Psychotherapy is a form of treatment for human suffering that is increasingly misunderstood by the people who seek it. Once the dominant force in psychology, it now gets confused with or supplanted by shorter,

In What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Mical Raz offers a deep dive into the theoretical roots of the Head Start program, and offers a fascinating story of unexpected policy o...

Why is falling in love so exciting and painful at the same time? And what explains our longing for people who are bad for us or no longer love us back? In her book On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion (Oxford University Press,

Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control (Karnac, 2011) is a practical, task-oriented, instructional manual designed to help therapists provide effective treatment for survivors of these most extreme forms of child abuse and men...

Mental illness and other emotional troubles are relatable experiences for Polly Buckingham, author of the new collection of short stories, The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 2016). In this collection,

The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental functioning, in diverse and unique ways.

Psychological and philosophical theories of the emotions tend to take the adult emotional repertoire as the paradigm case for understanding the emotions. From this standpoint, the emotions are usually distinguished into two categories: the basic emotio...

Pragmatism, as a philosophical concept, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Philip Rosenbaum, psychoanalyst and editor of the book Making our Ideas Clear: Pragmatism in Psychoanalysis (Information Age Publ...

In A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Claudia Malacrida explores the practices of the Michener Center in Red Deer, Northern Alberta, to uncover a close relationship between the institution...

When trying to conceive doesn’t go as planned, many women and couples are faced with difficult decisions about which interventions to pursue. Treatment of infertility, whether natural or high-tech, comes with stress and feelings of isolation when your ...

In Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind.

The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the light of expectations of what those sensory inputs ough...

Every night around the world, millions of people lie in bed at night, struggling to fall asleep. Experts suggest that about one in three people struggle with at least mild insomnia. Paradoxically, their efforts to control their sleep may actually resul...

Anger has acquired a bad reputation in our culture. It is an emotional state that can lead us to say and do things we later regret, particularly when our emotion overrides reason. But anger has the potential for being used productively,

If you have ever wondered what your therapist is really thinking, then my interview with Sherry Amatenstein will satisfy your curiosity. She sat down with me to discuss her new book, How Does That Make You Feel?

When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean to promote lay analysis, A.A. Brill,

All humans endure their private struggles, but rarely do we know what troubles our most famous public figures until now. In her recent book, Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Mind of History’s Great Personalities (National Geographic, 2016),

The life of the German-born, pioneering American psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, is intriguing enough in itself, but in the biography, To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (Other Books, 2005),

Why is our criminal justice system so unfair? How do innocent men and women end up serving long sentences while the guilty roam free? According to law professor and scholar Adam Benforado, our systems problems stem from more than occasional bad apples;...

Time and resources are scarce for many teachers. Often times, these same teachers are under immense pressure to produce higher test scores and severely constrained with the actions they can take in their own classrooms.

Many people carry around unresolved feelings and thoughts tied to difficult experiences, with no idea what to do with them. When left unattended for too long, these pent up feelings can lead to a variety of physical and mental health issues: sleep prob...

In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how complex is revealed in Behaving: What’s Genetic,

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Greg Eghigian,

What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (ICU) settings.

The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities,