New Books in Psychoanalysis

This episode of “A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Racism in America” takes a deep dive into the disturbing legal outcomes of state-sanctioned violence. The host and co-host, Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams, analyze the Department of Justice's sentencing recommendation for Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved in the raid that led to Breonna Taylor's death. The episode uses this case as a springboard to explore the central question: what unconscious processes are at work when the state acknowledges harm but refuses to assign it meaningful consequence? And how does this shape the racial psyche of a nation already strained by the traumatic repetition of Black death without accountability? The episode begins by examining the DOJ’s sentencing memo for Brett Hankison, who was convicted of federal civil rights violations for blindly firing his weapon. Drs. Messina and Powell-Williams note that while Hankison was not found directly responsible for Taylor's death, his actions contributed to a chaotic and dangerous situation. The DOJ's recommendation for leniency—framed around Hankison’s expressed remorse and mental health struggles—is presented not as a gesture of compassion but as a powerful act of disavowal. In psychoanalytic terms, this is a mechanism of simultaneously knowing and not knowing: the state admits a legal wrongdoing but emotionally withdraws from its moral and human significance. This defense is a way for institutions to maintain a sense of "white institutional innocence" by trivializing the consequences of their actions and deflecting from the deeper, systemic issues of race and historical violence. Drawing on historical analysis, the podcast then places this legal outcome within a larger pattern of Black death as public spectacle and white remorse as resolution.  The hosts argue that these ritualized performances of remorse—appeals to "good intentions" and vague promises of reform—are ways to reassert order and preserve the racial status quo. They use Saidiya Hartman's concept that "innocence is the condition of whiteness" to explain how the justice system often re-centers the perpetrator's psychological state and suffering over the victim's. This reversal, where the officer is subtly pitied and the Black woman's life becomes incidental, is a key dynamic of this historical pattern. To further illustrate this psychic phenomenon, the episode sets up a comparative case study between the killing of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed by white officers, and the death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a white woman killed by a Black officer. The hosts detail the background, outcomes, and sentences in each case to illuminate the differential application of justice and the underlying psychic valuations of human life based on race in America. This comparison serves to highlight how the justice system's response is often a traumatic reenactment of historical patterns rather than a genuine move toward accountability and repair. The episode also introduces the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed, arguing that the persistence of Breonna Taylor’s name in cultural discourse—in art, protests, and community rituals—is a refusal to allow her death to be buried. These acts of symbolic resistance, or counter-memory as defined by Foucault, challenge the official narrative and insist on a different kind of justice. This alternative model of justice, the hosts conclude, requires not just legal process, but a willingness to bear witness to suffering and engage in the emotional labor and truth-telling that are necessary for genuine collective repair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis' often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing. Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Hatred of Sex (U Nebraska Press, 2022) links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a range of fields and institutions, including queer studies, attachment theory, the #MeToo movement, and “traumatology,” demonstrating how hatred of sex has been optimized and exploited by neoliberalism. Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious. Matthew Pieknik is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2022) presents an accessible introduction to the conceptualization and treatment of eating disorders from a psychoanalytic perspective. Each of the chapters offers a different perspective on these difficult-to-treat conditions and taken together, illustrate the breadth and depth that psychoanalytic thinking can offer both seasoned clinicians as well as those just beginning to explore the field. Different aspects of how psychoanalytic theory and practice can engage with eating disorders are addressed, including mobilizing its nuanced developmental theories to illustrate the difficulties these patients have with putting feelings into words, the loathing that they feel towards their bodies, the disharmonies they experience in the link between body and mind, and even the ways that they engage with online Internet forums. This is an accessible read for clinicians at the start of their career and will also be a useful, novel take on the subject for experienced practitioners. Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, CEDS-S is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on topics such as eating disorders, masculinity, technology, and psychoanalytic treatment. His first book, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, was published by Routledge in 2016 and has been praised as “groundbreaking” and a “milestone publication in our field.” His second book, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak, an edited volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, was published by Routledge in 2018, and has also been well reviewed. In addition, Dr. Wooldridge has been interviewed by numerous media publications including Newsweek, Slate, WebMD, and others for his work. