and groups aimed at confronting legacies of racism in psychoanalysis no such movement has occurred with regards to misogyny following the horrific murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of a police officer in 2021 when the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, stated that “London streets are not safe for women or girls” and 50% of UK women reported they did not feel safe leaving their homes after dark.Misogyny in Psychoanalysis argues that women’s experience in psychoanalysis has been “negatively hallucinated” and that “What is needed for psychoanalysis to take the brave first step of putting itself on the couch to grapple fully with its unconscious fantasies about women and begin coping with what it working hard not to see.”[1] Manne, K. (2018). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The monumental sense of dislocation we experience after losing a loved one can be life-altering. There is no script for grieving–each individual passes through their own phases of mourning. In Don't Be Sad When I'm Gone': A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires (Toplight Books, 2020), psychologist Beatriz Dujovne documents how she grieved the loss of her husband and sought therapy during an extended stay in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recounting her healing process day-to-day, from shock through recovery, this book traces her navigation of the uncertainty and devastation that often engulfs those who have suffered profound loss. A profound read!Lexa Rosean is a licensed psychoanalyst with private practice in New York City. I am a graduate of New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis (NYGSP) and Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis