Today I began my discussion with Dr. Adrian Perkel about his new book Unlocking The Nature of Human Aggression: A Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Approach (Routledge, 2024) “Aggression is to the mind what the immune system is to the body. It doesn’t seek the fight.” With this perfect mind-body analogy Dr. Perkel proposes a clear way to think theoretically and work clinically with aggression. Throughout the book he links Freud’s formulations of the psyche with contemporary physics and biochemi...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep 262•Transcript available on Metacast This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a high...
Mar 10, 2025•53 min•Ep 367•Transcript available on Metacast Studies show that students who have a positive outlook on their lives outperform students who don’t. Is positive thinking a skill? Can it be taught? Our article is: “Teaching Positive Psychology Skills at school may be one way to help student mental health and happiness,” by Dr. Kai Zhuang Shum, published in The Conversation, which explores how the components of happiness and connection can be applied to classroom settings around the world. Amid the reduced access to mental health services for m...
Mar 06, 2025•55 min•Ep 253•Transcript available on Metacast Of all the mental illnesses, schizophrenia eludes us the most. No matter the strides scientists have made in neurological research nor doctors have made in psychiatric treatment, schizophrenia remains misunderstood, almost complacently mythologized. Without a reason for the illness, patients feel even more alienated than they already do, families are left hopeless, and doctors struggle to provide accurate care. Steven Lesk, though, after a medical career dedicated to those affected by schizophre...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep 236•Transcript available on Metacast Passion, Shame, and the Freedom to Become: Seizing the Vital Moment in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2025), by Peter Shabad, examines how humans can overcome feelings of shame through self‑acceptance and regain their innate passion and freedom to grow. Shabad examines in detail how self-shaming and passivity are intertwined with the fatalism of self-pity, envy, resentment, and ultimately, regret for not "seizing the vital moments" in life. From birth on, children attempt to contribute to the human ...
Feb 25, 2025•2 hr 36 min•Ep 259•Transcript available on Metacast In the third podcast of this series, “Brain Rot: What Our Screen Are Doing to Our Minds,” host Dr. Karyne Messina, psychologist, psychoanalyst and author talked about the problems that can emerge in Erik Erikson’s Identity versus Identity Diffusion stage of development along with Dr. Harry Gill, a psychiatrist who has a PhD in neuroscience. The two mental health professionals discussed major difficulties they see in their young patients when they are exposed to too much screen time. For one thin...
Feb 19, 2025•41 min•Ep 235•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of Madison's Notes, Jonathan Haidt, renowned social psychologist and author, dives deep into the impact of digital saturation on today's youth, drawing insights from his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, 2024). The discussion explores how growing up immersed in social media, video games, and smart technology is reshaping young people’s sense of self and influencing their political engagem...
Feb 19, 2025•57 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode my co-host and I had planned to talk about how the new Trump administration could create unity in America. The episode title had been, “Starting with a Clean Slate: How the Trump administration could create unity in America.” By starting anew, without a political agenda, we intended to explore how a new sense of community and pride in America could evolve. However, after the group in charge eliminated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in a day, we felt we needed to t...
Feb 18, 2025•47 min•Ep 257•Transcript available on Metacast Today I spoke to Dr. Carl Waitz about his new book Youth Mental Health Crises and the Broken Social Link: A Freudian-Lacanian Perspective (Routledge, 2024). “The kids are not ok” blurbs Patricia Gherovici in her endorsement of Dr. Waitz’ necessary new book. We know this. On the weekend we recorded this interview (February 9, 2025) the New York Times published research[1] showing national trendlines from 1990-2024. Rates of depression and suicide; up. Life expectancy and satisfaction; down. Dr. W...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep 256•Transcript available on Metacast “Brain Rot,” the 2024 Oxford word of the year captures the essence of our new podcast that is being created as a special series on the New Books Network (NBN). The full title is “Brain Rot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds.” In this second podcast Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and NBN host discusses the problems the emerge when children watch screens and digital devices too much. Dr. Messina talked about this topic with Dr. Harry Gill, a well-known psychiatrist...
Feb 13, 2025•47 min•Ep 234•Transcript available on Metacast The idea that there is a distinct phenemenology of thought – that there is thinking experience just as there is visual experience or auditory experience – is a radical position in philosophy of mind. David Pitt is one of its foremost proponents. In The Quality of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2024), Pitt provides an extended defense of the position and its implications: if thinking is a kind of experience, then what about unconscious thought, or the idea that explaining thought must rely ess...
Feb 13, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep 364•Transcript available on Metacast Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency (Routledge, 2024) illuminates what the pathways from emotions to social change look like--and how they work--so we can recognize and inform our collective attempts to avert further climate catastrophe. Debra J. Davidson engages with how our actions are governed by a complex of rules, norms, and predispositions, central among which operates ou...
Feb 11, 2025•32 min•Ep 201•Transcript available on Metacast The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxf...
Feb 09, 2025•49 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Narcissistic Parenthood and its Ramifications: The Forgotten Echo (Routledge, 2024) proposes a new perspective on narcissism, focusing on its destructive impact within relationships. Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Hila Yahalom discusses the patterns and ramifications of traumatizing upbringing by narcissistic parents, exploring the resulting development of a defensive-behavioral pattern and personality structures in the child which constitutes a mirror image of nar...
Feb 05, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep 255•Transcript available on Metacast AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems,...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Life Studies in Psychoanalysis: Faces of Love (Routledge, 2023), by Dr. Ahron Friedberg, consists of four psychoanalytic studies each representing a patient's course of treatment over several years. These studies demonstrate how love, in an array of forms, is refracted through the process of psychoanalysis, which unfolds over time and reveals the complexities of human desire. The cases presented here cover topics including repressed homosexuality, a taboo desire for a sibling, obsession with a f...
Jan 31, 2025•55 min•Ep 254•Transcript available on Metacast Udo Hock's Die rätselhaften Botschaften des Anderen. Zum Werk Jean Laplanches (The enigmatic messages of the other. On the work of Jean Laplanche), came out in 2024 with Psychosozial-Verlag, and collectes nine essays that Hock published over the past twenty years. Published in 2024 to celebrate Laplanche's centennial, these papers are a crucial contribution to Laplanche studies from one of its key actors. Hock is not only a reader and commentator of Laplanche, but also an editor and translator o...
Jan 26, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep 251•Transcript available on Metacast In Vocabulaire de Laplanche (PUF, 2024), edited by the renowned scholar and analyst, Hélène Tessier, several of the key readers of Jean Laplanche's work propose what is nothing short of a revelation for Laplanche studies. Theirs is a vocabulary that provides a concise and accessible dictionary of key Laplanchian terms, inviting readers of Laplanche's work to engage with the French psychoanalyst's work. In a wide-ranging conversation, professor Tessier delves into Laplanche's work, highlighting t...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 28 min•Ep 251•Transcript available on Metacast Led by Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and host of NBN’s “New Books in Psychology” and “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Racism in America,” this podcast covers the effects of too much screen time. Dr. Messina talks about this topic with Dr. Harry Gill, a renown psychiatrist who also has a PhD. in neuroscience. They discuss one of the greatest difficulties they see in their child, adolescent and adult patients who contend with way too much screen time, the all-encompassin...
Jan 22, 2025•46 min•Ep 233•Transcript available on Metacast Why are women's friendships so deep yet so fragile? Friendship coach and educator Danielle Bayard Jackson unpacks the latest research about women's cooperation and communication, while sharing practical strategies to preserve and strengthen these relationships. Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships (Hachette, 2024) is one part textbook, one part handbook. Readers will not only learn what the latest research has to say about the mech...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep 401•Transcript available on Metacast Clinician and psychoanalyst Jan Abram proposes and elaborates the dual concept of an intrapsychic surviving and non surviving object. She extends Winnicottian technique by highlighting the centrality of the analysand playing with the object. Across eight chapters she develops this theory of survival, while also exploring the terror of non-survival, and its implications for psychic health, the fear of WOMAN as underlying misogny; Winnicott's theory of desire; and the role of the father as part of...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep 251•Transcript available on Metacast Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Roberta Satow about her new book Our Time Is Up (Ipbooks, 2024). In 1895 Freud noticed that his case histories “read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.” What Dr. Satow has written works in the other direction; a novel that reads like case histories. She has accomplished the difficult task of representing what it feels like on both sides of the couch as her protagonist Rose is first a patient and the...
Jan 16, 2025•50 min•Ep 249•Transcript available on Metacast There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways. In The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health (Princeton UP, 2024), Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health--actively striving to maintain balance in response to...
Jan 15, 2025•39 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast Your mental health is as important as your physical health and, in times of stress, it's vital to have enhanced cognition and reserves of resilience. Brain Boost: Healthy Habits for a Happier Life (Cambridge UP, 2025) is packed with practical tips, based on scientific evidence, that will teach you how to implement lifestyle strategies that will improve your brain health, cognition, and overall wellbeing. Covering the benefits of exercise, diet, sleep, social interactions, kindness, mindfulness, ...
Jan 13, 2025•32 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast The 9/11 attacks, as well as the ones in Madrid, London, Paris and Brussels; the genocides in Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Cambodia; the torture in dictatorial regimes; the wars in former Yugoslavia, Syria and Iraq and currently in Ukraine; the sexual violence during periods of conflict, all make us wonder: why would anyone do something like that? Who are these people? Drawing on 30 years of research, Alette Smeulers explores the perpetrators of mass atrocities such as war crimes, crimes against hum...
Jan 12, 2025•55 min•Ep 217•Transcript available on Metacast We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory. The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since th...
Jan 07, 2025•57 min•Ep 176•Transcript available on Metacast New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative. In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the hi...
Jan 02, 2025•57 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel ...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep 164•Transcript available on Metacast The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us ...
Dec 31, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 141•Transcript available on Metacast James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experiences alternate between his present-day struggles with impotence and his memories of racial violence. As the narrative unfolds a pivotal childhood memory of a lynching, sets the tone and comes to represent the fundamental weakness of white supremacy. His need for racist violence to regain potency suggests that the system of white supremacy requires co...
Dec 31, 2024•39 min•Ep 248•Transcript available on Metacast 
