New Books in Psychoanalysis

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Christopher Bollas, “Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown” (Routledge, 2013) Mar 26, 2013

Show notes

What if analysts took steps to keep their analysands out of the hospital when they were beginning to breakdown? What would that look like? In Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown (Routledge, 2013), the eminent psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, walks us through that process.

Beginning with his treatment of psychotic and manic depressive patients in the 1970s in London, Bollas sought to increase patients psychoanalytic sessions and to work with a team of psychiatrists and social workers who were analytically savvy. When these fragile patients disturbances became heightened, Bollas et co. worked in such a way that none of his patients needed to endure the shock and awe of hospitalization. Now, 40 years later, he has published a book that looks deeply into a way of working that confidently declares psychoanalysis to be THE treatment of choice for the person breaking down. By expanding sessions from five times a week to twice a day seven days a week or from morning to early evening, he discusses with us how breakdowns attended to in this way can become their antithesis: a breakthrough. He is passionate and as always, an intelligent maverick.

This interview promises to give analysts and analysands cause to pause regarding our relationship to the frame and the doing of business as usual. His belief in the human need to find a human other to hear us in our darkest moments, an other especially attuned to unconscious meanings, is convincing. For Bollas, being with a person breaking down demands we change our modus operandi. A breakdown is in a way an opportunity that can be dealt with by psychoanalytic means. To not attend to a breakdown is to put the analysand at risk of simply and devastatingly sealing over the elementary forces that brought the breakdown to the surface in the first place. Always thought provoking, in this interview Bollas weds theory and technique, expanding the reach of psychoanalysis with great creativity.

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Jon Mills, “Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis” (Routledge, 2011) Dec 19, 2012

Show notes

In this interview, Canadian philosopher, psychologist, and psychoanalyst Jon Mills speaks with us about his book Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysiss (Routledge, 2011). In the book he discusses current tenets in North American psychoanalytic thinking and practice that he finds to be concerning and problematic. Focusing on the relational and intersubjective turn currently popular in the field, he articulates what he believes are the faulty ways in which some contemporary analytic thinkers make use of philosophy and, therein, particularly post-modernism. Though relationally influenced himself, in that he is drawn towards a more flexible, less removed approach in the consulting room, he questions the denigration of the drives and what appears to be a seeming disinterest in life before the acquisition of language. Mills wonders about the ways in which ideas associated with post-modernism and the practice of a psychoanalytic hermeneutics have been used to drum thinking about the body out of psychoanalysis and what impact that has on our clinical encounters.

In this interview the discussion ranges from the problem of therapeutic excess via analytic self-disclosure to the fate of the drives in relational and intersubjective thinking to the emphasis on meaning-making, and the role of philosophy in psychoanalysis. Also discussed are psychoanalytic politics, analytic training, and the relational critique of the analyst’s authority. While in this interview Dr. Mills asks some hard questions, particularly of the relational approach, and particularly its philosophical underpinnings, he does so gently and with great seriousness.

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Sandra Buechler, “Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career” (Routledge, 2012) Aug 25, 2012

Show notes

In Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career (Routledge, 2012), Sandra Buechler suggests that shame and loss are key components of a clinical career, and we would be best served to accept their presence and get used to their ongoing tug and pull.

Indeed, clinical training is rife with shame. Buechler reminds us that in training to be a clinician, unlike most other professions, one must investigate one’s defenses, one’s inner conflicts and do so in public. How to mitigate the shame that ensues? She suggests that we can certainly reduce shame about shame. Shame then must be accepted as an ineluctable aspect of the training.

The same with loss: losses of patients, all in good time or out of the blue, also prompt grief reactions and perhaps more shame in the clinician. Shame about shame begets rage, and according to her mentor, Sullivan, anger helps us to cohere in the face of dissolution. She wonders aloud whether shame and loss, suffered in silence, don’t end up prompting us to attack colleagues of different analytic stripes, or within our own ranks so as to shore ourselves up. Are the old battles among analysts a displacement of sorts?

Yet when an analysand leaves us, even if it is a well-planned termination, the experience is unique. No one we know knows the patient and even if we knew people who did we are bound by confidentiality to say nothing. So the analyst carries around unacknowledged and, in a way. unacknowledgeable losses.

Managing these feelings is of interest to Buechler as is the use of writing as a way to transform. Her book is a unique blend of memoir, emotion theory, and a survey of clinical life–and as such, it is in the tradition of new forms of psychoanalytic writing. As an interviewee she was full of clarity and verve and her words will be like salve on a wound for the clinician who is suffering from the slings and arrows, as well as the heartaches and joys, of a clinical career.

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John Burnham, “After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Jul 31, 2012

Show notes

Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case.

In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few.

Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines.

Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result.

In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins.

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Patricia Gherovici, “Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism” (Routledge, 2010) May 21, 2012

Show notes

In Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Patricia Gherovici unpacks the ways in which hysteria, Lacanian-style, functions. Approaching her topic, transgenderism, from many angles, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the transgender turn is changing clinical thinking and practice. The person who comes into the consulting room with questions about “being in the right body” sheds light on the culture and perhaps especially the culture of psychoanalysis. Arguing against a more traditional Lacanian view that the refusal to accept sexual difference is indicative of a psychotic structure, Gherovici details why she thinks otherwise. She is passionate and informed and true to her training all at once. NBiP senses that she is an unusual psychoanalytic scholar who is exhaustive in her cross-disciplinary research and so brings to us many challenging and provocative questions. Her thinking has strong foundations and her intellectual scaffolding is made of only the finest material. To analysts, anthropologists, activists, queer and feminist theorists, philosophers and historians, Patricia Gherovici has something to say.