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF’s Medical School, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She is associate professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Host Pierce Salguero sits down with Richard Saville-Smith, an independent scholar of madness, religion, and psychiatry. We discuss Richard’s book Acute Religious Experiences (2023), which argues that frameworks from Mad Studies can get us out from under the academy’s current habit of either pathologizing or sanitizing religious experiences. Along the way, we talk about the power struggle between psychiatry & the humanities, the influence of Queer Studies on Richard’s work, and his reinterpretation of Jesus as a madman. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. Also check out our members-only benefits on Substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned in this episode: Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies (2023) Become a paid subscriber on blackberyl.substack.com to unlock our members-only benefits, including PDFs of some of these resources. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell. First, he decided, he’d better read some Freud. This started a life-long engagement with psychoanalysis and leftist politics, and his new book Political Freud: A History (Columbia University Press, 2015) conveys the richness of his decades of reading Freud. Following his 2004 Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, Zaretsky’s latest book, some would call it a companion, is comprised of five essays analyzing the complexity of the mutual influencing of capitalism, social/political history, and psychoanalysis, with particular attention to how and whether people conceive of their own interiority as political. (Particularly timely is chapter two: “Beyond the Blues: the Racial Unconscious and Collective Memory” which explores African American intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding oppression.) “Whereas introspection did once define an epoch of social and cultural history– the Freudian epoch– there were historical reasons for this, and it was bound to pass” says Zaretsky. But Political Freud is also a compelling argument for how badly we still need a conception of the self–or ego– with a critical and non-normalizing edge. Eli Zaretsky is a professor of history at The New School, writes and teaches about twentieth-century cultural history, the theory and history of capitalism (especially its social and cultural dimensions), and the history of the family. He is also the author of Why America Needs a Left, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis and Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Both new and seasoned psychotherapists wrestle with the relationship between psychological distress and inequality across race, class, gender, and sexuality. How does one address this organically in psychotherapy? What role does it play in therapeutic action? Who brings it up, the therapist or the patient? Daniel José Gaztambide addresses these questions by offering a rigorous decolonial approach that rethinks theory and technique from the ground up, providing an accessible, evidence-informed reintroduction to psychoanalytic practice. He re-examines foundational thinkers from three traditions--Freudian, relational-interpersonal, and Lacanian--through the lens of revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, and offers a detailed analysis of Fanon's psychoanalytic practice. Drawing on rich yet grounded discussions of theory and research, Gaztambide presents a clinical model that facilitates exploration of the social in the clinical space in a manner intimately related to the patient's presenting problem. In doing so, this book demonstrates that clinicians no longer have to choose between attending to the personal, interpersonal, or sociopolitical. It is a guide to therapeutic action "on the couch," which envisions political action "off the couch" and in the streets. Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique provides a comprehensive, practice-oriented and compelling guide for students, practitioners, and scholars of critical, multicultural and decolonial approaches to psychotherapy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psychological toll of being a Black woman…can never be underestimated. There is a low value placed on Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level and yet we feel the need to struggle to change the condition of all Black women.” Almost 50 years later, we have a book that responds to this important group’s felt need. Foluke Taylor’s Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room, delivers an archive of Black feminisms that are leveraged to explore certain psychoanalytic truths. This ambitious trajectory is however delightfully embedded within a text that also includes the potential of musical accompaniment: she prompts us to tune into Billy Paul, Sault, Norman Connors and many other musicians. Read Taylor and turn up your speakers: let your senses rise and fall, clap and hum. The book depends in part on the author’s personal reflections that in their tenderness, read, at least to my ear, as rather different from auto theory. Indeed, Taylor seems not to be embracing a tributary of critical theory through which she then allies herself. Rather there are aspects of her history that beautifully accompany and highlight what is a heart-rending treatise about the lay of the land traversed by Black women who seek to train to become clinicians and by Black women who come to lie on the couch, a terrain that can be unduly rough, distorting, dangerous. Chapter by chapter, Taylor is conducting a chorus of Black feminist thinkers, women with whom she works in ongoing movement to transform and trouble what subjugates and suffocates the lives of Black women. A clinician herself, she places a special emphasis on the practice of psychotherapy, demonstrating how it can participate in deadly, racist repetitions. The book has an interior design that reminds me of the way one might arrange furniture in a room, a living room as it were. There are bolded quotes, in the upper right hand corner perhaps or the bottom left, demanding attention. Sometimes the same quote is reproduced more than once in a chapter. These quotes are the equivalent of textual wall hangings that live on the page. They take on a physicality, almost like an ottoman by the reading chair, a place to stop and stay put, feet off the ground. I experienced them also as obstacles: I had to consider them in order to move forth. Taylor’s voice is intimate and readers are assumed into a position, dropped into her mind at times mid-sentence: a thought is forming and we are there for its birth. She offers radical hospitality, breathing us into being. All who create life, she reminds us, must breathe for those they carry forth. This she also does. The voices of African feminists were new to me and reflective of her having left London for ten years to seek her origins in Africa, looking for her place in the world. This is where her sharing of her early life is put to powerful use as she wonders with bell hooks, with Hortense Spillers, hardly alone, yet alone, “where do I come from?” This question is one that belongs to all people whose lineages have been truncated by enslavement. Tracy D Morgan is the founding editor of New Books in Psychoanalysis, and works as a psychoanalyst in Rome, Italy and Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest and most loyal supporter. In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalyst, in the spotlight. She shows how Riviere made use of the latest psychoanalytic ideas in a highly creative and original way, expressing herself with clarity and emotional depth in seminal works about the inner life of female sexuality and treatment impasses. She was able to draw from a lifetime of challenging and fruitful experiences. After a childhood rife with emotional neglect, she stepped into the rich ferment of the dying Victorian era and came in touch with major progressive forces of the time like the suffragettes and the Society for Psychical Research. As a dressmaker’s apprentice, she was among the first wave of women entering the work force. When the shifting soil of her childhood proved unstable, she entered analysis with Ernest Jones and, after becoming an analyst, with Freud himself. This personal connection proved fortuitous to the newly formed British Psychoanalytic Society, as it provided a solid anchor against the dividing drift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Bower paints an intimate portrait of a woman with a stern and sometimes vitriolic public persona and a shy and fragile personality that was saved by her involvement in psychoanalysis. In her best moments she was able to bridge that gap in her psychoanalytic writing, revealing herself through her theoretical musings. Marion Bower has trained as a teacher, social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked for many years in the child mental health services, including the Tavistock Clinic, and has edited and co-edited four books on various applications of psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editing a book on sexual exploitation. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams, the host and co-host of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Racism in America” sponsored by The American Psychoanalytic Association explored how employing mechanisms of defense perpetuates racial injustice’s movement forward and the resistance it faces as a tug of war, i.e., progress followed by backlash. They examined the symbolic removal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s bust from the White House and its implications for societal values, while also talking about the impact of Dr. King’s assassination and the current state of racial justice initiatives. The conversation included a discussion about the challenges of tolerating difficult truths and emotions in both psychoanalysis and society, including the persistence of white supremacy and its modern manifestations. It also underscored how symbols of the civil rights movement have been honored at the highest level of government yet in this case defense mechanisms initiated the physical removal of the bust. Other topics discussed by the host and co-host covered the current administration’s sense of Juneteenth including the press secretary’s statements that suggested the day was “observed” but not “celebrated.” Her statements seemed to be in line with President Trump’s remarks about Americans having “too many holidays” which many observers interpreted as a direct critique of Juneteenth itself and, more broadly, of recent efforts to deemphasize the historical experiences of Black Americans. This approach stands in contrast to previous years when Donald Trump issued statements honoring Juneteenth. Some analysts and advocates have noted that the timing of President Trump’s post was likely not coincidental. By choosing Juneteenth to air grievances about paid holidays, he sent a message to his political base that aligns with his administration’s broader efforts to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The lack of formal White House observance and Trump’s public complaints about holidays were viewed by some as part of a pattern of minimizing the importance of this holiday and its meaning for Black Americans as well as all people in this country who celebrate the end of slavery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis