New psychoanalytic books, explained by the people who wrote them.
New Books in Psychoanalysis, a channel of the New Books Network, pairs authors of recently published books with an interviewer and lets them explain what they wrote. Recent episodes range from a first-hand account of analysis with Lacan to youth mental health crises, narcissistic parenthood and the social isolation of serious illness.
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New Books in Psychoanalysis is a channel of the New Books Network, and its core business is the author interview. Most of the recent episodes start from a published book, with the publisher and year printed in the episode title: Routledge, Bloomsbury, Reaktion Books. The feed can double as a reading list. The subjects are broad. Recent titles include 'Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith', Hila Yahalom's 'A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Narcissistic Parenthood and its Ramifications: The Forgotten Echo', and Carl Waitz's 'Youth Mental Health Crises and the Broken Social Link: A Freudian-Lacanian Perspective'. Lacan is a recurring name. The most direct link is Betty Milan's 'Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account'. Host Matt Piechnik introduces her as a Lacanian psychoanalyst practicing in Sao Paulo who first trained as a psychiatrist and was in analysis with Lacan in France between 1973 and 1978. She also writes novels, plays and articles. He frames the book as a rare view of how Lacan worked in the room, which his theoretical writing seldom shows. The talk also turns to her craft as a writer, including advice from Robert McKee to 'make it bigger than life'. Adolescence is a second thread. Waitz is introduced as an attending psychologist at Boston Children's Hospital and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, with a small private practice serving adolescents and young adults. In 'Dominique: the Case of an Adolescent interview with Jamieson Webster', host Jordan introduces Webster as a psychoanalyst and author whose most recent book is 'On Breathing', and the conversation is set up to do something a little different. Other episodes reach past the consulting room. On 'Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment', by Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton, host Miranda Melcher sets up the book's point that serious illness is about relationships as well as medicine. Vickers then outlines a model of why illness interrupts the recognition people normally extend to each other, drawing on disability theory, social neuroscience, psychoanalysis and evolutionary theory. His sharper claim is that the isolation of the ill is often studied as if it came from the condition alone, which leaves out the part the healthy and able-bodied play in producing it. The register across these episodes is courteous, and guests get room: at one point Vickers asks whether he is talking too long and is told no. For a listener less at home with Freudian and Lacanian vocabulary, the 'Being Ill' conversation is the easiest way in. For one already reading Lacan, Milan's first-hand account is the obvious draw.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants to hear psychoanalysts and scholars explain a new book in their own words, and who is at ease with Freudian and Lacanian terms alongside plainer talk about illness, adolescence and parenting.
What sets it apart: It is built around authors rather than a single fixed host, with several interviewers sharing the chair. Its range runs from a first-hand account of analysis with Lacan to an argument that the healthy share responsibility for isolating the ill.
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.com Subscribe 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: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Woodrow Wilson gets a Freudian reading; your margin notes may need margin notes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at early trust, political error, and the search for truth.
Political leadership comes into focus here through the fragile machinery of trust: who gets believed, how children learn to depend on adults, and what happens when public figures cannot admit error.
A careful discussion of Freud, Woodrow Wilson, and psychoanalysis at the edge of history.
Patrick's 2023 book The Madman in the White House gives this single-episode review a sturdy center: Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and their lost psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson.
Diane Elise returns to erotic life in psychoanalysis, with Tracy Morgan pressing difficult ideas into vivid clinical questions.
Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field finds Diane Elise returning to libido, sexuality, and erotic life in psychoanalysis, arguing that sex has been largely displaced by the field's turn toward object relations and attachment.
A careful conversation about masculinity, triangulation, and the paternal function in changing family life.
Sebastian Trull speaks with Michael Diamond about masculinity, psychoanalytic ideas of the male psyche, and what maturing manhood can mean. Diamond moves from identification theory toward a later way of thinking about the infant's unconscious need to rebuild a triangular…
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Science fiction thinking for a platform-shaped world
Ana Fischson interviews Donald Moss about At War with the Obvious, a 2018 Routledge collection arguing that psychoanalysis resists the surface’s claim to be complete.
Austin Ratner, editor of The American Psychoanalyst, describes redesigning TAP with full-color art, professional writers, and a website for readers outside psychoanalysis.
Philip Lance interviews Barnaby Barratt about Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst, the third book in a trilogy that began with What Is Psychoanalysis?
New Books in Psychoanalysis features Avgi Saketopoulou discussing Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, her 2023 book from New York University Press.
Cassandra Saltman interviews Frederick Crews about Freud: The Making of an Illusion, his biography of Freud from 1856 through approximately 1905.
Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton's Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment argues that serious illness changes relationships, not only medical status.
Patrick Weil's 2023 Harvard University Press book The Madman in the White House anchors Jordan Alsterman's conversation with Jameson Webster about Freud's Woodrow Wilson study.
New Books in Psychoanalysis on the New Books Network's New Books and Psychology channel features C.K.
Betty Millen discusses Analyzed by Lacan, a memoir begun during the 2020 pandemic about her analysis with Jacques Lacan between 1973 and 1978.
["Tracy Morgan and Dianne Elise center this New Books in Psychoanalysis episode on Elise's 2019 Routledge book Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field.", "Elise says her work grew out of 1990s critiques of Mahler, Pine, and Bergman's separation-individuation writing, including a six-page gender section that reduced the girl to penis envy.", "She argues that psychoanalysis needs \"analytic eroticism\" alongside holding and containing, meaning the analyst's own libidinal vitality, interest, and passion.", "The discussion keeps returning to mothers, daughters, psychic bisexuality, and female desire, including Elise's warning that treatment can stall when a patient erases maternal layers from erotic life."]
New Books in Psychoanalysis speaks with Gail M.
["Sebastian Trull talks with Michael Diamond about Diamond's 2021 book Masculinity and Its Discontents: The Male Psyche and the Inherent Tensions of Maturing Manhood.", "Diamond, a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, says Freud offered a limited account of masculinity and that fatherhood pushed him to rethink it.", "He recasts male development as oscillating pre-phallic, phallic, and genital positions, with the pre-phallic built around \"primordial vulnerability\" and the boy's first relation to the mother.", "The interview moves through Stoller, Greenson, Laplanche, Green, Klein, Winnicott, and Corbett while arguing that male receptivity, fathering, and bigenderization are central rather than peripheral."]
This episode is a survey request from the New Books Network, followed by an interview with an author about their recent book in psychoanalysis.
An academic interview with psychoanalyst Jameson Webster about his recent book 'On Breathing' on the New Books Network.
An academic interview series where scholars discuss their recently published research in psychoanalysis.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
Linda Hopkins and Steven Kuchuck explain that Masud Khan's 4,000 pages of workbooks were cut to about 900 pages across three volumes, with volume one published by Karnac in 2022 as "Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst." They describe a five-year permissions fight after the IPA withdrew its approval, and they say Khan left no literary executor and left his estate to a Pakistani relative's husband.