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

In his new book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (Norton, 2014), the psychoanalyst and innovative historian, George Makari speaks to us about the dramatic history of the invention of the concept of the mind. Beginning at the origins of modernity, Makari takes the reader on a wild ride across the European continent in a search for answers about the nature of human inner life. Hardly a sedate academic debate, the history of the mind is a history soaked in blood. Heretical ideas challenged religious and political authority, toppled governments and fomented revolution. In the shift from an ethereal, God-given soul to a material, thinking mind, humanity found itself freed from the authoritarian rule of the church and the need for a monarch; however, with this newfound freedom to reason and self-govern, man needed to contend with the limits of reason, with unbridled passions, and with madness. Makari has written a history of ideas with powerful implications for the field of psychoanalysis. First, there was the secularization of the soul. Now we are witnessing the supplanting of the mind by neuroscience, biology, and brain. This raises questions about the role psychoanalysis can play in keeping a focus on the mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

20 Jan 201655min

For a couple of decades, scholars have moved toward a broad consensus that context, rather than ideology, is most important in pushing ordinary men and women to participate in mass murder. The “situationist paradigm,” as Abram de Swaan labels this, concludes from studies by psychologists, sociologists, historians and others, that individuals are malleable, easily influenced by their surroundings, easily enough that they can be moved to do things that, in other contexts, would be easily recognizable as morally bankrupt. de Swaan rejects this conclusion. He asserts instead that most people would not participate in mass murder without a much deeper set of framing events and incentives. His book The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2015) lays out an alternate theory for the participation of both regimes and individuals in cases of mass murder. de Swaan brings his decades of experience in sociology to bear in crafting a thoughtful, well articulated and well-constructed argument. In particular, he argues that we should place more weight on the life-histories of perpetrators than has been common in recent discussions. As de Swaan points out early in the book, what is modern about mass violence is not that it happens, but that we are embarrassed about it. This reminds us of the importance of the debate he has so vigorously engaged. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

11 Jan 20161h 3min

In his second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are intimately intertwined with the treatment of psychosis, the ways in which this early exposure colors all of his clinical thinking becomes apparent. Indeed, in psychoanalysis we could say that there are two kinds of clinicians–those who treat psychosis and those who don’t. Bollas is clearly in the former camp. One wonders, given the centrality of psychosis in his theoretical work, if he would have been drawn to analytic work had he not started with the most primitive of human experiences? We meet him as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, studying history, working at a program for autistic and psychotic children presumably to pay the bills. We follow him to SUNY-Buffalo where, while pursuing his PhD in literature, he encounters psychotic students in a class he is teaching, walks across the campus to the clinic, asks if he might work there as a clinician and is brought on staff. (Those were the days…) It is worth noting that Bollas, one of the most renown thinkers in psychoanalysis, began as a lay practitioner (he has an MSW which I presume he acquired so as to practice in this country). His longing for a clinical life, pursued while completing his studies in the humanities, seems to have been piqued by his encounters with psychosis. While Bollas is one of the profession’s strongest critics of the medicalization of psychosis, he always works with a team that includes an MD, a social worker and others when treating schizophrenia. His role on the team is to help the person suffering from psychosis to talk and also, crucially, to historicize. (Interestingly, the book includes a chapter that shows him at work as an American historian.) He reminds us that seeing psychosis as “other” places those who begin to have nascent-to-florid psychotic experiences at ever greater risk of being lost to us and to themselves, forever. He minces no words as he argues on behalf of the psychotic persons need for speech. “We all know the wisdom of talking. In trouble, we turn to another. Being listened to inevitably generates new perspective, and the help we get lies not only in what is said but in that human connection intrinsic to the therapeutic process of talking that promotes unconscious thinking.” Indeed the barrage of medications on offer alongside treatment modalities that give short shrift to speech, run the risk of increasing isolation and blurring the mind which in turn increases psychosis. As is his wont, Bollas turns common treatment logic on its head: “the loss of un-selfconscious participation in the everyday …constitutes the gravest tragedy for the adult schizophrenic.” There is a way back, he argues, but, and here I riff on his thinking, only if the culture comes to understand anew what it means to be human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

