New Books in Psychology

We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory.

The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.

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On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected].

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New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative. 

In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health.

Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret history of American motherhood, women’s political activism, and the rise of postpartum depression advocacy amid an often-censorious conservative culture. By breaking new ground with the first book-length history of postpartum mental illness in the twentieth century, Moran brings mothers’ battles with postpartum depression out of the shadows and into the light.

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The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. 

Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth.

Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man. 

How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work?

In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s going in for the kill shot.

Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. [email protected]

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James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experiences alternate between his present-day struggles with impotence and his memories of racial violence. As the narrative unfolds a pivotal childhood memory of a lynching, sets the tone and comes to represent the fundamental weakness of white supremacy. His need for racist violence to regain potency suggests that the system of white supremacy requires constant reinforcement to maintain itself. Projective identification, a powerful mechanism of defense, also plays a significant role in exploring the complex psychological dynamics of racism and its impact on both the oppressor and the oppressed.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited seven books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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The key to a life well-lived is prioritization, but people rarely explain how to do it effectively.  

In Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions (Rosenfeld Media, 2024), Harry Max provides a useful guide. 

He explains how learning to prioritize is helpful in life as well as at work. He explains how he - and his clients - feel a sense of freedom, as though a weight is lifted, when it's clear what is most important and they are able to focus on those things. In this relatable approach, Max acknowledges that avoidance behavior is natural, and clarifies the need to understand the costs of not prioritizing intentionally.

Drawing on methods used at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, Harry Max presents a practical method that you can apply either for single large decisions or for ongoing efforts. 

In the book he introduces the "daily boot", a way to start the day by clearing out the fog of competing efforts, and his DEGAP® method: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize. 

Max demystifies common prioritization frameworks by providing guidance on how and when to use them, either together or separately. These include the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Paired Comparison, and Stack Ranking among others. 

Mentioned resources:

• The New How by Nilofer Merchant
• The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists by Richard P. Rumelt
• The Kano model by Noriaki Kano. It's not a prioritization framework per se, but a valuable resource for understanding what is important as it relates to customer satisfaction. 

Author recommended reading:

• Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear
• Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

To experience the Upper Paleolithic era—a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment—the age of reason and the end of the soul—Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (Metropolitan Books, 2021) is one man’s audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth—and thrive.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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According to the medical world, hysteria is a thing of the past, an outdated diagnosis that has disappeared for good. Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics (Routledge, 2021) argues that hysteria is in fact alive and well.

Hyperventilating, we rush from one incident into the next - there is hardly time for a breather. From the worldwide run on toilet paper to cope with coronavirus fears to the overheated discussions about immigration and overwrought reactions to the levels of crime and disorder around us, we live in a culture of hysteria. While hysteria is typically discussed in emotional terms - as an obstacle to be overcome - it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Irritating though this may be, hysteria needs to be taken seriously, for what it tells us about our society and way of life. That is why Marc Schuilenburg examines what hysteria is and why it is fuelled by a culture that not only abuses, but also encourages and rewards it.

Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, criminology, philosophy and all those interested in hysteria and how it permeates late modern society.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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Do you obsess over your partner's flaws? Does thinking about the future of your relationship leave you imagining the worst-case scenario? When it comes to navigating the world of romantic relationships, some feelings of anxiety, doubt, and fear are to be expected. But if your fears so extreme that they threaten to destroy an otherwise healthy relationship, you may have relationship OCD--a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that causes chronic obsessive doubt and anxiety in relationships. So, how can you free yourself to discover deeper intimacy and security?

Relationship OCD (New Harbinger, 2022) offers an evidence-based, cognitive behavioral approach to finding relief from relationship anxiety, obsessive doubt, and fear of commitment. You'll learn to challenge the often-distorted thought patterns that trigger harmful emotions, increase your ability to think rationally, and ultimately accept the presence of intrusive thinking while maintaining the values of a healthy relationship.

Relationships are the ultimate unknown. If you're ready to let go of needing to know for sure, this book will help you find satisfaction and thrive in your romantic relationships--in all their wonderful uncertainty.

For more: 

• The Center for Anxiety and OCD Website
• The ROCD Masterclass

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Bion and Thoughts Too Deep for Words: Psychoanalysis, Suggestion, and the Language of the Unconscious (Routledge, 2020) is Robert Caper's most recent book, and it offers a sustained exploration and discussion of key problematics that have informed psychoanalysis since its inception. Caper offers a nuanced discussion of psychotherapy's tendency to fall into suggestion, and thus move away from an exploration of the truth, which he considers to be psychoanalysis's central task. The psychoanalyst has to mirror back to the patient who they are, rather than keep them in a state of blithe affirmation, and thereby inspire in them the notion that the therapist, like the analysand, is unwilling to explore what lies beneath the rubble of conscious beliefs and statements.

In his discussion of these matters, Caper draws on a wide range of thinkers, most importantly that of W.R. Bion, asserting that there are always "thoughts too big for words," which is a reminder that there is always more. He hightlights the importance of the aesthetic drawing on Meltzer, and he introduces a new distinction between maternal and paternal container.

I greatly enjoyed both reading the book and talking to Robert, and I happily recommend this book to anyone seeking to reconnect to psychoanalysis's foundations, utilizing the British school's key thinkers.

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In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed rise in drug use reached a fevered pitch, the emergence of the nation’s first “narcotic farms” in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky, marked a watershed moment in the treatment of addiction. Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impacts on the American West. Throughout its operation from the 1930s to the 1970s, the institution was the only federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi River. Designed to blend psychiatric treatment, physical rehabilitation, and vocational training, the Narcotic Farm, its proponents argued, would transform American treatment policies for the better. The reality was decidedly more complicated.

In Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West (University of Texas Press, 2024) Dr. Holly M. Karibo tells the story of how this institution—once framed as revolutionary for addiction care—ultimately contributed to the turn towards incarceration as the solution to the nation’s drug problem. Blending an intellectual history of addiction and imprisonment with a social history of addicts’ experiences, Rehab on the Range provides a nuanced picture of the Narcotic Farm and its cultural impacts. In doing so, it offers crucial historical context that can help us better understand our current debates over addiction, drug policy, and the rise of mass incarceration.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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This interview is an exception to our “single author monographs” rule, because the edited collection that is its topic is an intellectual achievement worth making an exception for in over 12 years of New Books in Philosophy podcasts. Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide: Volume I and Volume II (Routledge, 2024) is a two-volume compendium of 62 chapters on emotion theory written by 101 leading theorists from philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, and other fields, all grappling with the question: What is an emotion? Editor Andrea Scarantino, who is a professor of philosophy at George State University, has compiled a synoptic and thematically organized collection that covers the history of emotion theory, the main contemporary theories of emotions, individual chapters on 35 distinct emotions, and more. The volumes bring together theorists from distinct disciplines that don’t normally engage with each others’ work, and provide readers with a one-stop-shop for clearly written introductions to the current states of play in emotion research.

Andrea Scarantino is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University, where he has taught since 2005.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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A Psychoanalytic Study of Political Leadership in the United States and Russia: Searching for Truth (Routledge, 2024) provides psychoanalytic insight into the motives of this complex and contradictory topic.

The chapters written by the editor of this book focus on the importance of truth-telling and evidence as it relates to presidents of the United States. She studied the way in which some of these leaders have failed to tell the American people the truth about the Maddox incident, Abu Ghraib, the Iran-Contra affair, My Lai, and the real reasons why atomic bombs were detonated in Japan.

In the process of uncovering lies, over time this process has eroded trust in our leaders. She also explains epistemic trust which refers to the trust we place in others as sources of knowledge and information. It is a fundamental aspect of how we learn and understand the world, relying on the belief that the knowledge we receive from others is reliable and truthful. It plays a crucial role in various contexts, including education, science, with the media, and in everyday interpersonal interactions.

The other contributors, from different professional and academic backgrounds, use a range of methods including quantitative research and literary analysis to shed light on Putin’s background, outlook and current actions. Reflecting a range of perspectives on how Putin’s background may have informed his beliefs and his actions, particularly with respect to the invasion of Ukraine, the book brings together diverse viewpoints.

A Psychoanalytic Study of Political Leadership in the United States and Russia will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to readers seeking to understand the complex dynamics of populist leadership.

Interview conducted by C.K. Westbrook.

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Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma.

Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024).

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The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events?

Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, in Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Even though this is not a political show, today we will be talking about the ways in which mechanisms of defense effected both parties in the 2024 campaign and the presidential election. It is too big and too germane to our society to ignore. If we did, we might be guilty of denial.

In this podcast the hist and co-host discuss the following question and how mechanism of defense were employed to ward off difficult thoughts and feelings; some too frightening to contemplate.

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Human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasize the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective. For many, here and now is as good as it gets - we have steadily progressed from a savage past, and all we have to look forward to is the great unknown. But if our literature and cinema are anything to go by, many are convinced that the future will indeed be dystopian. At the same time, arguments abound that living in the moment is a key to happiness and success.

However, to privilege the present over the past or future, Brett Bowden argues in Now Is Not the Time: Inside Our Obsession with the Present (Iff Books, 2024), is to engage in tempocentrism. More than a mere preoccupation with the present, tempocentrism involves comparing and judging the past in relation to the present, with the tendency to assume that the present isn’t only materially and qualitatively different from the past but also superior to it, often morally so.

Yet tempocentrism, a mistaken belief in the unprecedented nature of events going on around us, brings with it a skewed perspective loaded with bias and prejudice. Requiring just as much ignorance and arrogance as Eurocentrism - tempocentrism implies that the present is somehow superior to the past because we live in it now. The point, however, is not to suggest that there is not something special about the present - there might well be - but now is not the time to decide whether it is more significant than previous moments, or those still to come. Depending on the issue or event in question, the time for that is later … possibly hundreds or thousands of years later.

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If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), you may seek constant reassurance from others, lose time to compulsions, struggle with unwanted thoughts and intense emotions, or act out in ways that are ineffective. These symptoms can put a major strain on your relationships--whether it's with family, friends, partners, or other relationships. And you may feel alone, embarrassed, and ashamed of your symptoms, which can lead to further withdrawal and social isolation. So, how can you reduce the impact of OCD on your relationships?

Drawing on evidence-based practices grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), exposure and response prevention therapy (ERP), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindful self-compassion, psychologist Amy Mariaskin offers a comprehensive guide for managing your toughest symptoms--before they hijack your relationships. With this book, you'll find hands-on skills to move toward what you truly want in your relationships and strengthen feelings of intimacy, trust, and connectedness. And finally, you'll learn how to cultivate self-compassion, mindfulness, and curiosity--all while challenging the beliefs and behaviors that keep you feeling stuck in isolation.

If you're tired of OCD sabotaging your relationships, Thriving in Relationships When You Have OCD (New Harbinger, 2022) will help you take control of your symptoms--and your life.

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By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was being published and, before long, devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, however, few people think much about the concept of self-esteem—but perhaps we should.

Self-Esteem: An American History (Polity, 2024) by Dr. Ian Miller is the first historical study to explore the emotional politics of self-esteem in modern America. Written with verve and insight, Dr. Miller’s expert analysis looks at the critiques of self-help that accuse it of propping up conservative agendas by encouraging us to look solely inside ourselves to resolve life’s problems. At the same time, he reveals how African American, LGBTQ+, and feminist activists have endeavoured to build positive collective identities based on self-esteem, pride, and self-respect.

This revelatory book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of mental health and well-being, and in how the politics of self-esteem is played out in today’s US society and culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Although once marginalized in the field of psychotherapy, spirituality and religion have now become established ethical considerations in clinical research and practice.

Drawing from diverse spiritual and religious backgrounds, this book offers clinical guidance for addressing a vast variety of traditions and complex diversity considerations in psychotherapy.

Spiritual Diversity in Psychotherapy: Engaging the Sacred in Clinical Practice (APA, 2021) uses strategies and in-depth case descriptions to serve as a guide for therapists and clinical professionals to effectively integrate spirituality and religion into clinical practice.

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Note: This episodes contains references to suicide.

When a state trooper appeared at Rachel Zimmerman's door to report that her husband had jumped to his death off a nearby bridge, she fell to her knees, unable to fully absorb the news. How could the man she married, a devoted father and robotics professor at MIT, have committed such a violent act? How would she explain this to her young daughters? And could she have stopped him? A longtime journalist, she probed obsessively, believing answers would help her survive. She interviewed doctors, suicide researchers and a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived. Us, After examines domestic devastation and resurgence, digging into the struggle between public and private selves, life's shifting perspectives, the work of motherhood, and the secrets we keep. In Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2024), Zimmerman confronts the unimaginable and discovers the good in what remains.

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In A Boy Broken: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Mental Ilness, Loss, and a Search for Meaning (2023), Dr. Douglas J. Engelman takes us through an often painful, sometimes uplifting story, where he recalls and describes the moment his relationship with his son changed forever - the moment that his son revealed his mental illness to him - and the journey that followed. Dr. Engelman allows the reader to accompany him as he learns about his son’s first psychotic break, witnesses his terrifying accounts of frightening hallucinations, struggle to accept that life would never be the same, and commits to helping his son, no matter what. Through years of the up and downs that so many experience with a serious mental illness, the author and his family ultimately triumph, only to lose Doug in a random auto accident.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the negotiation of identity and place for residents at the neighborhood level. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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The question of whether mental disorders are disorders of the brain has led to a long-running and controversial dispute within psychiatry, psychology and philosophy of mind and psychology. While recent work in neuroscience frequently tries to identify underlying brain dysfunction in mental disorders, detractors argue that labelling mental disorders as brain disorders is reductive and can result in harmful social effects.

Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge, 2024) brings a much-needed philosophical perspective to bear on this important question. Anneli Jefferson argues that while there is widespread agreement on paradigmatic cases of brain disorder such as brain cancer, Parkinson's or Alzheimer’s dementia, there is far less clarity on what the general, defining characteristics of brain disorders are. She identifies influential notions of brain disorder and shows why these are problematic. On her own, alternative, account, what counts as dysfunctional at the level of the brain frequently depends on what counts as dysfunctional at the psychological level. On this notion of brain disorder, she argues, many of the consequences people often associate with the brain disorder label do not follow. She also explores the important practical question of how to deal with the fact that many people do draw unlicensed inferences about treatment, personal responsibility or etiology from the information that a condition is a brain disorder or involves brain dysfunction.

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Today I talked with Stijn Vanheule about Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers (Other Press, 2024).

Are we all a little crazy? Roughly 15 percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. 

Drawing on his work in Lacanian psychoanalysis, Stijn Vanheule seeks to answer this question, which carries significant implications for mental health as a whole. With a combination of theory from Freud to Lacan, present-day research, and compelling examples from his own patients and well-known figures such as director David Lynch and artist Yayoi Kusama, he explores psychosis in an engaging way that can benefit those suffering from it as well as the people who care for and interact with them.

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The Ideas That Rule Us: How Other People's Ideas Rule Our Lives and How to Change it (Prepolitica, 2024), political theory researcher, author, and entrepreneur Nathan J. Murphy takes an eye-opening, multi-disciplinary deep dive into how others’ ideologies, perceived societal norms, and pop culture influences shape our lives, through our decision-making, political affiliations, and consumer spending.

Murphy deftly weaves over four years of political, cognitive, and sociological research into a very relatable and practical discussion about the fascinating origins of the many influential ideas and ideologies that rule our lives. He also examines the undeniable bond between the abstract and the emotional—a relationship that plays a dominant role in the human condition… and the quality of our lived experience.

Recommended by Kirkus Reviews, which calls it, "A well-researched, thought-provoking reconsideration of society’s sacred cows."

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How can Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” shed light on Lacan’s maxim, “The unconscious is structured like a language?” In Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018), professor Derek Hook thoroughly investigates and explains a number of Lacan’s major concepts from his structuralist period, making them accessible to a wide-ranging audience with reference to entertaining examples from popular culture. Hook argues that, while the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis share certain questions and premises, we must, as Lacan insisted, remain alert to the radical disjunction between the objectifying aims of psychology and psychoanalysis’s unique attention to the subject, conceived as an event in language. In this interview, we hear Derek explain several of his book’s key arguments, explore the clinical dimensions of Lacanian theory, and, alongside Derek’s illuminating commentary, listen to Richard Nixon confess his responsibility for Watergate.

Jordan Osserman grew up in South Florida and currently calls London home. He received his PhD in gender studies and psychoanalysis from University College London, his MA in psychosocial studies from Birkbeck College, and his BA in womens and gender studies from Dartmouth College. His published work can be found here.

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Conspiracy theories spread more widely and faster than ever before. Fear and uncertainty prompt people to believe false narratives of danger and hidden plots, but are not sufficient without considering the role and ideological bias of the media. 

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped (Cambridge UP, 2021) focuses on making sense of how and why some people respond to their fear of a threat by creating or believing conspiracy stories. It integrates insights from psychology, political science, communication, and information sciences to provide a complete overview and theory of how conspiracy beliefs manifest. Through this multi-disciplinary perspective, rigorous research develops and tests a practical, simple way to frame and understand conspiracy theories. The book supplies unprecedented amounts of new data from six empirical studies and unpicks the complexity of the process that leads to the empowerment of conspiracy beliefs.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 years to make inclusive and accessible learning products with media organizations such as Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and PBS KIDS. Vinsel and Alper talk about disability studies, the nature of Alper’s empirical work, the arc of Alper’s career, including her future projects.

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When taught properly, yoga can be a healing and life-affirming practice for students experiencing mental illness. Lauren Tober's book Mental Health Aware Yoga: A Guide for Yoga Teachers (Singing Dragon, 2024) will cover the foundations of yoga psychology, therapeutic skills, the mental health crisis, and more. After reading, yoga teachers and trainees will feel confident creating a safe space for their practice.

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Francisco Aboitiz is a professor at the Medical School and the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness (MIT Press, 2024) tells the story of life and nervous systems. It introduces the conceptual framework and terminology of evolution, gives a great overview of our current knowledge and a thorough discussion of open questions.

The first part defines two basic concepts: evolution and life. Surprisingly, we learn that the first definition is more straightforward. If you are challenged by some terminology in the later chapters - like phylogeny, ontogeny, or the different types of homology - it is highly recommended to revisit the definitions in the first chapter.

The story begins in the second part. Chapter 3 introduces multiple theories on how the first cells might have appeared. In the next chapter, these cells start to form more complex, multicellular organisms. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the main characteristics and early history of neurons.

In the third part, we get acquinted with more complex animals. In chapter 6 with the bilaterians, in chapter 7 and 8 with the vertebrates and their nervous system, in chapter 9 with mammals. Chapter 10 provides a deep dive into the neocortex and its role in cognition.

The fourth part of the book is about "a singular ape". Chapter 11 describes the history of primates, focusing on Hominins. It goes into details on various aspects like walking, the growth of brains, toolmaking, and social life. Chapter 12 describes the evolution of vocal communication. Chapter 13 discusses how speech has influenced communication and social life. Chapter 14 explores numerous open questions around consciousness. How to define it? When and how did it emerge in evolution? Which animals are conscious and in which ways? After this long history, chapter 15 arrives in the present and the future. What are some current evolutionary trends? How do cultural and technological changes influence our nervous systems?

In our conversation with Professor Aboitiz, we focused on a few remarkable milestones in this story. For start, he outlined some theories how life might have begun.

Then a huge jump in time followed: How the first mammals appeared and survived in a world dominated by dinosaurs. Professor Aboitiz elaborated on how the brains of mammals differ from the brains of other vertebrates. He described the cerebral cortex, a new part in the mammalian brain. The role of senses changed significantly: The early mammals had worse vision, but better smell, touch, and audition compared to other vertebrates. Changes in the anatomy of the head and neck supported these more developed senses. The enhanced olfactory system is also related to the hippocampus, where some new skills appeared: advanced spatial orientation and short-term memory.

