How do we go forward in our psychoanalytic understanding of transgender children? This highly contested issue is at the core of an interesting edition of the journalThe Psychoanalytic Study of the Child(Volume 75, Issue 1, 2022), titled “Transgender Children: From Controversy to Dialogue”, and edited by Jordan Osserman and Hannah Wallerstein. To counter the feeling of being stuck in an endless spiral of splitting and binary thinking in the field, they have proposed a new model of dialogue: Four scholars of issues connected to transgender children, namely Eve Watson, Oren Gozlan, Tobias Wiggins and Laurel Silber, shared their views in four short papers, and then engaged in a real-time online discussion, which was transcribed and edited for the journal. In the edition, as well as in the interview, a lot of ground is covered: Questions about the psychoanalytic theorization of gender and the mind-body divide are raised and clinical issues like regret, responsibility and countertransfe...
'Whiteness' is a politically constructed category which needs to be understood and dismantled because the system of racism so embedded within our society harms us all. It has profound implications for human psychology, an understanding of which is essential for supporting the movement for change. Helen Morgan'sThe Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective(Routledge, 2021)explores these implications from a psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic perspective. The 'fragility' of whiteness, the colour-blind approach and the silencing process of disavowal as they develop in the childhood of white liberal families are considered as means of maintaining white privilege and racism. A critique of the colonial roots of psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung leads to questioning the de-linking of the individual from society in modern day analytic thinking. The concept of the cultural complex is suggested as a useful means of connecting the individual and the social. Examples from the author's clinical practice as well as from public life are used to illustrate the argument. Relatively few black people join the psychoanalytic profession and those who do describe training and membership as a difficult and painful process. How racism operates in clinical work, supervision and our institutions is explored, and whilst it can seem an intractable problem, proposals are given for ways forward. This book will be of great importance to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, social workers and all those with an interest in the role of white privilege on mental health. Philip Lance,Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached atPhilipJLance@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty –The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies(Verso, 2022)moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, this book lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined. In this interview, I spoke with Mark Neocleous about his fascinating and wide-ranging bookThe Politics of Immunity. We also spent time discussing his previous work on security and police power, the personal context informing this work, and connections with the ongoing UK undercover policing controversy (discussed in my previous interview with the authors ofDeep Deception). Content warning:between 43-45 minutes into the podcast, there is a brief discussion of suicide in the context of Mark's forthcoming work. Mark NeocleousisProfessor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for hisinfluentialwork on police power and security. His recent books includeThe Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind'(2016);War Power, Police Power(2014);and the newly-reissuedA Critical Theory of Police Power:The Fabrication of Social Order(2021). Catriona Goldis a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached byemailor onTwitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Kim talks with Michelle Rada about the death drive in psychoanalysis. Michelle references Todd McGowan’sEnjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, University of Nebraska Press, 2013.She also recommendsCapitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets,by Todd McGowan. In our longer conversation, she also quoted,WhatISSex?by Alenka Zupančič, MIT Press, 2017. She also recommends a special issue ofdifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studieson “Constructing the Death Drive.”This issue includes an article by Luce Cantin, “The Drive, the Untreatable Quest of Desire” which she discusses in the epidsode. Michelle thinks the whole issue is worth checking out, and especially recommends the article in there by Tracy McNulty as well, “Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive” and the piece by Willy Apollon, “Psychoanalysis and the Freudian Rupture.” She also highly recommendsLife and Death in Psychoanalysisby Jean Laplanche (Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), which really informs her understanding of the economics/psychic structure of the drive,and of course….Beyond the Pleasure Principleby Sigmund Freud. And “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud’s 1914 essay on primary/secondary narcissism. Michelle Rada is a PhD candidate in English at Brown University and Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College. Her research is on modernist aesthetics, form, the novel, and psychoanalysis. Michelle’s work has appeared inRoom One-Thousand, The Comparatist, The James Joyce Quarterly,The Journal of Beckett Studies,andThe Journal of Modern Literature. She is Senior Assistant Editor atdifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
