New Books in Psychoanalysis

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Michelle Ann Stephens, “Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer” (Duke UP, 2014) May 28, 2015

Show notes

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”? According to Michelle Ann Stephens, this was one question about the space between realness, race, and performance that led her to write Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and the Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Stephens investigates the history of the concept of the skin, especially in relation to the notion of the flesh, and how they are both re-written by colonialization, and the idea of racial difference. Stephens turns to the work of four iconic black male stars whose careers span the twentieth century–including Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley–and explores the dynamic between the gaze, representation and technology, and how these performers challenged notions of race, sexuality, and skin/flesh in the act of performing. Stephens uses psychoanalytic theory to understand the role of the viewer and the viewed and how the gaze operates as a racial and racializing object. Calling on the work of cultural theorists, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, and Sylvia Winter among so many others, Stephens takes the reader along on a bold new attempt to relate psychoanalysis, race, and gender identity in fresh, optimistic, and clinically promising ways.

Michelle Stephens teaches in the Departments of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies and teaches courses in African American, American, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Literature and Culture. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005).She is currently in training at the The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology.

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Frank Summers, “The Psychoanalytic Vision” (Routledge, 2013) Apr 13, 2015

Show notes

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. Privileging terms not often used in psychoanalytic writing, among them romanticism, transcendence and futurity, Summers documents an as yet undocumented shift in the field. In an effort to buttress the standing of psychoanalysis as a science, psychoanalysts previously attempted to delineate certain laws pertaining to the psyche, ranging from the Oedipus complex to notions of the self; now, according to Summers, the majority of analysts attend primarily to the experience of their patients. As such, psychoanalysis has become a “science of the subjective.”

Critiquing the field for reifying concepts like “the unconscious” and for perhaps unwittingly playing along with a culture that maximally commodifies humanity, Summers suggests we position psychoanalysis on the perimeter of the American mainstream. “Any view of analysis that presupposes a norm,” he writes, “may justifiably be labeled wild analysis, irrespective of theoretical content.” In fact he cogently argues that there may be a new divide among analysts that has nothing to do with metapsychology but rather more to do with technique. The new “classical” analyst applies theory to their clinical work deductively, using the patient to prove a theory right rather than exploring with the patient what constitutes their sense of things.

Influenced by Loewald, Benjamin, Stern, Heidegger, Husserl and Winnicott, among others, Summers has nevertheless developed his own clinical metier. When he turns his trenchant eye to the culture and the impact of new technologies upon us, one shivers with recognition. It is high time that psychoanalysts begin to take on the culture industry, assessing its powerful impact on what it means to be human. In this interview Summers does this and more.

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Jean Petrucelli, “Body-States” (Routledge, 2014) Apr 01, 2015

Show notes

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. Just as the papers within Body States:Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2014)animate the twin themes of dissociation and integration, so too do the authors illustrate how these forces shape interpersonal relationships, body-states, self-states, as well as, ultimately, the ability to functionally shift between selves.

One may well agree with Philip Bromberg when he remarks in his Foreword, “Do not be fooled by the format. It is the groundbreaking perspective of Dr. Petrucelli that inspires each chapter, and my use of the word groundbreaking should not be taken lightly.” Indeed, the undeniable coherence of this volume springs from each writer’s affirmation of and convincing argument for the ability of interpersonal and relational analysis to uniquely – and perhaps best – treat eating-disordered patients in an integrative fashion. Such is the groundbreaking thesis Dr. Petrucelli presents in Body-States and discusses at length in her interview.

Bringing together myriad voices, Dr. Petrucelli manages to strike a harmonious but nonetheless sophisticated cord while adding her own voice to the mix. Beginning with a description of the psychoanalytic climate of the 1990s, she goes on to explain how she and others had to fight in order to convince the psychoanalytic establishment to consider eating-disorders seriously. Dr. Petrucelli then examines the notion of “participant-observer” and argues that eating-disordered patients find it especially difficult to exist in the spaces between being the subject-who-desires and the object-who-is/isn’t-desired.

Thoughout the course of our conversation, she addresses not only the aforementioned points but many more, including the origins of eating-disorders as well as the role culture may play in transmitting body-states from mother to daughter. In fact, near the close of this interview, the author expertly handles the question of what sort of wellness can women achieve living in an ill society (where aggressive systems of sexual/body-based objectification pervade)?

Dealing with big questions, Dr. Petrucelli provides answers well worth savoring.

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Susan Kavaler-Adler, “Anatomy of Regret” (Karnac, 2013) Mar 17, 2015

Show notes

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 talking about the mind in the language of the body.As it subtitle tells us, the anatomy of this book is structured by the case study.

If there is something that informs Alder’s approach to understanding psychoanalysis and how she intervenes in the psychoanalytic encounter, its that where theory fails, the body succeeds. Regret, for Kavaler-Adler, is a bodily experience that orients us in some way to the unconscious consequences of our relationships – of the actions of other bodies in our lives.

In telling the stories of these case studies, Kavaler-Adler performs a kind of surgical suturing of theory along the sinews of loss – the scars left at the site of the aggression of the other. She begins with the important insight that something was at stake in Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia – something that had to do with the aggressive ties that bind the self to the other and the impossibility of distinguishing the two but leaves Freud here, his theory having already become arrested in the language of the body and the physical laws a theory of the drive drive must adhere to.

In her thinking, Kavaler-Adler stitches Freud to the British psychoanalytic thinker Melanie Klein (and to Object Relation theorists after her) who situates mourning in a developmental context. In doing so, she stiches boundary of the anatomical to the symbolic, through the language of her cases. The Anatomy of Regret serves to articulate an affect theory that is uniquely its own, but for those new to psychoanalysis, or those who want a new way of thinking of psychoanalysis, informs about the theory it draws from in a meaningful way.

Dr. Susan Kavaler Adler is a psychoanalyst in private practice and the founder of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and an ABBP for Diplomat status from the American Professional Board of Psychology and the Division of Psychoanalysis. For her work analyzing the language of mourning, loss, and regret, through bodily language, in the work of iconic women writers, Dr. Kavaler-Adler was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature.

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Paul Geltner, “Emotional Communication: Countertransference Analysis and the Use of Feeling in Psychoanalytic Technique” (Routledge 2013) Mar 06, 2015

Show notes

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, to my knowledge comes even close to this accomplishment. Most analysts are taught that countertransferences are the idiosyncratic feelings of the analyst. Geltner begins with the radical assumption that all of the analyst’s feelings should be considered inductions by the patient until proven otherwise. Geltner describes the many ways in which emotional communications can be induced and expands concept of countertransference into discrete observable categories with clinically useful examples.

In this interview, Dr. Geltner discusses the Modern Psychoanalytic underpinnings of his thinking about emotional communications, the field founded by Hyman Spotnitz. He describes the different types of countertransference and how understanding what the patient is inducing in the analyst is a main focus of the Modern Psychoanalytic technique. Working beyond interpretations that a based in language, Geltner describes how the Modern Psychoanalytic theory of cure includes not only words, but also the analyst’s use of emotional communication to meet the patient’s unmet maturational needs.

Dr. Geltner is in private practice in New York City, working with individuals and couples. He specializes in individual and group supervision with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

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Lynn Chancer and John Andrews, “The Unhappy Divorce of Sociology and Psychoanalysis” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) Feb 12, 2015

Show notes

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 backstory to that relationship. The core chapters expose the campaign waged by leading sociologists to discredit psychoanalysis as they sought legitimacy for the discipline through the adoption of positivist research paradigms. Some of that story is told through biographical and autobiographical accounts. The co-editors are among the authors of the book’s 18 chapters as are Neil Smelser, Nancy Chodorow, George Steinmetz, and Jeffrey Prager.

In this interview, the volume’s editors, Lynn Chancer andJohn Andrews, respond to questions about the political climate surrounding “the divorce” and add their reflections on the standing of psychoanalysis in sociology in the early years of the 21st century.

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Sally Weintrobe, “Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Routledge, 2012) Feb 11, 2015

Show notes

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, yet realistic sense of hope to what most people consider a dire picture. Weintrobe, a practicing psychoanalyst and Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, organized an interdisciplinary conference of psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists, and sociologists to address a burning question: why is knowledge of climate reality being so resisted? (The conference in its entirety is posted online in 6 parts here.)