The next milestone we discussed in detail is the appearance of language. Professor Aboitiz shared some fascinating facts about the vocal communication of birds and primates. He explained the connection between toolmaking and language. He described the speech loop and the connection between working memory and talking. He proposes that manual gestures and vocal communication have evolved together, and communication has always been multi-modal.

The last part of our conversation focused on the current and future situation. How culture and technology has changed our nervous system, e.g. how a brain area is particularly involved in reading. Professor Aboitiz also discussed the more recent technological innovations and their effects on society and the environment. He introduced the social projects conducted by the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience. The project RIEN (Robótica Integral Educativa & Neurociencia) facilitates workshops where kids work in teams with rotating roles to build and program robots.

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There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Jennifer Chudy is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Dr. Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Dr. Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Dr. Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring.

Mentioned

• Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
• Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing (2019)
• Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k (2016)
• Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…. (1997)
• Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (2012)
• New Thought (philosophy? religious movement?)
• Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)
• Orison Swett Marden, How to Succeed (1896)
• David Riesman et al. The Lonely Crowd (1950)
• Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1945)
• Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (1982)
• Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. (2007; concept of”self-belabourment”)
• Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less
• Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019)
• Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2015)

Recallable books

• Epictetus, Handbook (125 C.E.)
• Sheil Heti, How Should a Person Be (2012)
• Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
• Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904)

Read Here:

38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today

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This podcast describes a short history of a man who did something we’ve lost in America. That man was James Baldwin who insisted on telling the truth. He confronted the harsh realities of racism, believing that exposing its ugliness was necessary for progress. He rejected simplistic solutions, arguing that racism was deeply rooted in American consciousness and imagination, beyond just political and economic inequalities. Instead, Baldwin called for a fundamental transformation of American society and identity. He critiqued white America, urging white Americans to confront their own behavior and complicity in racist systems.

Controversially, Baldwin advocated for Black Americans to approach white countrymen with love, while still insisting on unconditional freedom, seeing this as necessary for true transformation. He ultimately wanted to build a nation that moved beyond racial categorization, focusing instead on individual humanity. Baldwin viewed racism as stemming from a deeper spiritual problem in America, where individuals and the nation lacked a true sense of identity. While he did not offer simple solutions to racism, Baldwin's penetrating analysis and powerful writing exposed the complexities of racism in our country, challenged both white and Black Americans to confront difficult truths, and provided a framework for understanding racism beyond just political reforms. His work continues to influence discussions on race in America today, aiming not to ameliorate racism in a superficial sense, but to push for a profound reckoning with and transformation of American society and identity in relation to race.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a powerful novel that explores the complexities of race, sexuality, and identity in America through the life of its protagonist, Leo Proud/hammer. As the story begins, Leo, a successful African-American actor, suffers from a heart attack. As he recovers he reflects on his life and relationships.

It is also of interest to note how James Baldwin’s novel relates to Dr. Matin Luther King Jr.’s non-fiction book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

Both books are discussed in terms of the major contributions they made to racism in America as well as how they illustrate psychoanalytic mechanism of defense.

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In Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives (Dutton Books, 2020), Daniel J. Levitin delivers powerful insights:

• Debunking the myth that memory always declines with age

• Confirming that “health span”—not “life span”—is what matters

• Proving that sixty-plus years is a unique and newly recognized developmental stage

• Recommending that people look forward to joy, as reminiscing doesn’t promote health

Levitin looks at the science behind what we all can learn from those who age joyously, as well as how to adapt our culture to take full advantage of older people’s wisdom and experience. Throughout his exploration of what aging really means, using research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive- enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age.

Successful Aging inspires a powerful new approach to how readers think about our final decades, and it will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens within a society where the average life expectancy continues to rise. 

Victoria Reedman is a resident doctor in Toronto studying neurology with some health systems work on the side.

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The Great War haunted the British Empire. Shell shocked soldiers relived the war's trauma through waking nightmares consisting of mutilated and grotesque figures. Modernist writers released memoirs condemning the war as a profane and disenchanting experience. Yet British and Dominion soldiers and their families also read prophecies about the coming new millennium, experimented with séances, and claimed to see the ghosts of their loved ones in dreams and in photographs. On the battlefields, they had premonitions and attributed their survival to angelic, psychic, or spiritual forces. For many, the war was an enchanting experience that offered proof of another world and the transcendental properties of the mind. Between 1914 and 1939, an array of ghosts lived in the minds of British subjects as they navigated the shocking toll that death in modern war exerted in their communities.