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Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, “Intimacies” (University of Chicago Press, 2008) Mar 19, 2012

Show notes

In Intimacies and in this interview, Leo Bersani asks “does knowledge of the Other create a foundation for intimacy?” Troubling certain psychoanalytic models that survey the analysand’s past, gathering information about the vicissitudes of childhood, dreams, and other communications, he wonders if intimacy lies elsewhere. Reflecting on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power, he suggests that intimacy is in trouble unless it is reformulated as a mode of being with, rather than a mode of knowing about. He wonders what might create a new mode of relationality altogether, and as he ponders this, he takes many fascinating detours that further illuminate his thinking. Since the confrontation with difference is what most often prompts violence, and since some schools of psychoanalytic thought place a premium on the ability to recognize the other, he suggests we embrace of a bit more narcissism of an “impersonal” variety. This part of his argument is fascinating and will give many in the field and those who are near it cause to pause.

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Jamieson Webster, “The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation” (Karnac Books, 2011) Dec 16, 2011

Show notes

In this interview, the Lacanian inflected psychoanalyst, Dr. Jamieson Webster, speaks to NBIP about her new publication, The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation (Karnac Books, 2011), a text that offers the reader/listener an opportunity to think about the recurrent anxieties that perpetually face this “impossible” profession. Interweaving her training, dreams, and encounters with the thinking of Adorno, Badiou and Lacan, the author troubles the quest for knowledge in the field of psychoanalysis, maybe particularly in its American incarnation Her book’s subtitle, “On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation” serves as a reminder that the work of the analyst is to spend time with the ineffable, that which is imperiled, just out of reach, that which is to be reached for, perhaps, in the work of a psychoanalytic practice that aims to keep desire in circulation.

Her words will give many cause to pause as she, in a sense, champions the fields perpetual endangerment, seeing in our peril precisely the perfect position for analysis to always occupy. “Psychoanalysis,” writes Webster, “…rests on a precarious ethics that demands one steer clear of any fantasy of closure.” In this statement, we begin to hear her critique of psychoanalytic knowledge and her warm embrace of the unknown. “Knowledge, accumulated in the service of mastery or a unified self-image,” for Webster, “is antithetical to our clinical work, so why not also our theoretical work and teaching?”. A great question and among many that she deftly considers in this interview.

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Muriel Dimen (ed.), “With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories” (Routledge, 2011) Sep 12, 2011

Show notes

What’s culture got to do with psychoanlaysis? According to Muriel Dimen and Stephen Hartman, a whole lot. Dimen, editor of With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (Routledge, 2011), and Hartman, a contributor to the same, note that “culture is always already there.” Therefore culture and the clinic cannot be two separate places but must be, as our guests say, “interimplicated,” or folded together. With their diverse academic backgrounds, Dimen and Hartmen are the perfect pair to explain just how they are so folded and why it matters to psychoanalytic practitioners.

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Steven Poser, “The Misfit” (RosettaBooks, 2011) Aug 31, 2011

Show notes

While the tragic tale of Marilyn Monroe has been written many times over, her impact on her psychoanalyst, the eminent Ralph Greenson has, until now, been largely unexplored. In The Misfit (RosettaBooks, 2011), Steven Poser tries to understand how Greenson treated Monroe by putting himself in Greenson’s milieu. He attempts to find out what Greenson knew, what he thought, what he felt and how he used it all to help Monroe. What we discover is that Greenson essentially adopted Monroe, creating psychic confusion for a vulnerable woman who lacked a sense of belonging in the first place. Poser details how, in eliding the negative aspects of the transference-countertransference matrix, Greenson lost a patient and lost his own way as a clinician.

In addition to discussing this tragic analytic dyad, Poser also shares his thoughts about psychoanalytic writing and research. He argues that then-current psychoanalytic theory did little to aid Greenson, or to help Greenson treat Monroe. That theory did not allow therapists to use their patients’ hateful feelings toward them to help said patients cohere. This important technique was not developed theoretically until the later twentieth century. Poser reminds us, then, that we are in a sense prisoners of contemporary practice, however flawed it may be.

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Susie Orbach, “Bodies” (Picador, 2009) Aug 15, 2011

Show notes

“Why is the body the site of so much ongoing, current and growing attention in the West”? asks the feminist psychoanalyst and public intellectual Susie Orbach in her book Bodies (Picador, 2009). In this interview, the groundbreaking author of Fat is a Feminist Issue (inter alia)speaks to New Books in Psychoanalysis about how the body is “no longer a place we live from” but rather a place where the capitalist marketplace has hit a sort of pay dirt. From trendy diets to vaginal recalibration to liposuction, the body is big business. Indeed, as women and men feel a greater and greater need to control their bodies, losing touch with our natural appetites, and attempting to look a certain way, the market that exploits our fears and anxieties is making a fortune.

Meanwhile analysts are more and more likely to encounter patients with a plethora of what Orbach calls “bodily instabilities.” She argues that the profession should take a moment to rethink what is ailing the physically unstable analysand, suggesting that we are not looking at hysterical symptoms, but rather we are seeing bodies that never cohered in the first place. All the pressure on mothers in the past 30 years to police their own desires for food, for rest, for pleasure in the body, has produced a generation of offspring that inherited their caretakers’ sense that the body is not for living in, but rather the body is a project, and an ongoing one. Orbach describes “an internal body” that is often missing in those struggling with anorexia or bulimia or plastic surgeries. In this interview she describes how the analyst can listen to her own body to come to better tune into a pre-verbal and, in fact, a pre-physicalized, pre-body transference.

Orbach is engaging, funny, and willing to step into one of the major social problems of today–living while having never developed bodily coherence.

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