21 Dec 201555min

Vamik D. Volkan, a native of Cyprus, was touched by ethnic/political violence at a very personal level when he was still in medical school: a very close friend was shot by terrorists during the Cypriat war. “I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it at the time, I was far from home.” Once he completed medical school and his psychoanalytic training, he noticed that he had become preoccupied with theoretical questions of mourning, and he realized he was motivated by his loss to address issues of ethnic violence and peace-making from a psychoanalytic angle. How are generations of families affected by historical trauma and loss? How does political violence and trauma become a chosen or disavowed element of identity across generations? With A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action (Karnac 2015), Volkan recounts a fascinating, riveting, theoretically powerful case history he supervises, of the grandson of a high level Nazi perpetrator, instrumental in developing the forced euthanasia of people with disabilities. The grandfather’s program was called “T4”, and he was responsible for introducing the technique of killing groups of people with gas, which went on to be used on the large scale in the camps. He was later killed on the Eastern Front. When the grandson, the subject of the case, Victor, is born, his parents are deeply preoccupied with the possibility that Victor may have a disability. Victor is haunted by the memory of a tonsillectomy at three years old, of his struggling and resisting being “gassed” by the pediatrician. As an adult, he presents for therapy with the problem that he has episodes at night of waking in a dissociative state in his room and trying to escape through the window. A complication for the treatment is that Victor’s future analyst is the daughter of a Nazi soldier… A Nazi Legacy is challenging, moving, but also useful as a presentation of clinical technique. Volkan strongly advocates for psychoanalysts to be more aware of the effects of social and political violence on the internal world of their patients, but also to be aware of how these events affect analysts themselves, and play out in enactments of disavowal. As Victor begins to work through his family history and the truth of his grandfather’s atrocities, he has a pivotal reaction to seeing the film “Twelve Years a Slave”: “he recalled the film dealing with racism and thought he might be like white people in the United States.” Vamik D. Volkan is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Erikson Institute of Education and Research of the Austen Riggs Center, and an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington DC Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Volkan is also president of the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), a nonprofit organization that brings together unofficial representatives from various parts of the world, such as Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, UK, U.S.A, and the West Bank to examine world affairs from a psychopolitical angle. The IDI develops a common language between psychoanalysts and those who are diplomats, politicians or from other disciplines. Dr. Volkan is a 2015 Winner of the prestigious Sigourney Award, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

15 Dec 201554min

There are theorists who seem to strive for integration and those who insist on fundamental differences, incompatibilities, and unbridgeable gulfs. Some write from an interdisciplinary position, exulting in hybridity and increased potentiality, while others, no less passionately, police disciplinary boundaries, urging seriousness and rigor. The argument to integrate is rooted in the assumption that a theory only can be enriched through the incorporation of varying perspectives; a multiple factor model is inherently more flexible and practicable. Proponents of disciplinary and theoretical purity counter that true integration is impossible: synthetic efforts often fall short, resulting in pastiche, lists of superficial similarities, or vitiated “middle positions.”Steven J. Ellman, in When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought (Karnac, 2010) unapologetically declares his allegiance to the first camp. As Ellman explains in his preface, the blending of various theoretical models in the service of expanding and deepening clinical practice has long been his preoccupation, one might even say, his ethical stance. When Theories Touch is divided into three loosely delimited sections (“Freud Chapters,” “Major Post-Freudian Theorists,” and “Contemporary Issues in Psychoanalysis”) and eighteen chapters featuring readings of an array of psychoanalytic giants, including Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Melanie Klein, W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Harry Stack Sullivan, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg, Wilfred Bion, and Stephen Mitchell. Most of the integrative labor is contained in the commentary sections of each chapter, as well as the concluding chapter, modestly titled, “A Tentative Developmental Model.” In many ways, Ellman is building on the work spurred by the baby observers of the 1980s and 1990s. Those decades not only witnessed the challenge to classical technique by relational theorists but also epistemic convergences founded on object relations theory and the studied infant-caregiver dyad. Insights from Klein, Kohut, Bion, and Winnicott were framed and woven together by shared assumptions about the structuring influence of early mother-infant interactions. Ellman echoes and enlarges these prior efforts. He includes clinical material, indexing implications for technique. He also introduces the relational viewpoint of Mitchell while maintaining a place for drives (or what he prefers to call “endogenous stimulation”), both in his developmental model and his practice. With surprising ease Ellman is able to stake out a theoretical position that complicates (or, arguably, obviates!) age-old psychoanalytic debates about object-seeking vs. pleasure-seeking infants, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, the timing and necessity of transference interpretation, and a host of metapsychological and clinical questions. The relevance and value of Ellman’s book, I believe, rests less in its integration (which is partial by the author’s own measure) than in its brave and convincing advocacy of the merging of causes that previously have done violence to one another. During our interview and in the book, Ellman approaches each body of theory with rare openness and curiosity. He enables theorists as discordant as Stephen Mitchell and Charles Brenner to enter into productive conversation, enhancing the contributions of both through new and unexpected syntheses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

