Psychoanalysis is a queer theory. That’s what Tim Dean said, according to Eve Watson in the afterword to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (Punctum Books, 2017), a new book that she co-edited with Noreen Giffney. In her interview for this podcast, Watson qualifies that declaration by saying that psychoanalysis isn’t always a queer theory, but it should be. “There are many psychoanalyses.” Queer theory challenges the conventional approach to sexuality that...
Jun 28, 2018•53 min
This interview with Jonathan House is about a book titled Laplanche: An Introduction (The Unconscious in Translation, 2015). Dr. House is not the author of the book (more on that below) but he is the publisher and translator of portions of the book. This interview tries to understand Laplanche: An Introduction in the context of House’s expertise as a teacher, translator, scholar, and publisher of the works of the French psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche. Laplanche consists of three essays including ...
Jun 05, 2018•57 min
“Clinical moments,” as defined in this book, are those therapeutic encounters that challenge the analyst’s capacity to make snap judgments about how to respond to a patient at particularly delicate times. Richard Tuch and Lynn S. Kuttnauer‘s edited collection Conundrums and Predicaments in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018), presents twelve such moments, each one written by a different analyst, with twenty-five experts who share their ways of thinking about the conundrums and pre...
May 18, 2018•41 min
Dominique Scarfone‘s The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious (The Unconscious in Translation, 2015) charts “a new itinerary through the vast landscape that is Freud.” For many North American readers, or others who may not appreciate the relevance of drive theory and Freud’s metapsychology in today’s world, this book serves as an inspiring re-visitation of that territory and presents a cogent theory for understanding clinical material and analytic aims in a faithfully Freudian context. The book is als...
Apr 24, 2018•53 min
The history of psychoanalysis is full of twists, turns and also glaring omissions. In their new two-volume set, editors Irwin Hirsch and Donnell Stern attempt to set the record straight in regard to the overlooked contributions of interpersonal writers and thinkers. In this interview, they speak at length about the history of the interpersonal tradition, why it was initially ignored by more traditional approaches, and how it became the one of the foundations of what is known as the relation scho...
Apr 19, 2018•59 min
In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted with his surgeon Hans Pichler 92 times. Freud’s smoking motivated much of the fussiness with his prosthetic jaw: it had to be right at the palate edge, with optimal occlusion so as to get the most out of his cigars. For Freud, smoking facilitated writing and intellectual creativity; it provided exquisite...
Apr 03, 2018•47 min
Alenka Zupancic has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about sex with only cursory mention of things naughty. What is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017) avoids fluff, heterosexual intercourse, and the gender binary (and gender altogether) and instead cogently explains sexual difference, the elusive “beyond” of the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, the materiality of signifiers, the hole in being, the non-coincidence of truth and knowledge, primal repression, passio...
Mar 14, 2018•1 hr 22 min
What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral culpability for the Holocaust? Roger Frie explores the thorny issue of historical memory and intergenerational trauma in his new award winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017)....
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Richard Tuch is an analyst in Los Angeles who specializes in writing and teaching about psychoanalytic technique. In this book, he succinctly reviews a number of major historic controversies regarding technique, fairly presenting both sides and arguing that psychoanalytic practice tends to evolve toward a middle ground after the pendulum swings too far in favor of an overvalued idea. Tuch was trained as a modern ego psychologist but he is steeped in other schools as well, especially British Obje...
Dec 26, 2017•52 min
When the Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis writes a book about the work of psychoanalysis, interested parties ought to take notice. But alas, the world of psychoanalysis speaks many languages and readers often choose authors who speak their own tongue. The Work of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017) by Dana Birksted-Breen, while written in English, listens to international voices in the psychoanalytic community and considers them from the perspective of an analyst who i...
Nov 07, 2017•51 min
The “tongue in cheek” title of The New Analyst’s Guide to the Galaxy: Questions about Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 2017), which references the hugely popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, hints at the playful and lighthearted tone of the conversation that unfolds between co-authors Luca Nicoli (the “new analyst”) and Antonino Ferro (the Guide) in this mildly irreverent but ultimately serious statement about the future of psychoanalysis. Nicoli is a recent graduate of an Italian...
Sep 26, 2017•58 min
Little murders, unkind cutting back, uneasy intimacy and connoisseurship gone awry are just a few of the provocative relational concepts Dr. Margaret Crastnopol describes and explores in her new book Micro-trauma: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Cumulative Psychic Injury (Routledge, 2015) Trained in the interpersonal tradition, Dr. Crastnopol writes about how patients experience the slights that occur in their everyday interactions. These exchanges, in an earlier day, in a prior theoretical or...
Sep 08, 2017•53 min
This is an interview for the pessimists among us: Worried that your career as an analyst is over? That CBT is about to enact world domination over all things psychological? Plagued by ideas that your institute training was all for naught? Aner Govrin is Director of the doctoral program in Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics at Bar Ilan University in Israel, a psychoanalyst, and memberof the Tel Aviv Institue for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP). His keen intelligence and big picture perspective w...
Sep 07, 2017•1 hr
Freudian theory laid the foundation for a felicitous engagement of psychoanalysis with transgender experience. Building on the work of sexologists, Freud not only posited a universal bisexuality, thereby implying that we are all transgender in our unconscious, but also indexed something in sexuality that exceeds our grasp. His most controversial claim, perhaps, was that human sexuality itself is faulty and symptomatic — that our confrontation with the enigma and overproximity of parental desire ...
Aug 31, 2017•57 min
It has been said that we cannot not be in intersubjectivity. During the past decades, this fact has challenged the traditional psychoanalytic project. Various psychoanalytic schools have addressed the challenge in their own way, as does Dr. Lewis Kirshner in his new book Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2017). He approaches the topic from the perspective of an academic with a strong background in phenomenology as well as psychoanalysis. The book re...
Aug 29, 2017•52 min
Adrienne Harris and Steven Kuchuck‘s The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (Routledge, 2015) contributes to the resurgence of interest in Sandor Ferenczi since the early 1990s when Harris published another book also titled The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi with co-editor Lewis Aron. As Harris says in the interview, the resurgence is partially explained by the work of Steven Mitchell, relational psychoanalysis, and the Vietnam war! War is of particular interest to Harris because it ch...
Aug 16, 2017•47 min
While I was in college, undergrads reeking of stale coffee and cigarettes paraded on gothic quads with flannel armor, black-rimmed glasses, messenger bags, and paperback copies of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mired in misinterpretation, budding philosophers of various political stripes dreamed of amoral Ubermenschian architects expressing “will to power” through design of phallic buildings and superior socialities. This memory haunted me years later while teaching On the Genealogy of Morals...
Aug 13, 2017•53 min
The influential yet controversial psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan was pioneering in his treatment of schizophrenia however the way he lived privately did not always correspond to the theoretical ideas he espoused publicly. With meticulous research and access to clinical and historical records, historianNaoko Wake, examines the life and work of this pioneer of American Psychoanalysis from an unconventional perspective, quite different than the usual biographical approach. In this interview we ...
Aug 01, 2017•58 min
Bruce Fink joins me once again, this time to discuss his latest book, A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques For Everyday Practice (W. W. Norton & Co., 2017). What prompted Fink, a world-renowned Lacanian analyst, to return to Freud? In the spirit of Lacan, he informs us at the outset that he was always already, and forever will be, Freudian. This does not mean, of course, that Fink is uncritical of Freud. Carefully, brilliantly, and often playfully, he reads Studies on Hysteria, The I...
