New Books in Psychology

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and personal context must be negotiated. In Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human (Oxford University Press, 2016), Samuel Morris Brown approaches the problem of end-of-life care with a clinician’s eye and a scholar of religion’s touch. The book places advance directives in the clinic in their historical context while unpacking their ethical and legal nature, describes the psychological aspects of medical decision-making and how moral distress clouds judgment, and provides recommendations on how to heal the process of healing in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). An ICU physician himself, Brown’s account is interwoven with powerful stories that render his argument for humanistic care particularly salient. As such, Through the Valley of Shadows offers as much to dyed-in-the-wool humanists as it does to those focused on measuring and improving outcomes. This is the second of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, preceded by Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care, by Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting account of a decade of research on improving outcomes by incorporating patients’ individual life contexts into planning of care. Their groundbreaking studies showed that physicians, while getting the biological details largely correct, frequently disregard personal circumstances that lead to medical errors. Such an assertion might appear intractable or unfit for empirical study, but Listening for What Matters describes a series of creative experiments that strongly support it. From placing fake patients into real clinical contexts to measure the appropriateness of recommendations, to recording interactions between real patients and doctors (for which they developed a system, Content Coding for Contextualization of Care), and finally training groups of medical students to ask about individual context, Weiner and Schwartz build a case for the existence of a widespread problem while simultaneously offering compelling solutions. This is the first of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, to be followed by Samuel Morris Brown’s Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of a disease to an instance of sexual abuse. How might creative expression help with the healing process? What can we learn and teach others from the writing and artwork that emerge from these traumas? How might we come to value personal writing as worthy of increased scholarship? In Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image (Parlor, 2015), Roy Fox, shares his reflections based on years spent developing a graduate course that asks students to come to terms with the most difficult moments in their lives. Fox joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at foxr@missouri.edu. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work after all this time? It’s a good question. Even today, Kafka’s fiction retains a felt strangeness, the “Kafkaesque,” a quality Dr. Troscianko calls “both compelling and unsettling.” His stories have had an enduring readership, sustaining critical attention for over a century. This was what Troscianko wanted a better explanation for. In the book, Troscianko finds that explanation from theories current in the cognitive sciences. She approaches Kafkas fiction (and what is Kafkaesque about it) as a realistic depiction of visually perceived space. In other words, for Troscianko, Kafka’s fiction works by simulating fictional places, people and phenomena as real, as happening in real visual space, according to how vision actually works. This seems, in part at least, to explain Kafka’s hold on us. And think: If the fictional realities of Kafka are lifelike in their fidelity to real lived experience, how strange when they gradually warp, and shift to become something more dreamlike, or unbelievable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While unique in scope, Kaplan’s project can be characterized as the culmination of efforts to apply techniques of personality capture–projective testing, dream analysis, and life history–in cross-cultural research on indigenous peoples, an effort to account for the full spectrum of human life amidst the encroachment of modernity upon cultures based, for example, in oral traditions. Richly documenting the entanglements of Kaplan and others in their attempts to render subjects as data, Lemov throws the transactional nature of anthropology into relief. A data point for an ethnographer can be many things for a research subject: cash for buying American niceties, a beer, a dream lost in the act of recounting, even a permanent mark of distrust. The book is also a history of a technology which never came to fruition: the futuristic reader for Kaplan’s Microcards was never realized, and the boxes of cards became dispersed and lost their value as a total archive of human personality. Lemov argues that we would do well to regard the fate of Kaplan’s database as a parable for our age by calling attention to the information loss upon which the technologies of documentation that saturate our present rely. What, then, will become of our compressed audio files, forgotten social media accounts, and backup hard drives stashed in the back corners of drawers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Should the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakdown, reactions will likely be much