Kyle Falcon is a historian specialising in the British Empire during the First World War. He is based in Ontario, Canada.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Sandra Buechler joins hosts Christopher Bandini and Tracy Morgan to discuss her latest book, Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living: Addressing Life's Challenges in Clinical Practice (Routledge, 2019), which continues her long standing exploration of the role of values in the work of psychoanalysis. The book discusses the many common difficulties that drive patients into treatment, such as loss, a hunger for meaningful work, the wish for revenge, aging, queries over forgiveness, struggles with guilt and shame. Buechler shows us how the analyst’s values inevitably shape their approach to these common topics, tilting treatments in myriad directions. As is her wont, she engages with poetry to deepen her explanations. She tells us that each of her books is generated by questions left unanswered in the previous one. And in each book, including this one, we see her in conversation with her forebears, particularly Sullivan, Fromm and Fromm-Reichman—what she calls her internal chorus. 

What makes this interview especially rich is the discussion between Bandini, her former supervisee of 14 years and herself. She is a member of his internal chorus. Their tone with each other has a familiarity and warmth. But they have both had to face the loss of that particular way of relating, supervisor to supervisee. Buechler most recently retired from clinical work, making her a maverick in a profession where “dying in one’s chair” is not exactly a joke.

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A serious illness often changes the way others see us. Few, if any, relationships remain the same. The sick become more dependent on partners and family members, while more distant contacts become strained. The carers of the ill are also often isolated. This book focuses on our sense of self when ill and how infirmity plays out in our relationships with others.

In Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (Reaktion, 2024) Dr. Neil Vickers and Dr. Derek Bolton offer an original perspective, drawing on neuroscience, psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as memoirs of the ill or their carers, to reveal how a sense of connectedness and group belonging can not only improve care, but make societies more resilient to illness. This is an essential book on the experience of major illness.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. 

In Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish (Stanford University Press, 2024), Naomi Seidman takes a different approach, turning her gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.

Interviewee: Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts at the University of Toronto, a National Jewish Book Award winner, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Listener note: This interview contains discussions of suicide. 

Youth and Suicide in American Cinema: Context, Causes, and Consequences (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) explores the depiction of suicide in American youth films from 1900 to 2019. Anchored in Sociology, this multidisciplinary study investigates the causes and consequences of suicide and uncovers the socio-cultural context for the development of youth, film, and suicide. While such cinematic portrayals seem to privilege external explanations of suicide versus internal or psychological ones, overall they are neither rich nor sensitive. Most are simplistic, limited or at the very least unbalanced. At times, they are flatly controversial. In light of this overall problematic depiction of suicide, this book offers a proactive approach to empower young audiences--a media literacy strategy to embrace while watching these films.

A Fulbright grantee and an award-winning artist, Alessandra Seggi (PhD in Sociology and MA in Media Studies) teaches at Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA.

Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories.

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There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events--and treatments--can affect people in such different ways.

In The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health (Princeton UP, 2024), Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health--actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life's turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain--from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods--a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend--work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders.

Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.

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Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.”

Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs.

In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design.

In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.

Joy Knoblauch is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture's engagement with politics and science.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light. 

In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard UP, 2023), Neil Van Leeuwen draws on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence to show that psychological mechanisms underlying religious beliefs function like those that enable imaginative play. 

When someone pretends, they navigate the world on two levels simultaneously, or as Van Leeuwen describes it, by consulting two maps. The first map is that of factual, mundane reality. The second is a map of the imagined world. This second map is then superimposed on top of the first to create a multi-layered cognitive experience that is consistent with both factual and imaginary understandings. 

With this model in mind, we can understand religious belief, which Van Leeuwen terms religious "credence", as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express values they hold as sacred. Religious communities create a religious-credence map which sits on top of their factual-belief map, creating an experience where ordinary objects and events are rich with sacred and supernatural significance. 

Recognizing that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways allows us to gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith.

Author recommended reading:

• The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich.

Mentioned resources: 

• Lecture 'But... But... But... Extremists!' by Neil van Leeuwen
• Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran

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An award-winning childhood grief expert shares clinically-informed advice for supporting kids and teens through difficult times--from family deaths and lost pets to unexpected moves, and beyond.

A necessary and impactful guide to understanding children's grief from the inside and to guiding children through loss, from the death of a parent and other family members, to the loss of friends, pets, and even the family home. Dr. Masur, an award-winning clinical psychologist specializing in grief and mourning, describes how to understand, help, and guide children at each age and stage of development and uses her own childhood experience with loss through empathetic yet clinically informed advice.

When Dr. Masur was fourteen years old, her father died. Like most children and teens facing loss, Masur didn't know how to handle her grief, and she was never encouraged to acknowledge or share what she was feeling with her family, teachers, or friends. Her experience of shock and emotional paralysis around her loss is what led her to become an expert in childhood grief in order to help grieving children and to help others to support the children in their lives who have experienced loss.

As a psychologist and child psychoanalyst, Dr. Masur has helped many children recognize and express their feelings after loss. In How Children Grieve: What Adults Miss, and What They Can Do to Help (Alcove Press, 2024), Masur shares her expertise with caregivers of all kinds, giving them the tools they need to help a child or teenager mourn, move forward, and make meaning of terrible loss.

Prior to a high school teaching career, Judith Tanen worked in the visual arts field. Still, her educational pursuits have been driven by a passion for language in its varied forms, specifically, communication, intersubjectivity and the hidden worlds inside our minds. These interests prompted this current pursuit: travelling into the psyche and gaining insight into the complicated, inexplicable and always enlightening ways of living and making sense of experience -- indeed, life itself.

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Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts enter an emotional relationship when they treat a patient; no matter how experienced they may be, their personalities inform but also limit their ability to recognize and give thought to what happens in the consulting room. 

The Psychoanalyst’s Superegos, Ego Ideals and Blind Spots: The Emotional Development of the Clinician (Routledge, 2019) investigates the nature of these constrictions on the clinician’s sensitivity. Vic Sedlak examines clinicians’ fear of a superego which threatens to become censorious of themselves or their patient and their need to aspire to standards demanded by their ego ideals. These dynamic forces are considered in relation to treatments which fail, to supervision and to recent innovations in psychoanalytic technique. The difficulty of giving thought to hostility is particularly stressed. Richly illustrated with clinical material, this book will enable practitioners to recognize the unconscious forces which militate against their clinical effectiveness.

Vic Sedlak is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society in private practice in the North of England.

Christopher Russell is a Psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan.

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From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles - a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor - psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illustrates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.

Mariana Craciun is Associate Professor in Sociology at Tulane University. As a cultural sociologist, she is interested in the issues of expertise, professions, science, and technology. Her writings on psychotherapeutic expertise and authority and was published in top peer reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Behavioral scientist Alison Fragale offers powerful new insights and a practical playbook for women to advance in any workplace, full of tips, tricks, and strategies to help secure that elusive corner office.

Over decades of research, speaking engagements, and mentorship, psychologist and professor Alison Fragale encountered recurring questions from high powered and early career women alike: How do women thread the needle of kindness and competence in the workplace? How can women earn credit for their accomplishments, negotiate better, and navigate complex office politics without losing the goodwill of their peers?

Fragale investigated and determined that many women's workplace issues boil down to what psychologists call status: the perception of them by others. No amount of power-- no degree, title, or paycheck-- will raise a woman's workplace stature unless it also affects how others see her. Acknowledging this roadblock, Fragale pulls back the curtain on how we can change how others see us by developing our standing as a "likeable badass." By cultivating perceptions of warmth and assertiveness, women can achieve the kind of reputation that leads to a seat at the table and a fulfilling career path.

Likeable Badass: The New Science of Successful Women (Doubleday Books, 2024) is equal parts behavioral science and life hacks, weaving together rigorous research with actionable advice and impactful stories from a diverse array of women. This is a warm, heartening book written for women, their allies, and anyone who struggles to rise, and wants evidence-based, practical strategies for success, served with a side of inspiration and humor.

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In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future. 

Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

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Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable--and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic's "Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief" begins with his grief for the unexpected and early loss of his mother: "I stopped grieving or at least the grief diminished, yet the reason didn't really change. It's not like that my mother stopped mattering to me or that I stopped loving her, but still this change in grief somehow seemed reasonable." What are philosophers and the rest of us to make of this durable insight?

John is lucky to be joined in this discussion of Beri's thoughts on grief by by his new Brandeis philosophy colleague, Katie Elliott. She is not afraid to complicate things further, proposing to Beri that we distinguish between the immediate affective intensity of the initial loss and persistent negative emotions towards the fact of the loss, even when that initial affective heat of loss has faded. Beri reponds that emotions are "thinking with feeling" and we maybe want to be skeptical about splitting the two.

Beri sees two aspects of grief: "On the one hand, the vision of loss that is constituted by grief and on the other hand, a vision of grief from a empirical or as some philosophers, like to say, a creature construction perspective." It is wrong to make a pragmatist case for the sheerly functional advantages of getting over grief, and also a mistake to see (like Sigmund Freud) grief as a kind of work, a task, to detach oneself from the mourned object.

John asks what it means that he personalizes his sensation of grief, focussing not on the lost beloved, but on the way the beloved, or the lost beloved, remains present to him, a loss felt inside himself. Beri invokes Iris Murdoch's warning against the "fat relentless ego" (The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, p 50) intruding itself--when what really should be at stake is the lost object of one's grief. Beri closes by suggesting that grief doesn't happen to us in the way digestion happens (purely involuntary). Sure, grief is not strictly controllable, and yet because it is reasons responsive rather than simply somatic, it is me.

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The third podcast in this series focuses on an article written by Dr. Dionne Powell who participated in the 2014 documentary, “Black Psychoanalysts Speak,” which was an excellent film created by Basia Winograd. Dr. Powell’s JAPA article written in 2018 was entitled, “Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Situation.” This is a an important illustration of racism in America and ties in nicely with our topic about psychoanalytic mechanisms of defense.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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You Will Get Through This: A Mental Health First-Aid Kit (Experiment, 2024) was written by three practicing therapists to serve as a tool kit. Drawing on the techniques the book’s authors Julie Radico, Nicole Halverson and Charity O’Reilly use with their own clients, You Will Get Through This offers a holistic understanding of more than twenty common life challenges, plus compassionate and evidence-based strategies for when you’re struggling. In each chapter, you’ll find what the research says about the issue, coping mechanisms that are used in actual therapy rooms, step-by-step guidance on using these strategies in real life and overcoming common obstacles, and tips for communicating with your loved ones. You will also find practical advice on accessing professional help, deciding if a therapist is the right fit for you (and breaking up with them if they’re not), and paying for therapy.