9 Dec 201556min

[NB:Please be forewarned, there is some brief audio difficulty at the beginning of the interview. It does clear up quickly, so please do listen through.] We are drawn to what is hidden. We are excited by what is mysterious whether we find it beautiful or repellant. Erotic experience is all about this urge. Sexuality, both in its defensive function and as an intrinsic part of being human, defines the ways in which we engage in the psychoanalytic situation. However, it can be very difficult – even taboo – for analysts to admit having erotic feelings towards a patient, and it can be equally thorny handling erotic transference when it arises in a treatment. In Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios (Routledge, 2014), Andrea Celenza discusses the importance of reclaiming sexuality as one of the many realms that are of central concern to our patients as she simultaneously observes the pervasive “desexualization” of the psychoanalytic field. She asserts that erotic transference and countertransference (of various manifestations) should be explored in every thorough analysis and she means to bring sex squarely back into psychoanalytic theorizing. Celenza offers careful consideration of the use and perils of embodied erotic countertransference as well as dilemmas surrounding self-disclosure, guilty pleasure and the “slippery slope” towards sexual boundary transgression (the subject of her earlier writing.) Celenza and I discuss writing about patients, mutuality, asymmetry, embodiment, re-eroticization, multiplicity and contradictory gender considerations proposing ways in which the binary (e.g., “feminine” and “masculine”) poses constraints that may be transcended. Finally, Celenza reclaims the term “perversion” as a mode of relating vs. a descriptor of behavior thereby restoring its usefulness in the psychoanalytic lexicon. Among other points, she posits that perverse scenarios are attempts to construct a one-person fantasy/universe thereby defending against dangerous subjectivities (either within one’s self or in the other.) Dr. Andrea Celenza, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and an Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts and is a proud and avid soccer player. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

10 Nov 201553min

To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growing elasticity of bipolar disorders. For about the last twenty years, argues Leader, the bipolar spectrum has been tailored to a pharmaceutical industry eager to shift attention away from ineffective antidepressants and toward newly developed mood stabilizers. A household word since the mid-1990s, “bipolar” is now widely considered to be biological and hereditary. Its loosened parameters have saddled large swaths of the population with a chronic illness requiring life-long medication. Strictly Bipolar (Penguin, 2013) is a trenchant case for the reexamination of the “bipolar revolution” and for a return to the older diagnosis of manic depression. Leader points out that while bipolarity is at the center of modern capitalist subjectivity – the principal feature of twenty-first-century worklife, which encourages and rewards herculean productivity and exuberant all-nighters — manic depression is a structural, much narrower and less frequent problem. The highs and lows of manic depression are not merely behavioral or ominously genetic but, rather, rooted in an individual’s early history: relationships with primary caregivers, fantasies regarding one’s symbolic place within the family. Manic depression also has common motifs that reflect its structural basis and identifications. Mania announces itself, for example, in fits of housecleaning, shopping sprees, and grand gestures of altruism. Manic episodes often begin with a steady stream of words – extravagant metaphors and brilliant rhetorical leaps — a levity in the symbolic, as Leader puts it. These great themes of mania are traced in Strictly Bipolar to personal stories of guilt, responsibility, and debt; distant or inconsistent parents and grandparents who expected too much or overwhelmingly little and elicited (split off) aggression and hate. We learn that manic-depressives struggle with the overproximity of the Other, attempting to keep the Other separate and safe from all that is bad, from murderous rage, from oneself. Strictly Bipolar offers compelling clinical material and vivid biographical descriptions of the “signature motifs” of manic-depression. In reading the book, I could see how one might be tempted to lean too heavily on surface behaviors and mood states in thinking and diagnosing manic depression. Yet, as Leader points out, manic-depressives have a troubled relationship with time and find it difficult to integrate their own histories. It therefore behooves therapists not to join them in this, redoubling the problem. In the interview, Leader characterizes manic depression and other psychoses without the usual prognostic pessimism – not as problems of subjectivization resulting in social exclusion, medication, or institutional scrutiny but as “ways of being in the world.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

3 Nov 201540min

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as case studies. The book is both compelling and readable, and argues that the fantasy and depiction of torture play a role as an ideology in national politics and policy, and that it’s all more complicated than it seems–once you stop averting your eyes. Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is also the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

27 Okt 20151h