Jul 20, 2017•55 min
Reading Annie Reiner‘s Bion and Being: Passion and the Creative Mind (Karnac, 2012) was a spiritual experience for me. Dr. Reiner illuminates the often-obscure ideas of Wilfred Bion with seemingly effortless and masterful recourse to poetry, literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. The book is a serenely beautiful extended meditation on Bion’s O and a rigorous and lucid explication of a theoretical paradigm that shapes a powerful psychoanalytic vision. In addition to the soulful consolation ...
Jul 16, 2017•51 min
If you steered yourself away from books about brain science because you were interested in something completely different–psychoanalysis–then this is the book for you! This book will renew your appreciation for the revolutionary discovery and urgent need for psychoanalysis, as argued by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Mark Solms invented the word “neuropsychoanalyis” twenty years ago because he believed that brain science at that time was still in a primitive state of learning about ...
Jul 03, 2017•57 min
There are many fronts in the argument against the existence of a god or gods and veracity of religious narratives. Some familiar approaches are to critique the philosophical underpinnings of religious ideology or to make a case from the perspective of scientific evidence and the physical laws of reality. Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (Routledge, 2016), written by Dr. Jon Mills, argues from the perspective of psychology and posits that god is a psycholog...
May 21, 2017•55 min
Reading Laurence Rickels‘ The Psycho Records (Wallflower Press, 2016) gave me the urge to ask random strangers questions like: Are you haunted by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene? How do you feel about Norman Bates and other cinematic killers pathologically attached to their mothers? Does the thought of Anthony Perkins impersonating his dead mother and stabbing Janet Leigh make you uncomfortable and scared? Induce an uncanny sensation? Or does it seem dated, campy, even comical? Rickels is...
Mar 21, 2017•54 min
Todd McGowan‘s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016) elegantly employs psychoanalytic thinking to unpack the lure of capitalism. He argues that we are drawn to capitalism because, under an overt promise to bring us what we want, it gives us what we need: lack. Every commodity disappoints. And that’s the point. Satisfaction, that moment when all is well and good, flutters rapidly, blessedly away. What is so great, so crucial, about lack? Though ...
Mar 19, 2017•59 min
Literature and training in diversity and multiculturalism typically emphasize cultural differences–how to identify them, and the importance of honoring them. But does such an emphasis neglect other important dimensions of cross-cultural relating? Brent Willock, Lori Bohm, and Rebecca Curtis, editors of the book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide (Routledge, 2017), argue that finding similarities in our universal human longings and experiences are also k...
Mar 13, 2017•58 min
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 Publishing, 2015)about what pragmatism really is and how it informs clinical theory and praxis. We discuss how pragmatisms influence reaches far back to the beginnings of psychoanalysis, in Sigmund Freud’s original ideas, and up through the ways clinic...
Jan 04, 2017•51 min
The Interpersonal School of psychoanalysis developed independent of the classical tradition in the United States early in the twentieth century, and was a harbinger to the relational thinking of the current day. Yet, the contributions of interpersonal analysts have often been glossed over or ignored completely. In his new book of collected papers, The Interpersonal Tradition: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity (Routledge, 2015) Dr. Irwin Hirsch, writes in depth of the contributions of in...
Dec 09, 2016•59 min
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, president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was preparing to divorce the International Psychoanalytic Association. Brill, driven by a fear that psychoanalysis might be seen as quackery and so discredited, sought to guarantee that the only people allowed to pr...
Nov 07, 2016•1 hr 2 min
In Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016), Psychoanalyst Jill Gentile explores the intersection between Freuds fundamental rule of free association and freedom of speech in a democracy, two subjects with obvious connections; however, as Gentile points out, surprisingly few writers have attempted to linked the two. In this interview, which spans the history of psychoanalysis and the U.S. Constitution, Gentile describes how both the psychological discipline ...
Oct 21, 2016•1 hr
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), we learn that Fromm-Reichmann played an integral role in mid-century psychoanalysis. In this interview, with the author, psychologist, and historian, Gail Hornstein, we trace not only Fromm Reichmann’s many accomplishments, but also the history of Chestnut ...
Oct 13, 2016•59 min