Weintrobe contributed to and edited this book of essays by 23 authors, and it is an important document of current psychoanalytic thinking on the nexus of splitting, denial, reintegration– and love- in the context of how we conceive of nature. How are we split-off from our childlike affection for nature? How does neo-liberal capitalism promote alienation from nature and from others? What would it mean to engage with a realistic– and not grandiose– experience of nature and the impact of climate change, which allows for mourning and care? In discussion, Weintrobe offers touching examples of processing these questions, while also going in unexpected directions, such as analyzing sound production in “nature” films. All in all, Weintrobe’s project promises to inspire new perspectives on climate change and hope for action.

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Daniel Shaw, “Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation” (Routledge, 2013) Jan 28, 2015

Show notes

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), Daniel Shaw explores narcissism from a relational perspective, concentrating on the effect that the traumatizing narcissist can have on others. Shaw defines the traumatizing narcissist as the parent of a child, a leader of a cult, a partner in a couple or others who abuse their power, use their charisma and knowledge of human nature to subjugate. This power dynamic can lead to maladaptive patterns such as compliance, dissociation and the taking on of the abusive behaviors of the narcissist by thepatient.

To elucidate his conceptualization, Shaw writes chapters on clinical theory, his practice with patients effected by narcissism and his own past history as a cult member. Shaw illustrates how the therapeutic relationship can be healing by helping the patient reclaim a sense of subjectivity that has been lost. Our interview concludes with an exploration of traumatizing narcissism in the psychoanalytic profession, both in the consulting room and the institute setting.

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Bruce Fink, “Against Understanding: Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key” (Routledge, 2014) Jan 13, 2015

Show notes

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 their right mind would pay for analysis.” Just like one might go to a personal trainer to shed some pounds, one goes to an analyst to lose something. We often enter analysis against our will and immediate interests, kicking and screaming, to have our symptoms – the sources of our most precious satisfaction and exquisite misery — taken away. We pay, in other words, to be castrated. This is a better deal than it initially seems: we cede self-pity related to primordial loss – the loss of something we never had in the first place – in order to be able to pursue our desire and derive more joy from our enjoyment.

In the second volume of Against Understanding, the initial chapters on practice and technique cover fundamental questions like the goal of analysis, ethics, diagnosis and fantasy. Next there are several close readings of Lacan’s papers and seminars on Kant and Sade, semblance, personality, and love. The Cases section takes up the themes of the earlier chapters, demonstrating Fink’s talent for communicating complex ideas in a direct and remarkably limpid style. He wades through Lacan’s explanation of why and how both sadists and masochists seek to stage the other’s anxiety; discusses the role semblance-as-ideology might play in fantasy; and interpolates Freud’s phases of “a child is being beaten” to get at the specific ways several of his analysands fantasize and enjoy.

True to Lacanian theory and practice, Fink does not lay emphasis on affect and empathy as central facets of technique in the book. Yet, during our interview, as he discusses his reluctance to display mastery in case presentations and reveals his willingness to stretch (and not only scand) sessions of patients in crisis, his compassion and humility are very much in evidence.

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Liran Razinsky, “Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death” (Cambridge UP, 2013) Jan 05, 2015

Show notes

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, and psychology.These two fields are intimately related in that each asks essential questions about what it means to be a human subject that lives always in the face of death. However divergent in their systems of logic, each runs the risk of loosing its subject to its own ethos.Psychoanalysis is more functional theoretically when thought of as a philosophical system, but its applications were intended to be clinical.For Razinsky, psychoanalysis succumbs to the split in these two fields in its conception of death.

Those who lived to be intellectually killed by Freud as he claimed their ideas as his own, knew that Freud had no limits in refusing the limit of his life.He would destroy individual egos–and entire careers–in building a legacy that would outlast him.He got what he wanted but at what cost?Where is death to be found in a system structured by a man who refused loss?Those psychoanalytic thinkers who have survived him have had to live with his legacy and its confusing logic.

Razinsky reads Freud’s conceptualizations of death against themselves, at different places in his body of work, and against those that came after him. He argues that there is an essential problematic in the way Freud considers death which, for psychoanalysis to survive as a philosophical system with clinical applications must be addressed. Beyond this, however, the book raises a discussion about the limits of subjectivity: both literal, as in the case of death, and symbolic, as in the ways in which we imagine ourselves in relationship to it.

Liran Razinsky is a lecturer at The Program for Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar Ilan University in Israel where he conducts research at the disjuncture between philosophy, and psychoanalysis, life and death.

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