New Books In Psychoanalysis

Vamik D. Volkan, a native of Cyprus, was touched by ethnic/political violence at a very personal level when he was still in medical school: a very close friend was shot by terrorists during the Cypriat war. “I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it at the time, I was far from home.” Once he completed medical school and his psychoanalytic training, he noticed that he had become preoccupied with theoretical questions of mourning, and he realized he was motivated by his loss to address issues of ethnic violence and peace-making from a psychoanalytic angle. How are generations of families affected by historical trauma and loss? How does political violence and trauma become a chosen or disavowed element of identity across generations? With A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action (Karnac 2015), Volkan recounts a fascinating, riveting, theoretically powerful case history he supervises, of the grandson of a high level Nazi perpetrator, instrumental in de

There are theorists who seem to strive for integration and those who insist on fundamental differences, incompatibilities, and unbridgeable gulfs. Some write from an interdisciplinary position, exulting in hybridity and increased potentiality, while others, no less passionately, police disciplinary boundaries, urging seriousness and rigor. The argument to integrate is rooted in the assumption that a theory only can be enriched through the incorporation of varying perspectives; a multiple factor model is inherently more flexible and practicable. Proponents of disciplinary and theoretical purity counter that true integration is impossible: synthetic efforts often fall short, resulting in pastiche, lists of superficial similarities, or vitiated “middle positions.”Steven J. Ellman, in When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought (Karnac, 2010) unapologetically declares his allegiance to the first camp. As Ellman explains in his preface, the blending of various theoretic

[NB:Please be forewarned, there is some brief audio difficulty at the beginning of the interview. It does clear up quickly, so please do listen through.] We are drawn to what is hidden. We are excited by what is mysterious whether we find it beautiful or repellant. Erotic experience is all about this urge. Sexuality, both in its defensive function and as an intrinsic part of being human, defines the ways in which we engage in the psychoanalytic situation. However, it can be very difficult – even taboo – for analysts to admit having erotic feelings towards a patient, and it can be equally thorny handling erotic transference when it arises in a treatment. In Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios (Routledge, 2014), Andrea Celenza discusses the importance of reclaiming sexuality as one of the many realms that are of central concern to our patients as she simultaneously observes the pervasive “desexualization” of the psychoanalytic field. She asserts that erotic transference and countert

To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growing elasticity of bipolar disorders. For about the last twenty years, argues Leader, the bipolar spectrum has been tailored to a pharmaceutical industry eager to shift attention away from ineffective antidepressants and toward newly developed mood stabilizers. A household word since the mid-1990s, “bipolar” is now widely considered to be biological and hereditary. Its loosened parameters have saddled large swaths of the population with a chronic illness requiring life-long medication. Strictly Bipolar (Penguin, 2013) is a trenchant case for the reexamination of the “bipolar revolution” and for a return to the older diagnosis of manic depression. Leader points out that while bipolarity is at the center of modern capitalist subjectivity – the principal feature of twenty-first-century worklife, which encourages and rewa

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as ca

In this interview Dr. Theodore Jacobs discusses his book The Possible Profession: The Analytic Process of Change (Routledge, 2013) . Dr. Jacobs is a pioneer in the use of countertransference in the analytic setting and is regarded as the originator of the term “enactment” to describe the actions and emotions that occur within both the patient and analyst during treatment. In this interview we discuss how psychoanalytic technique has evolved and how Jacobs’ classical orientation has changed over his career. Dr. Jacobs also shared his views on self disclosure, current practice and the integration of one and two person psychologies. The interview concludes with Dr. Jacob’s thoughts on the current state of the profession, some of his favorite theorists, institute training, and the internecine battles that have occurred in psychoanalysis over the years. Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst as well as an adult analyst in private practice. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emerit

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway,

Lene Auestad, PhD, is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oslo, and affiliated with the Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo. She currently resides in the UK to pursuing long-standing interests in British psychoanalysis. Working at the interface of psychoanalytic thinking and ethics/political theory, her writing has focused on the themes of emotions, prejudice and minority rights. Her books include: Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac, 2015) Nationalism and the Body Politic. Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac, 2014) Psychoanalysis and Politics – Exclusion and the Politics of Representation (Karnac, 2012) Action, Freedom, Humanity – Encounters with Hannah Arendt (in Norwegian) Auestad founded and co-directs the interdisciplinary conference series “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” which aims to address how cr

Feeling exhausted, hopeless, and anxious? You might be suffering from symptoms of neoliberalism, according toPaul Verhaeghe. In What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (Scribe Publications, 2014), he takes on “Enron society,” demonstrating how the core insights and principles of psychoanalysis can be brought to bear on social relations, history, and ideology. The last 50 years have witnessed a staggering proliferation of psychiatric disorders — a bloated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) that has both reflected and caused the over-diagnosis, disciplining, and medication of individuals afflicted with social rather than mental problems. How can you not feel dejected and panic-stricken, asks Verhaeghe, when you live in a “meritocracy” that ensures some an obvious advantage? When you are evaluated incessantly and told you are not trying hard enough? When your work environment and community lack authority figures who take responsibility and set limits, leavin

Alison Bancroft has written a book with a refreshingly straightforward title: Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self (I. B. Tauris, 2012). One immediately suspects that it reflects the author’s two most enduring obsessions and this suspicion is confirmed within the first quarter of our interview. Yet, as it turns out, both “psychoanalysis” and “fashion” demand qualification.By “fashion” Bancroft means adornment that assumes an innovative form – creativity applied to the surface of the body.The psychoanalysis she has in mind is Lacanian theory.If, then, you are expecting a condemnation of fashion as a frivolous pursuit or a Kleinian explanation for shifting hemlines and anorexic models, Bancroft will not satisfy. But if you are curious about what fashion as art and corporeal style might express about fundamental Freudian and Lacanian concepts like identification, femininity, and the unconscious, you will be delighted and edified.Readings of fashion and its sociocultural resonances teach us a great deal a

We are mostly familiar with the hermeneutics of suspicion. But what about a hermeneutics of curiosity? In his latest book Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Routledge, 2015), Dr. Donnel Stern discusses the ways in which a spirit of mutual curiosity between analyst and analysand can transform the field between them and alter their relationships to each other and themselves. Continuing the groundbreaking work of Unformulated Experience and the more recent Partners in Thought, Relational Freedom showcases Dr. Stern’s ability to arrange clinical case studies, a rich history of psychoanalytic thought, and contemporary theoretical critique in such a way as opens the reader’s mind to new conceptions of the priority of feeling in the interpersonal/relational field. Along the way, he paints a picture of enactment (the interpersonalisation of dissociation) and how the analytic dyad can handle enactments in a fashion that frees up the analyst and analysand to see their relationship in a

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the milli

What meaning does money have in psychic life? And where does clinical psychoanalytic work fall in the realm of commerce? Does money play an inherently alienating role with regards to the psychoanalytic subject? Or might it contain meaning crucial to the patient’s progress? In Money Talks in Therapy, Society, and Life (Routledge, 2011), Brenda Berger and Stephanie Newman present a collection covering a wide range on the topic from varied psychoanalytic perspectives. With contributions from Muriel Dimen, Robert Glick, Theodore Jacobs, and others, money is understood in terms of psychosexuality, greed, envy, narcissism, sexuality, loss, the economics among candidates in psychoanalytic training institutes, and its ever-present roll in the transference/countertransference matrix. In the interview Berger describes the ways in which money was split off and denied in clinical psychoanalysis in the years leading up to the economic crash of 2008, and how this was followed by a re-emergence within the field after 2008.

Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler reminded me of something very important and unsettling: I have a brush with madness every night. Most of us do – when we dream. Or fall in love; or write poetry; or free-associate. Madness resides within all speaking beings and erupts in the most ordinary activities. In fact, ordinariness, rationality, and normalcy can be the most maddening phenomena of all. In editing Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015) Gherovici and Steinkoler consciously employ the non-nosological, capacious — one might even say literary – term “madness” to resist normative and abjecting approaches to the insane and think in novel and flexible ways about both psychosis and neurosis. Eschewing diagnostic categories like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, the editors embrace “madness” precisely because it exceeds the DSM and the clinic, does not lend itself easily to medication, and inspires controversy and innovative reflection. The volume brings together eighteen impressive L

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for a

Why would Bert Williams, famous African-American vaudeville performer of the early twentieth century, feel it necessary to apply burnt cork blackface make-up to his already dark skin, in order to emphasize “blackness”? According to Michelle Ann Stephens, this was one question about the space between realness, race, and performance that led her to write Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Stephens investigates the history of the concept of the skin, especially in relation to the notion of the flesh, and how they are both re-written by colonialization, and the idea of racial difference. Stephens turns to the work of four iconic black male stars whose careers span the twentieth century–including Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte  and Bob Marley–and explores the dynamic between the gaze, representation and technology, and how these performers challenged notions of race, sexuality, and skin/flesh in the act of performing. Stephens uses psychoanalyt

In The Psychoanalytic Vision: The Experiencing Subject, Transcendence, and the Therapeutic Process (Routledge, 2013), Frank Summers has written a wholly original work of theory, technique and cultural critique. Privileging terms not often used in psychoanalytic writing, among them romanticism, transcendence and futurity, Summers documents an as yet undocumented shift in the field. In an effort to buttress the standing of psychoanalysis as a science, psychoanalysts previously attempted to delineate certain laws pertaining to the psyche, ranging from the Oedipus complex to notions of the self; now, according to Summers, the majority of analysts attend primarily to the experience of their patients. As such, psychoanalysis has become a “science of the subjective.” Critiquing the field for reifying concepts like “the unconscious” and for perhaps unwittingly playing along with a culture that maximally commodifies humanity, Summers suggests we position psychoanalysis on the perimeter of the American mainstream. “An

Responding to a significant lacuna in psychoanalytic literature, Jean Petrucelli has put together an impressive book that approaches the eating-disordered patient from interpersonal and relational perspectives. Just as the papers within Body States:Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2014)animate the twin themes of dissociation and integration, so too do the authors illustrate how these forces shape interpersonal relationships, body-states, self-states, as well as, ultimately, the ability to functionally shift between selves. One may well agree with Philip Bromberg when he remarks in his Foreword, “Do not be fooled by the format. It is the groundbreaking perspective of Dr. Petrucelli that inspires each chapter, and my use of the word groundbreaking should not be taken lightly.” Indeed, the undeniable coherence of this volume springs from each writer’s affirmation of and convincing argument for the ability of interpersonal and relational analysis to uniqu

The metaphorical construction of Susan Kavaler-Adler‘s Anatomy of Regret: From Death Instinct to Reparation and Symbolization through Vivid Clinical Cases (Karnac, 2013)evokes the complexities that have wrought psychoanalysis since its beginning of talking about the mind in the language of the body.As it subtitle tells us, the anatomy of this book is structured by the case study. If there is something that informs Alder’s approach to understanding psychoanalysis and how she intervenes in the psychoanalytic encounter, its that where theory fails, the body succeeds. Regret, for Kavaler-Adler, is a bodily experience that orients us in some way to the unconscious consequences of our relationships – of the actions of other bodies in our lives. In telling the stories of these case studies, Kavaler-Adler performs a kind of surgical suturing of theory along the sinews of loss – the scars left at the site of the aggression of the other. She begins with the important insight that something was at stake in Freud’s the

With Emotional Communication: Countertransference Analysis and the Use of Feeling in Psychoanalytic Technique (Routledge, 2013), Paul Geltner has written the definitive textbook on countertransference. No book, to my knowledge comes even close to this accomplishment. Most analysts are taught that countertransferences are the idiosyncratic feelings of the analyst. Geltner begins with the radical assumption that all of the analyst’s feelings should be considered inductions by the patient until proven otherwise. Geltner describes the many ways in which emotional communications can be induced and expands concept of countertransference into discrete observable categories with clinically useful examples. In this interview, Dr. Geltner discusses the Modern Psychoanalytic underpinnings of his thinking about emotional communications, the field founded by Hyman Spotnitz. He describes the different types of countertransference and how understanding what the patient is inducing in the analyst is a main focus of the Mode