New Books in Psychology

Latest Episodes:

Christopher M. Palmer, "Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health" (Benbella Books, 2022) Dec 23, 2022

Show notes

Christopher M. Palmer's book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health (Benbella Books, 2022) will forever change the way we understand and treat mental health. If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life. We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness? And why are mental health problems so hard to treat? Drawing on decades of research, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines a revolutionary new understanding that for the first time unites our existing knowledge about mental illness within a single framework: Mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain.

Brain Energy explains this new understanding of mental illness in detail, from symptoms and risk factors to what is happening in brain cells. Palmer also sheds light on the new treatment pathways this theory opens up—which apply to all mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, alcoholism, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, autism, and even schizophrenia. Brain Energy pairs cutting-edge science with practical advice and strategies to help people reclaim their mental health. This groundbreaking book reveals: Why classifying mental disorders as “separate” conditions is misleading The clear connections between mental illness and disorders linked to metabolism, including diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, pain disorders, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and epilepsy The link between metabolism and every factor known to play a role in mental health, including genetics, inflammation, hormones, neurotransmitters, sleep, stress, and trauma The evidence that current mental health treatments, including both medications and therapies, likely work by affecting metabolism New treatments available today that readers can use to promote long-term healing Palmer puts together the pieces of the mental illness puzzle to provide answers and offer hope. Brain Energy will transform the field of mental health, and the lives of countless people around the world.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Neurasthenia Dec 23, 2022

Show notes

In this episode of High Theory, Kim talks with Saronik about neurasthenia. A disease that no longer exists, neurasthenia was a nineteenth century American epidemic of energy depletion. Thinking about this diagnosis can help us understand the social functions of medical knowledge, and how that knowledge changes over time.

In the episode Kim discusses two nineteenth-century medical texts: American Nervousness: It’s Causes and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881) by George Miller Beard, which popularized the diagnosis, and Fat and Blood: And How to Make Them (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1877), by S. Weir Mitchell, which popularized the “rest cure” treatment. She also references three scholarly texts: Tom Lutz’s American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Cornell UP, 1992); Carolyn Tomas de la Pena’s The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (NYU Press, 2003); and Anson Rabinbach’s The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (UC Press, 1992).

Kim Adams is one of the co-hosts of High Theory. She works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute, where she is writing a book about electricity and the body in American medicine and literature. She also runs a working group on pain management as a cultural process, called Politics of the Prescription Pad. She lives in Rhode Island and has a very large dog named Tag.

This week’s image is a 1907 painting titled “On the Southern Plain” by Frederic Remington. The painting shows soldiers on horseback in the American West. Remington was diagnosed with neurasthenia and treated with the “west cure” (discussed in the episode) by S. Weir Mitchell himself.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Richard Wood, "A Study of Malignant Narcissism: Personal and Professional Insights" (Routledge, 2022) Dec 22, 2022

Show notes

A Study of Malignant Narcissism: Personal and Professional Insights(Routledge, 2022) offers a unique insight into malignant narcissism, exploring both its personal and professional aspects and constructing a theoretical framework that renders its origins and manifestations more accessible.

With reference to his own family dynamic and to 45 years of professional experience, Richard Wood explores the psychology of malignant narcissism, positing it as a defense against love. The book ﬁrst oﬀers an overview of existing literature before examining relevant clinical material, including an analysis of Wood’s relationships with his own parents. Wood presents vignettes illustrating the core dynamics that drive narcissism, illustrated with sections of his father’s unpublished autobiography and with his patient work. The book makes the case for malignant narcissism to be considered a subtype of psychopathy and puts forth a framework setting out the key dynamics that typify these individuals, including consideration of the ways in which malignant narcissism replicates itself in varied forms. Finally, Wood examines the impact of narcissistic leadership and compares his theoretical position with those of other clinicians.

This book will be of interest to clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, as well as all professionals working with narcissistic patients.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Geert Lovink, "Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism" (Pluto Press, 2019) Dec 22, 2022

Show notes

Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money?

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.

Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism(Pluto Press, 2019) by Geert Lovink offers a critical analysis of the controversies which drive our online media behaviours. Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’.

Geert Lovink speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the frustrations of studying the internet as it evolves from networks to platforms, the politically-contingent notions of online 'communities', and cycles of ideological production and capture.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic who has chronicled the development of internet and network cultures as they came of age alongside him. He is the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and most recently Struck on the Platform. He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tom McLeish, "The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art" (Oxford UP, 2021) Dec 20, 2022

Show notes

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime.

Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Batja Mesquita, "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions" (Norton, 2022) Dec 15, 2022

Show notes

A pioneer of cultural psychology argues that emotions are not innate, but made as we live our lives together. We may think of emotions as universal responses, felt inside, but in Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022), acclaimed psychologist Dr. Batja Mesquita asks us to reconsider them through the lens of what they do in our relationships, both one-on-one and within larger social networks. From an outside-in perspective, readers will understand why pride in a Dutch context does not translate well to the same emotion in North Carolina, or why one's anger at a boss does not mean the same as your anger at a partner in a close relationship. By looking outward at relationships at work, school, and home, we can better judge how our emotions will be understood, how they might change a situation, and how they change us. Brilliantly synthesizing original psychological studies and stories from peoples across time and geography, Between Us skillfully argues that acknowledging differences in emotions allows us to find common ground, humanizing and humbling us all for the better.

This interview was conducted by Jolie Ho, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology whose own research focuses on social connection and reward in the context of social anxiety.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Belonging: A Conversation with Geoffrey Cohen Dec 15, 2022

Show notes

Why do we feel the need to belong, and what happens when we don’t? This episode explores:

What it takes to belong.
Why it physically hurts to be excluded.
How perspective-gathering can help create more inclusion.
A Discussion of the book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides.

Today’s book is: Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, by Dr. Geoffrey Cohen, which explores how we became so alienated from one another, the physical and emotional costs of exclusion, and what we can do to create belonging even in polarized times. Dr. Cohen applies his and others’ groundbreaking research to offer solutions for improving daily life at work, in school, in our homes, and in our communities. We all feel a deep need to belong, but most of us don’t fully appreciate that need in others. Small acts of connection such as reflecting on our core values, and a suite of practices that Cohen defines as “situation-crafting,” can lessen polarization, improve performance in school and work, and unleash the potential in ourselves and in our relationships.

Our guest is: Professor Geoffrey Cohen, whose research examines processes that shape people's sense of belonging and self and implications for social problems. He studies the big and small threats to belonging and self-integrity that people encounter in school, work, and health care settings, and strategies to create more inclusive spaces for people from all walks of life. He believes that the development of psychological theory is facilitated not only by descriptive and observational research but by theory-driven intervention. He has long been inspired by Kurt Lewin's quip, "The best way to try to understand something is to try to change it."

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Brady, S. T., Cohen, G. L., Jarvis, S. N., & Walton, G. M. (2020). A brief social-belonging intervention in college improves adult outcomes for black Americans. Science Advances, 6(18), eaay3689.
Connor, Alice. How To Human: An Incomplete Manual for Living in a Mess-up World.
Frank Martela, A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence.
Milam, L. A., Cohen, G. L., Mueller, C., & Salles, A. (2019). Stereotype threat and working memory among surgical residents (vol 216, pg 824, 2018). American Journal of Surgery, 218(3), 668.

Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Avgi Saketopoulou, "Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia" (NYU Press, 2023) Dec 13, 2022

Show notes

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia(NYU Press, 2023) calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.

Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Austin Ratner, "The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof" (Ipbooks, 2018) Dec 12, 2022

Show notes

A clear and engaging call-to-arms to Freudians everywhere and a fresh diagnosis of the major problem confronting psychoanalysis today, Austin Ratner's book The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof(Ipbooks, 2018) presents exciting new ideas that could help psychoanalysis reclaim its eminent place among the mental sciences. By showing how and why Freudians have avoided proving their theories, The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof charts a new future of growth and engagement in which psychoanalysis fulfills its promise: to rescue humanity from its own irrationality.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sterlin L. Mosley, "The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else: Recognizing the 27 Types of Narcissism" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) Dec 12, 2022

Show notes

Sterlin L. Mosley's The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else: Recognizing the 27 Types of Narcissism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) introduces readers to the notion of narcissism as a spectrum-based model of increasing loss of empathy (due to a variety of factors including genetics, trauma, abuse, conditioning and environment) that can give way to a propensity toward narcissism. Through studies and examples, Sterlin Mosley defines the 27 subtypes of narcissism and how these variations differ from the limited description of the narcissistic as popularized in psychological literature, movies, and other forms of popular culture. He offers readers an opportunity to explore how their own narcissistic tendencies may show up and how to challenge those tendencies to continue to push for greater compassion and empathy for ourselves and others. Using the Enneagram model of personality, Mosley explores and explains the variety of narcissistic tendencies and types and reveals useful tips on how to best to manage those tendencies in ourselves and the narcissists around us.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.