more complex and awkward. In her fascinating book, Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Baylor University Press, 2015), Dr. Heather Vacek examines how American Protestants have struggled with the problem of mental illness, and how their relationship with it has changed over time. Vacek reveals in her well-organized and sensitive work the thought of five Protestants whose lives were deeply touched by mental illness: Cotton Mather, Benjamin Rush, Dorothea Dix, Anton Boisen, and Karl Menninger. Vacek then ends this well-researched book with a historically-informed theological reflection of how Christians can help those afflicted with mental illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Affect is a weighty and consequential problem in psychoanalysis. People enter treatment hoping for relief from symptoms and their attendant unbearable affects. While various theorists and schools offer differing approaches to “feeling states,” emotions, and affects, Lacan, despite devoting an entire seminar to anxiety, often is charged with completely ignoring affect. This misperception stems in part from a caricatured understanding of Lacanian technique – a suspicion that it consists mainly of punning and interminable wordplay. And there is another, more sound reason for the accusation: the tendency of relational, interpersonal, and Kleinian models to locate truth in affects and regard emotions as inherently revelatory – as the most direct communications by and about the subject. By contrast, the question, “How did that make you feel?” is heard infrequently in the Lacanian clinic. Following Freud, Lacan believed that affects are effects. He shared Freud’s skepticism toward manifest emotional states, doubting not their importance but rather their transparency. The royal road to the unconscious is the deciphering of dreams and not the affects they produce. Nevertheless, Lacan’s views on affect increasingly diverged from those of Freud, offering much that was new. Colette Soler’s pioneering Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, translated by Bruce Fink (Routledge, 2016) is the first book to examine Lacan’s theory of affect and its clinical significance. While Lacan focused more on the structural causes of affect in his earlier theoretical elaborations, an initial reversal came in his seminar Anxiety (1962-63), where he deemed anxiety the only affect that “does not lie” because it refers to and partakes of the real rather than the signifier. Another reversal, Soler explains, culminated in Encore (1972-73), where Lacan declared that certain “enigmatic affects,” though puzzling to the subject, are carriers of knowledge residing in the real unconscious – a knowledge that is not on the side of meaning but of jouissance. Soler’s book is wide-ranging, covering affects such as shame and sadness, as well as many others we did not have time to discuss in our interview: hatred, ignorance, the pain of existence, mourning, “joyful knowledge,” boredom, moroseness, anger, and enthusiasm. Perhaps most fascinating is Soler’s chapter on Lacan’s enigmatic affects: anxiety (translated in the book as “anguish”), love, and the satisfaction derived from the end of an analysis. Annie Muir kindly translated during the interview.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generative perspective, not linguistics). With a few notable exceptions, it’s my impression that researchers tend either to keep quiet about their skepticism about some foundational matters, or to gravitate towards fields in which those issues are moot. In this respect,Prakash Mondal‘s approach inLanguage, Mind and Computation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) is an interesting and perhaps somewhat unusual one: his work attempts to interrogate rather closely the consequences of adopting some rather innocuous and widespread assumptions or axioms about the nature of language. In doing so, Mondal finds much to criticise, and ultimately argues for quite substantial departures from these assumptions. In this interview we only scratch the surface of his arguments, but I hope we get a decent impression of how his approach relates to the wider field, as well as a sketch of how it plays out in practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an engaging combination of scientific exploration and personal memoir. In recounting the life of his older brother, Jim, who was a bright young graduate student at UCLA when his episodes began to intensify, Chase tells the story of how the treatment of schizophrenia has changed since the 1950s, connecting events in his own life to research on the causation and treatment of schizophrenia. He grapples with difficult questions about why the condition persists from an evolutionary perspective, and the stigma associated with it. Chase takes a hard line on the physical nature of schizophrenia; only by accepting it as a disorder of the biological brain, rather than the moral mind, can we begin to find the right, albeit complex answers and accommodate those who suffer from the condition. Though individuals with schizophrenia can live long lives, Chase’s meetings with Jim call upon the reader to ask themselves how we, as a society, can help make these lives more meaningful. This book is essential reading for those interested in the stories behind brain disorders, and those who want to learn more about how mental illness has changed over the last 50 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology