New Books in Psychology

Dr. James K. Beggan examines the meaning of dogs in people's lives, focusing on how ownership creates a powerful psychological connection. He discusses conflicts over dog ownership during divorce, why dogs are preferred over cats as pets, and mistreatment leading to anger. The podcast delves into the unique qualities of dogs, their communication abilities, and human tendencies to anthropomorphize them. Game theory is applied to personal interactions and emotional connections to pets, and the parallels between polyamorous relationships and relationships involving dogs are explored. The speaker also discusses defensive monogamy and the psychology of heroism.

Dr. Neil Cohn challenges assumptions about understanding comics, emphasizing the complexity of decoding sequential images. He explores cross-cultural influences, childhood learning, and the cognitive processes involved in visual narrative comprehension. The podcast also discusses methods of measurement, the development of visual language fluency, and the differences between filmic and static visual narratives. Neil Cohn shares insights on the importance of storyboards and his upcoming projects, including 'Patterns of Comics' and the Tintin project.

Even before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, chronic loneliness was a private experience of profound anguish that had become a public health crisis. Since then it has reached new heights. Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. Jeremy Nobel founded Project UnLonely to bring creativity as well as social and medical strategies to address this societal problem. In his book Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection (Avery, 2023), Dr. Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection. Dr. Nobel brings together many voices, from pioneering researchers, to leaders in business, education, the arts, and healthcare, to lonely people of every age, background, and circumstance. He discovers that the pandemic isolated us in ways that were not only physical, and that, at its core, a true sense of loneliness results from a disconnection to the self. He clarifies how meaningful reconnection can be nourished and sustained. And he reveals that an important component of the healing process is engaging in creativity, a powerful opportunity he shows us can be accessed by all.Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Is it really harder to pay attention to something than it used to be? No doubt the world is getting faster, and social media platforms are so good at grabbing attention. But how real is the problem and in particular, does it impact our creativity? Carolyn Dicey Jennings is based at the University of California, Merced, and has just co-written a chapter called “Attention, Technology, and Creativity” in a book called Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses published by Columbia UP (2023) Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Note: This episode contains a discussion of suicide. A list of resources is available below. In Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide (Temple UP, 2023), Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among suicidal people through forms of criminalization, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization, and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups experiencing multiple oppressions, including queer, trans, disabled, or Mad people.Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework. Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers.An open access edition of Undoing Suicidism, made available by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, is available here.Alexandre Baril (abaril@uOttawa.ca) is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa. His work is situated at the crossroads of gender, queer, trans, disability/crip/Mad studies, critical gerontology and critical suicidology. His commitment to equity has earned him awards for his involvement in queer, trans and disabled communities, including the Canadian Disability Studies Association Tanis Doe Francophone Award, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion President’s Award at the University of Ottawa. A prolific author who won the Young Researcher Award from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa (2023), he has given over 200 presentations at the international level and has over 80 publications.Resources:SAFE HOTLINES and ONLINE SUPPORT GROUPS: Trans LifeLine (trans/non-binary): 1-877-330-6366 (Canada) and 1-877-565-8860 (USA) Autisme Soutien: Online support for autistic people (French Canada) BlackLine (BIPOC): 1-800-604-5841 (USA) REGULAR HOTLINES (might trace your call and contact emergency services): Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 Suicide.ca (Québec): 1-866-APPELLE The Hope for Wellness Helpline (Indigenous people in Canada): 1-855-242-3310 The Samaritains (USA): 1-212-673-3000 A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility.Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

For two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves?Vivid and at times deeply personal, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers new insights into a wide variety of intoxicating experiences, from the intimate feeling of connection among concertgoers to the adrenaline-fueled rush of a fight, to the thrill of jumping off a balcony into a swimming pool. Tutenges shows what it means and feels to move beyond the ordinary into altered states in which the transgressive, spectacular, and unexpected take place.He argues that the primary aim of group intoxication is the religious experience that Émile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, the essence of which is a sense of connecting with other people and being part of a larger whole. This experience is empowering and emboldening and may lead to crime and deviance, but it is at the same time vital to our humanity because it strengthens social bonds and solidarity.The book fills important gaps in Durkheim’s social theory and contributes to current debates in micro-sociology as well as cultural criminology and cultural sociology. Here, for the first time, readers will discover a detailed account of collective effervescence in contemporary society that includes: an explanation of what collective effervescence is; a description of the conditions that generate collective effervescence; a typology of the varieties of collective effervescence; a discussion of how collective effervescence manifests in the realm of nightlife, politics, sports, and religion; and an analysis of how commercial forces amplify and capitalize on the universal human need for intoxication.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Bullies, bad bosses, human traffickers, and mean girls all manipulate their victims without lifting a finger. This sinister form of mind control is known in the psychoanalytical community as projective identification and blame shifting. Many millions of Americans suffer from this kind of abuse, but they don’t have to anymore—escape and healing is possible.  It’s Not Me, It’s You! How Narcissists Get What They Want and How To Stop Them (Cascade, 2023) will guide readers on their path to exiting toxic relationships and provide tangible, actionable solutions. It’s Not Me, It’s You! is for victims of psychological abuse and provides tips and tools to both fight the pain and to heal. Throughout the text are stories based on representations of the thousands of patients author Dr. Karyne Messina has helped in her practice as a licensed psychologist. Some examples involve actual people, like musicians and businessmen, and the details of those cases are based on public records that are cited throughout. Healing from the pain inflicted by narcissists is possible. It’s Not Me will help you realize that you’re not to blame and that you can take steps towards a positive and healthy life lived on your own terms.Dr. Karyne E. Messina, EdD, is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Today we have a  group session (read: an hour and a half) with the authors Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michal Levin discussing their new book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). Acknowledging that “We’re not the first to think about music in the clinical situation” the authors focused on the analytic project “as a kind of music in its own right.” With an interest in sensory, non-representational experiences. “We settled on music as a primordial operating system that all human beings are brought into.”We begin the interview with each author sharing their ideas on a key tenet of the book which is that “Before we can become fully functioning emotional, rational, linguistic, cultural, social, or political animals, human beings first become musical animals.” From here we explore the questions posed in the book. “What does the frame, frame?” What is meant by “Music is never the creation of an individual in isolation… there is no such thing as private music”, “What is the process of human musicalization”, “What happens to us when the rhythm changes?”This was a rich discussion and each author sharpened my thinking. One of the more meaningful exchanges came around my reaction to this line in the book, "the analytic frame may be usable as rhythm from the get-go; the analyst drops the beat, and the dance begins."  In my reading I disagreed sharply. It is the patient who comes in an drops the beat!  Peter's clarifying response to me may be the highlight of many highlights in this enchanting jam session of an interview. Near the end of our discussion in which the vicissitudes of induction as enchantment have made repeated appearances, I quote a passage that synthesizes much of the previous 90 minutes and speaks to the emotional resonance of the book.“There is a good reason why psychoanalysis has been ambivalent about, if not terrified, of enchantment, which is that it’s overwhelmingly powerful and potentially extremely hazardous. Why? Because at bottom the human being seeks and needs induction. We are thus radically suggestible and susceptible to influence and in-form-ation (and possibly ex-form-ation) by the environment, a “dethroning of the ego” that Freud could never accept. Our need for enchantment renders us essentially and permanently vulnerable to being taken over, and the crucial distinction between whether we are malevolently exploited or benevolently induced into culture is harrowingly historical, a matter of what world into which one is born.” (p.70)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/psychology

E. Summerson Carr, an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, delves into motivational interviewing (MI), a powerful behavioral therapy originally designed for treating addiction. She shares her transformative journey from anthropology to social work, emphasizing MI's shift in client relationships. Carr critiques MI's American roots and its global spread, exploring the complexities of training and state mandates. Additionally, she highlights the intriguing role of facility dogs in enhancing communication in health services.

Today I talked to Jenni Silverstein and Elizabeth Bechard about their study (co-authored wiht Jennifer Walker) "What are the Impacts of Concern about Climate Change on the Emotional Dimensions of Parents’ Mental Health? A Literature Review" published in the Journal of Health Care Communications (September, 2023).Jenni Silverstein is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Infant-Family Mental Health Specialist, working at the intersection of Climate Justice and Early Childhood Mental Health. Elizabeth Bechard is Senior Policy Analyst for Moms Clean Air Force and leads the organization’s work on climate change and mental health. She is author of Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change.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/psychology