In this episode, Kim talks with Saronik about the game “Fort / Da” — a game played by Sigmund Freud’s grandson inBeyond the Pleasure Principle, (which you can borrow from the amazingInternet Archive). Our cover image comes from another text on Internet Archive, in the Medical Heritage Library’s collection:Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung, written by Hippolyte Bernheim and Sigmund Freud in 1888.The image appears on page 330. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva(Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
The accusation “you’re deluded” is often used as something of a cheap shot intended to silence an opponent in debate. But what is the nature of a delusion and how can we assess rationality and irrationality? In this podcast, Owen Bennett-Jones talks to Professor Lisa Bortolotti who studies the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry at Birmingham University and is the author of among many other things,Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs(Oxford UP, 2010)and most recently editedDelusions in Context(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Owen Bennett-Jonesis 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year’s worth of therapy sessions with his patients to observe how his training in Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism, in tandem, led to greater awareness—for his patients, and for himself For years, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. Content to use his training in mindfulness as a private resource, he trusted that the Buddhist influence could, and should, remain invisible. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to learn how many were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think. InThe Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life(Penguin, 2022), Dr. Epstein reflects on a year’s worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist background influences the way he works. Meditation and psychotherapy each encourage a willingness to face life’s difficulties with courage that can be hard to otherwise muster, and in this cross-section of life in his office, he emphasizes how therapy, an element of Western medicine, can in fact be considered a two-person meditation. Mindfulness, too, much like a good therapist, can “hold” our awareness for us—and allow us to come to our senses and find inner peace. Throughout this deeply personal inquiry, one which weaves together the wisdom of two worlds, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help patients cultivate the sense that there is something magical, something wonderful, and something to trust running through our lives, no matter how fraught they have been or might become. For when we realize how readily we have misinterpreted ourselves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs, when we touch the ground of being, we come home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
In the hills north of Rome about a month ago I met a woman, a writer, so blown away by her Dottoressa, her psychoanalyst, that she announced to the surprise of all around her (surprised I want to add that she was in analysis in the first place) that she was writing a book about her treatment. I thought of H.D. I thought of Alison Bechdel. Then I thought of Emma Lieber. The Writing Cure(Bloomsbury, 2020), Lieber’s first book, is a hybrid text—equal parts the work of an analysand, a new clinician, a scholar of Russian literature, and a divorcing mother. It is also the work of a Lacanian-influenced analyst whose analytic credential comes from an institute not especially associated with the work of Lacan; as such, the book functions as a kind of “pass”, a representation of what it is that the author wants to present to a community of analysts who she hopes will see her as a peer. Her writing is creaturely by which I mean her words are close to the ground. She is funny. She is droll. She takes you into a nook and a cranny and your heart breaks. Always almost conversational, until she stops talking to you. The result is very beautiful and elusive. Her voice is precisely that: hers. She reveals but also conceals. The reader could want more. The reader could want less. But the reader is left wanting. How else can an analyst write about her own treatment but to tell the truth only to also tell it (a la E. Dickinson) a tad slant? Embracing auto-theory as a burgeoning psychoanalyst is no simple task. Lieber refers to certain writers bearing this hyphenated moniker, among them Maggie Nelson, Paul Preciado and Barbara Browning but not her own analyst who is known for her use of the same genre. Of course reading about an analysis—like watching two people fuck in a car—can feel prurient: “I didn’t mean to look but then I could not turn away.” Lieber nevertheless finds a way to circumvent our voyeuristic wishes. We meet her and then again, we are left wondering; we are left to wonder—which is kind of perfect for a book written by an analyst about her analysis—about her. She remains through her final written utterances, a powerful transference-magnet. Tracy Morgan is the founding editor of NBiP and in private practice in NYC and Rome, Italy She can be reached attracynewbooksinpsychoanalysis@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
In his latest bookFreud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis(Confer Books,2021), Professor Brett Kahrhas usedhis remarkable skills as experienced psychotherapist and rigorous historian to tell a meticulously researched,deeply engaging tale of the trials and tribulationsof Sigmund Freud's life. Kahr has takenan unflinching look at the darkest hours of this remarkable man,such as the Spanish flu of 1918, the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938 and a long struggle with carcinoma in later life. Digging deep into the archives, he has unearthed a treasure trove of stories that lets usappreciate Sigmund Freud`s genius even more against the backdrop of his struggle for survival. He hassynthesized his findings in elegant prose to offerus an inspiring story of hope, most pertinent for our troubled times. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis