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New Books in Psychoanalysis: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Marshall Poe
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.comSubscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
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- Yesterday1h 3m
Galit Atlas, "Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, And The Secrets of Emotional Intimacy" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
As the popular jazz standard tells us, “comes love, nothing can be done”, or can it? Galit Atlas begs to differ in her most recent book Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, which describes six kinds of emotional styles, as we might call them, made manifest when we are young. Atlas, whose work has endeavored to sexualize the Relational School, here turns an eye both keen and wistful, towards love.So, I admit to having read a few, but only a few, well maybe more than a few books like this, books that are psychoanalytically informed yet meant for a popular audience. In fact I credit one of them, Harriet Goldhor Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, for edging me towards the study of psychoanalysis. (Yes she is the mother of the author Ben Lerner btw, a fact I love.)As a kind of preview to Atlas’ book, I want to share a little about how I read for NBiP interviews as on reading this book, my usual mode slipped away. I think that reveals something essential about Come Closer.As an interviewer who speaks almost exclusively to authors of psychoanalytic books, I tend to read what populates my chosen queue tuned into a writer’s lineages. I am curious to see how the author situates themselves within the field’s family tree.As an analyst who interviews, I also read hoping to find some help, like what to do with the fact that yesterday serious psychic quicksand started to seep its seep into my consulting room and I am scared. Can you, dear author, can you keep me from being pulled under?Between a book’s covers I look for whether the author’s hand is grabbing mine, are our eyes meeting, do we share a wink, a nod, or get a leg up? And when a piece of psychoanalytic writing gives forth the new or the unexpected, like Dianne Elise, like Avgi Saketopolou? I live for it.I am sometimes a demanding reader and my “process” is quasi-athletic, certainly physical: as a child I slumbered with novels that tumbled from my hands to collapse on my chest as I lost consciousness. I have spent the night together with many an NBiP author whose book ended up under my pillow crooking my neck.I carried many of you on every train line. You gave me tennis elbow. I read you before the lights go out at the cinema and again as the curtain comes up, taking notes in the margins that I often cannot read three days later.I highlight. I underline. I fold pages in half, leave exclamation points, write the words ‘yes’ or ‘no’ emphatically and if I don’t have a pen? I swipe the lipstick off my lips touching a page so as to denote my interest, positive or negative.All my NBIP books come to resemble well loved rag dolls: they probably even smell like me.So how to understand that when I read Galit Atlas’ Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, And The Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, my pen lay fallow?I can say this: the book got a hold of me, and then once I was in it I got lost, so my hands they but held the book and nothing more, and they held it closely. Come Closer was telling me about myself.It has the quality of a beach read, which is rare in our field for sure, and often such an assignation is meant as an insult, but it is the kind of book that you can put down precisely because you are so into it. And because you are hooked you put that sunscreen on your companion’s back and then run to the sea realizing you are overheated, maybe need to pee, get a coffee, call for a dinner reservation and when you come back to it, it’s as if you had never left, forget that you touched a body with lotion and tended to your own. Like an engrossing film where after you exit the cinema you see its visual remnants everywhere, like a friendly hallucination, this book’s world remains with you.You cannot not find in yourself aspects of Atlas’ taxonomy: the guilty child who learns to lie, the melancholic child who won’t let go, the invisible child who sees it all, the frightened child who needs no explanation, the ashamed child who seeks perfection, and the chosen child who perhaps takes the hardest hit.Freud said, in paraphrase, that our thoughts cannot but turn to work and love. Who among us doesn’t see the remnants of our early lives in the strange debris and the funny shapes our love lives take? And who, in their secret heart of hearts, doesn’t want to read a book of stories, cases sure, but by a psychoanalyst who has prose that flows, psychoanalytic formulations secreted in, a book that almost masquerades as self help, but, in refusing easy answers, in sticking with the truth of the unconscious, seduces believers and unbelievers both: we cannot get away from early life and in our love lives we cannot pretend otherwise. Come Closer comes so close it can fee
- 5 days ago46 min
Sarah Meehan O'Callaghan, "Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body" (Routledge, 2026)
Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expression within representational systems and is core to the being of any subject. In Part One, The Epistemology of the Body, Meehan O'Callaghan approaches a theory of the body as traumatic by framing it as a question, a gap in knowledge through the lens of psychoanalysis and theatre studies. Part Two, The Body of Drama, is devoted to a study of the body in the works of Beckett and Artaud from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Part Three, The Body Between Being and Non-Being, provides a deeper exploration of how the interrogation of the body opens onto a question of being and uses the insights gained from the dialectical encounter of psychoanalysis with the specific works of Beckett and Artaud to apply them to contemporary and scholarly issues of the body. Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives through Beckett and Artaud will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for academics and scholars of Lacanian studies, psychoanalytic studies, the body, disability studies, and literary and theatre studies.
- 1 weeks ago50 min
Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" Part 2 (Bloomsbury, 2026)
This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality—in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint—names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear.Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2026) shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically—serially—connected.Ryan Engley is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena.Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).This is Part 2 of a 2 Part interview. Listen to Part 1 here
- 2 weeks ago52 min
Rachel Aviv, "You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters" (Knopf, 2026)
A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker. You Won’t Get Free: Stories of Mothers and Daughters (Knopf, 2026) of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,” Aviv writes. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.” Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world. You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.Liza Veale is a clinician in Oakland, California. She teaches at Access Institute for Psychological Services and serves on the editorial board of fort da, the journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.
- Aug 23, 20261h 23m
Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one. The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality—in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint—names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear. Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2026) shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically—serially—connected. Ryan Engley is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
- Aug 14, 20261h 7m
Mark Solms, "The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing" (Pegasus, 2026)
Once dismissed as unscientific, psychoanalytic therapy is proving to be among our most effective medical treatments of any kind - outperforming psychiatric drugs and rivaling vaccines in its power to prevent and heal. Why does it work so well?Perhaps because one of the most controversial figures in psychology was right all along. Neuroscience now confirms much of what Sigmund Freud conjectured over a century ago: our deepest struggles stem, not from chemical imbalances, but from buried memories and unconscious conflicts that no pill can touch.Using enthralling case studies and cutting-edge brain science, pioneering neuroscientist Mark Solms makes the case that psychoanalysis should resume its position as our master theory of the mind. Yet modern research also reveals where Freud got important things wrong. Could correcting these errors make therapy even more effective?As psychiatric diagnoses soar and standard treatments continue to fail many patients, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing (Pegasus, 2026) offers a revolutionary hope: a real science of healing, rooted in the radical idea that our suffering arises from truths we haven't yet faced. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
- Jul 25, 20261h 9m
Todd McGowan, "Self-Sabotage: How We Try Not to Flourish" (Polity Press, 2026)
Self-Sabotage: How We Try Not to Flourish (Polity Press, 2026) contends that an unconscious impulse to undermine our own interests plays a dominant role in our lives. The idea of a primary drive to self-destruction is at odds with the prevailing common sense in a world where almost everyone believes that we strive to flourish. Yet often we fail to flourish not because some people are wicked but because the drive to sabotage ourselves outweighs the pleasures of flourishing. Our tendency to self-sabotage distorts our politics, throws off our romantic relationships, and generally makes human existence difficult. It is why we become involved with partners who continually create unhappiness for us, and also why we elect leaders who derail the nation. Although the act of self-sabotage is clearly self-destructive, it appeals to us because it has a creative power. Through sacrificing ourselves, we create sublime value in the world. Our willingness to sacrifice our own interest elevates the value of the object we pursue and lifts it out of the realm of the ordinary. Self-sabotage leads to immense amounts of social harm. But at the same time, the tendency to self-destruction provides the basis for our ability to act ethically and surmount social pressure in the name of some higher value. Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the co-host of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
- Jul 24, 202659 min
Barbara Holifield, "Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm" (Routledge, 2024)
Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm (Routledge, 2024), featuring a foreword by Donald Kalsched, examines the integration of the subjectively experienced body in the practice of depth psychology. Barbara Holifield draws from philosophical perspectives, neuroscientific and infant research, developmental theory, and trauma studies to offer a comprehensive overview of embodiment within a relationally based psychoanalytic approach. Clinical vignettes demonstrate the critical value of working with the bodily-felt dimension of implicit relational memory and emphasize how bodily-felt sense facilitates access to feelings. The primacy of bodily-based knowing revealed through infant research illuminates an interior world of sensorial apprehension that conceptually based knowing and psychoanalytic thought often overlook. Furthermore, it establishes the body as intrinsic to relational life. Freud’s 1923 statement that “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego,” is as cogent today as it was then (1961, p. 26). It has only been confirmed by infant research and affective neuroscience. Psychic life is born in the body and is sustained by the body. It is in and through the body that relationship begins. Disruptions in one’s earliest relationship with the primary caregiver are synonymous with disruption of the integral unity of psyche and body. Further, the book highlights the organizing role that felt sensation, sensory perception, and affective experience have on facilitating the re-establishment of psyche indwelling the soma. Because disruptions of the felt sense of psyche integral to soma occur in infancy, work of this nature falls out of the purview of traditional psychoanalysis. “It requires instead a working-through focused on the present, on the heart of the analytic relationship, and on the activation of an awareness of one’s own inner mode of functioning” (Lombardi, 2017, p. 23). Focus on direct sensorial and relational experience in the body is foundational in working with the analysand’s unformulated experience. As this occurs, affects are able to be borne, reflected on, and lived as feelings-in-the-body while simultaneously making way for the establishment of new relational organizations. Throughout the book, clinical examples show how the mythopoetic imagination and soma entwine––at times, attention to the somatic dimension stirs the creative unconscious in the form of dreams, active imagination, artworks, and movement. Reciprocally, the imaginal world informs and stimulates somatic experience. In this way, the mythopoetic reality revealed in a depth analysis weaves somatic experience into a tapestry of personal meaning, facilitating deep psychophysical transformation. Here the body serves as a portal to the numinous––healing that goes far beyond the relief of symptoms to a renewed sense of aliveness. This book offers guiding principles for psychotherapists and clinicians of all levels to engage the bodily basis of experience in their clinical practice. It will appeal to general readers interested in integrating mind and body, including those in the healing arts, fine arts, dance, athletics, meditation, yoga, and martial arts. Barbara Holifield, MSW, LMFT, SEP is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. With over forty years of clinical practice in depth psychotherapy and somatic healing — and her certification as a Jungian Analyst since 2006 — her work lives at the intersection of Jung and the body, bringing together somatic experiencing, affective neuroscience, relational psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the bodily-felt sense to offer a path of healing for those who have suffered developmental trauma and its long aftermath. A certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) trained directly by Dr. Peter Levine, Barbara taught Somatic Psychology for approximately twenty years at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) — one of the foremost graduate programs in somatic and depth psychology in the United States. She is also an internationally recognized teacher of Authentic Movement, a contemplative body practice rooted in Jungian active imagination that she has taught across the United States and abroad for approximately forty years. Her clinical writing explores the relationship of body, trauma, self, and our participation in the dream of the earth. Her articles have been published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Psychological Perspectives, and the Journal of Analytic Psychology. She has also contributed a chapter to The Body in Psychotherapy (North Atlantic Press) and a chapter to the anthology Authentic Movement: Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). She maintains memberships in the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the United States Association for Body Psychothera
About New Books in Psychoanalysis
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.comSubscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
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