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?

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.

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 n...

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”?

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.

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.

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 tal...

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,

The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis: Diverse Perspectives on the Psychosocial (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)is an edited volume. Its chapters document the central place of psychoanalysis in American sociology in the 1950s and sketch the bac...

How up to date are you on the projected impact of climate change on human civilization in the next 100 years? Once you look at latest predictions, quickly come back and listen to this interview with Sally Weintrobe, because she brings a much-needed,

Conventional psychoanalytic views of narcissism focus on familiar character traits: grandiosity, devaluation, entitlement and a lack of empathy. In his new book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Routledge, 2013),

Bruce Fink joins me for a second interview to discuss Volume 2 of Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014). We talk about everything from desire, jouissance, and love to variable-length sessions and “why anyone in...

Liran Razinsky’s book, titled Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2014) came out of a decade’s long attempt to reconcile Liran’s personal search for meaning within two areas of professional inquiry: philosophy,

In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors,

What happens when a Kleinian psychoanalyst wants to write an intelligent self-help book for the general reader? First, she recognizes that one must have an online platform from which to launch, so she starts a blog called “The Headshrinker’s Guide to t...

What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014),

In a wide ranging and courageous interview that touched on the creative process, personal history, memoir and self-disclosure, the psychoanalyst and writer Sophia Richman explored the connections between trauma and the creative process.

Being human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence.

Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, financial and physical security during the Weimar Republ...

Putting Freud’s books — not the man but the writings — on the couch, listening closely for the breaks, the retractions, the internal conflicts, the sudden about-faces. John Fletcher, professor of English literature, reads Freud very, very closely.

Exploring everything from the impact of her own psychoanalysis on her mode and mien to the effect of consumer culture on the psyche, the delightful Mari Ruti keeps the ball rolling.  We pondered with her so many things that the interview feels like xma...

Elizabeth Lunbeck has made a major contribution to the historical study of psychoanalysis with the publication of The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014). Exploring the concept of narcissism and how it is deployed at the leve...

Join us for a maximum dopamine experience as Dr. Claudia Luiz discusses the making of her book Where’s My Sanity? Stories That Help, an everyman’s tour de force that’s poised to create a seismic shift in the cultural consciousness.

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift.

It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, there are...