We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, g...
Dec 03, 2019•58 min•Ep. 42
"I’m very happy to say I really really do love psychoanalysis. I think the insights are absolutely genius and I don’t think that I would be able to do any of my work if I didn’t have those ideas readily available to me." In Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge 2019), Professor Brett Kahr takes us on a tour de force through the rough fringes of clinical practice. He portrays his work with forensic and non-verbal patients, with sado-masochistic couples and deep...
Nov 15, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 119
There are many pathways into the world of psychoanalysis. Some arrive from fields like psychiatry and psychology; some from literature, philosophy, and the humanities; and others from political organising. Our guest Ian Parker found his way into Lacanian psychoanalysis via dissatisfaction with his training in psychology, alongside strongly-held Marxist and feminist political commitments. In his autobiographical work, Psychoanalysis, Clinic, and Context: Subjectivity, History, and Autobiography (...
Nov 13, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 118
John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you may have in your mind of Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in flagrante delicto. If this reference does not ring a bell, perhaps you can just consider yourself lucky. What follows are some head spinning facts: Sabina Spielrein was the first female member of Freudʼs inner circle. As a young Russia...
Nov 11, 2019•59 min•Ep. 116
Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund Freud's associations, anxieties and conflicts. These books tackle what has often remained hidden both in the historical writing about psychoanalysis and in Freud's explicit account of castration: the practice of female genital mutilation, pervasive in major European cities as treatment for hysteria in ...
Nov 07, 2019•58 min•Ep. 117
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, ...
Nov 03, 2019•39 min•Ep. 45
Benjamin Fong’s Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2016) revitalizes two oft’ maligned psychoanalytic concepts, the death drive and the drive to mastery, and makes lively and thoroughgoing use of both to revisit arguments about the power of the culture industry and how we might resist its narcotizing allure. For instance, we know Facebook is the devil, offering us relief from real strife via impotent political engagement; like prisoner...
Oct 31, 2019•1 hr 8 min
The subject of ethics in psychoanalysis has long been relegated to the sidelines of clinical theory. In his new book Psychoanalysis as an Ethical Process with a forward by Peter Fonagy (Routledge, 2019), Robert P. Drozek utilizes both philosophical and analytic concepts to arrive at a new theory of an ethical relational psychoanalysis, one that emphasizes the dignity and the values of both patient and analyst. Although the discussion of ethics is often seen as dry, Psychoanalysis as an Ethical P...
Oct 28, 2019•55 min•Ep. 114
Buddhism and psychotherapy have been in conversation since the days of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erich Fromm. Today, when practices drawn from Buddhism have entered the mainstream, that conversation continues in multiple dimensions. In Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Ira Helderman looks at the ways psychotherapists, some of them also active as leaders of Dharma communities, have engaged Buddhism,...
Oct 24, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 15
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how t...
Oct 24, 2019•33 min•Ep. 81
What happens when a Kleinian and Lacanian have a committed, generous, and accessible conversation about the commonalities and differences between their psychoanalytic perspectives? In this special, two-part interview, host Jordan Osserman joins authors Amy Allen, a prominent representative of Frankfurt School critical theory with expertise on Klein, and Mari Ruti, a leading Lacanian critical theorist, to discuss their new book, Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue (Bloomsbury Acad...
Oct 11, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 113
"Psychotherapy, in my experience, feels nothing like a paper about psychotherapy." In his honest, witty and at times deeply moving account of his graduate training in New York City, Valery Hazanov gives us the unique opportunity of joining a therapist at the beginning of his career. The Fear of Doing Nothing: Notes of a Young Therapist (Sphinx, 2019) raises a number of provocative questions about the efficacy of psychotherapy, the essence of the process and the experience of being in a therapeut...
Sep 23, 2019•59 min•Ep. 112
What happens when a Kleinian and Lacanian have a committed, generous, and accessible conversation about the commonalities and differences between their psychoanalytic perspectives? In this special, two-part interview, host Jordan Osserman joins authors Amy Allen, a prominent representative of Frankfurt School critical theory with expertise on Klein, and Mari Ruti, a leading Lacanian critical theorist, to discuss their new book, Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue (Bloomsbury Acad...
Sep 16, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 111
Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud. Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview. We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marri...
Jul 19, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 108
Lacan published his Écrits in 1966, a compilation of his written work up to that middle period in his teaching. Notoriously difficult to read, the editors of the book we’re discussing today describe the Écrits as “an unwieldy, conglomerate ‘urtext’ … not a book at all … but ‘the waste’ of his teaching: elements he didn’t discuss in public … and sensitive points to which his audience would have reacted with reluctance.” It wasn’t until 2007 that, thanks to work of translator Bruce Fink, the compl...
Jul 15, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 107
Composer, philosopher, scientist, psychoanalyst-Emmanuel ("Manny") Ghent was all of these and more. In this comprehensive interview with the editors, Adrienne Harris and Victoria Demos of the new book Heart Melts Forward: The Collected Writings of Emmanuel Ghent (Routledge, 2018) we discuss the seminal theoretical ideas Manny was passionate about and their impact on relational thinking. Manny Ghent has a firm place in the relational/psychoanalytic lineage. He was an analysand of Clara Thompson, ...
Jun 07, 2019•49 min•Ep. 106
Giuseppe Civitarese's An Apocryphal Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019) is a book of transpositions, collecting together the author’s clinical vignettes, enigmatic objects, stray thoughts, projects, images, notes from readings, and musings; but also remarks on films and exhibitions, memories, episodes from daily life, summaries of papers to write, questions, doubts and obsessions—all of which have shaped the author’s understanding of psychoanalysis. Born from moments in which the auth...
Jun 04, 2019•52 min•Ep. 105
In Transformational Processes in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Dreaming, Emotions and the Present Moment (Routledge, 2019), Lawrence J. Brown offers a contemporary perspective on how the mind transforms, and gives meaning to, emotional experience that arises unconsciously in the here-and-now of the clinical hour. Brown surveys the developments in theory and practice that follow from Freud’s original observations and traces this evolution from its conception to contemporary analytic field theory. Brow...
May 14, 2019•55 min•Ep. 104
If I could vote for my favorite new psychoanalytic book of the 21st century, Ellen Pinsky's Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts (Routledge, 2017) would be it. But to be clear, this is actually a set of essays and definitely not a collection of articles: it is full of style. The author marries two blind spots in the field and creates a conversation between them. The result of this union yields a reflective rejoinder to popular psychoanalytic preoccupations old and ...
Apr 19, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 103
Since the classical Freudian and ego psychology paradigms lost their position of dominance in the late 1950’s, psychoanalysis became a multi-paradigm science with those working in the different frameworks increasingly engaging only with those in the same or related intellectual “silos.” Beginning with Freud’s theory of human nature and civilization, Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2018) proceeds to review and critically evaluate a s...
Apr 09, 2019•53 min•Ep. 102
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on ...
Mar 19, 2019•32 min•Ep. 15
How can insights from psychoanalysis help us understand digital culture? in Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2018), Jacob Johanssen, a senior lecturer in the University of Westminster's School of Media and Communication, draws on the work of Freud and Anzieu to explore both traditional and new forms of media. The book uses research projects on the Embarrassing Bodies television show, and on digital labour, to show how psychoanalysis can inform...
Feb 28, 2019•37 min•Ep. 118
With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with their ...
Jan 16, 2019•35 min•Ep. 13
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the bo...
Dec 06, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 14
Can you be a relational analyst who is unobtrusive at the same time? In this book, Robert Grossmark makes a claim that you can and you should! He identifies a vulnerability of the relational style—being that it can place too much emphasis on reflective interactions between patient and therapist, where each party is working to put experience into words. This can be a problem for classically trained analysts too, who put a heavy emphasis on interpretation and insight. Grossmark makes a case that t...
Nov 14, 2018•53 min
Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview conducted in connection with the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, we discuss how the couch has become the leading symbol for psychoanalysis in positive and maligned ways. Dr. Kravis discusses how the couch came to signify reclining, rest, introspection and healing and how important decor was for Fr...
Nov 07, 2018•59 min
I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water, I heard a news report that the children of refugee women were being removed from them at the American border. Rose is nothing if not prescient in her thinking and in this book, perhaps especially so. While most of us learn what we think “alla nachträghlichkeit...
Oct 10, 2018•54 min
‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Prof. Herzog carries forward the groundbreaking research program into the politics of desire that already brought us Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany and Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and The Future of American Politics. The book offers fresh readings of...
Sep 07, 2018•45 min
Elliot Jurist is one of the authors, along with Peter Fonagy, of a prominent book in psychological science called Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self, published in 2002. This book, Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy (The Guilford Press, 2018), comes along 15 years later and “corrects” some aspects of the previous book as well as elaborates upon the emotional component of the mentalizing process. What does mentalization have to do with Psych...
Jul 27, 2018•47 min
Can one integrate Klein and Winnicott? Or does one have to choose between them when practicing psychoanalysis? These are questions for Abram and Hinshelwood in this podcast interview of two scholars known for their reference books on Klein and Winnicott. Bob Hinshelwood is the author of The Dictionary of Kleinian Thought and Jan Abram is the author of The Language of Winnicott. Most psychodynamic clinicians practicing today are heavily influenced by Object Relations theory, but many of them do n...
Jul 12, 2018•50 min
