On Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents"
In 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents and laid out his theory of civilization: civilization’s a problem, and it makes us unhappy. Freud felt humans were aggressive creatures by...
6 Sep 202221min
Carl Waitz and Theresa Clement Tisdale, "Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Eastern Orthodox Christian Anthropology in Dialogue" (Routledge, 2022)
Carl Waitz and Theresa Clement Tisdale offer to us a complex and scholarly text in their new book: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Eastern Orthodox Christian Anthropology in Dialogue (Routledge, 2021). Ps...
29 Aug 202258min
Jordan Osserman, "Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
It is not terribly controversial to say that castration fear is one of the key conceptual engines driving the psychoanalytic project overall. Whether one thinks of it manifesting as a looming, retribu...
15 Aug 202255min
Mark Solms, "The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness" (Norton, 2021)
If you have ever been skeptical about whether neuroscience has anything to teach psychoanalysis, or vice-versa, you will be stimulated by this book which engages the two disciplines in a fascinating d...
12 Aug 20221h 6min
Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, "Hatred of Sex" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
How well do we understand our relationship to sex? According to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the new book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), we tend to overlook the “unpleasu...
11 Aug 202246min
Transgender Children: From Controversy to Dialogue
How do we go forward in our psychoanalytic understanding of transgender children? This highly contested issue is at the core of an interesting edition of the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Ch...
11 Juli 20221h 1min
Helen Morgan, "The Work of Whiteness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective" (Routledge, 2021)
'Whiteness' is a politically constructed category which needs to be understood and dismantled because the system of racism so embedded within our society harms us all. It has profound implications for...
6 Juli 202252min
Mark Neocleous, "The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies" (Verso, 2022)
Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. T...
12 Maj 202248min