Our guest is: Dr. Julie Radico, a board-certified clinical health psychologist with ten years of experience working in primary care settings. In 2023, she opened an independent consulting, coaching, and therapy practice. She holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology and master’s degrees in clinical psychology & counseling and clinical health psychology. She is the co-author—with Charity O’Reilly and Dr. Nicole Helverson—of You Will Get Through This: A Mental Health First-Aid Kit.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy this playlist:

• Mindfulness
• Talking to Strangers
• Being Well in Academia
• Tell Me What You Want
• Belonging : The Science of Creating Connection
• The Good-Enough Life
• The Value of Taking A Break from Overworking and Underliving
• Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD
• Addiction and Sobriety in Academia
• Making A Meaningful Life

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? Find them all here.

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In Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst (Routledge, 2019), Barnaby Barratt illuminates a new perspective on the radicality of genuinely psychoanalytic discourse as the unique science of healing.

Starting with an incisive critique of the ideological conformism of psychotherapy, Barratt defines the method of psychoanalysis against the conventional definition, which emphasizes the practice of arriving at useful interpretations about our personal existence. Instead, he shows how a negatively dialectical and deconstructive praxis successfully ‘attacks’ the self-enclosures of interpretation, allowing the speaking-listening subject to become existentially and spiritually open to hidden dimensions of our lived-experience. He also demonstrates how the erotic deathfulness of our being-in-the-world is the ultimate source of all the many resistances to genuinely psychoanalytic praxis, and the reason Freud’s discipline has so frequently been reduced to various models of psychotherapeutic treatment. Focusing on the free-associative dimension of psychoanalysis, Barratt both explores what psychoanalytic processes can achieve that the psychotherapeutic one cannot, and consider the sociopolitical implications of the radical psychoanalytic ‘take’ on the human condition. The book also offers a detailed and compassionate pointer for those wanting to train as psychoanalysts, guiding them away from what Barratt calls the ‘trade-school mentality pervading most training institutes today.

Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles. He is candidate at The Psychoanalytic Center of California. He can be reached at [email protected] and his website address is https://www.psychologytoday.com/profile/228002

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In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (U Chicago Press, 2024) explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

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Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, Chater first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

Dr. Nick Chater is Professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School and cofounder of Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

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In growing numbers, athletes are speaking up about their struggles with mental illness—including high-profile stars such as Michael Phelps, Kevin Love, Simone Biles, and Naomi Osaka. More disclosures are surely on the way, as athletes recognize that their openness can help others and inspire those around them.

In Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), Julie Kliegman offers insight into how elite athletes navigate mental performance and mental illness—and what non-athletes can learn from them. She explores the recent mental health movement in sports, the history and practice of sport psychology, the stereotypes and stigmas that lead athletes to keep their troubles to themselves, and the ways in which injury and retirement can throw wrenches in their mental states. Kliegman also examines the impacts of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, substance use, and more, with a keen eye toward moving forward with acceptance, progress, and problem-solving.

Featuring insightful interviews with Olympians Chloe Kim, McKayla Maroney, and Adam Rippon, NBA players Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, former U.S. Open tennis champ Bianca Andreescu, and many other athletes and experts, Mind Game breaks down the ongoing, heartening movement of athletes across sports coming forward to get the care they need and deserve—and to help others feel safe opening up about their struggles, as well.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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What does Donald Moss have against common sense, Captain Obvious, sincerity, and everything duh!? At War with the Obvious: Disruptive Thinking in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018) turns to culture and the clinic to reach beneath semblance, the lure of affect, and the comforts of doxa, and to discuss “erotic thought,” rupture, and conceptual transgression. Moss is interested in how flashes of profound epistemological disorientation and isolation are transmuted into potentiality and theory: from fragmenting “zones of uncertainty” and the suffocating flood of experience we might — as analysts, artists, writers, and political actors — manage our way back to sociality and thinking, safely ashore and reconstituted but not the same.

As in his previous books, Moss writes courageously, revealing his own periodic struggles with smugness and easy solutions – moments when he, unable to analyze or gather himself – lashed out, fled, and recovered with great difficulty. In a particularly compelling chapter, Moss describes his experience of terror, shame, and rage when a violent patient threatens to hit him in the face and leaves the consulting room shouting “faggot!” The epithet later erupts in Moss as he waits on a subway platform next to an effeminate man and resounds in the reader as Moss parses his identifications and disidentifications, both with the ostensibly gay stranger and with physical and psychic vulnerability.

In the chapter, “On thinking and not being able to think,” Moss reflects on what happens when he observes objects, specifically performance art and documentary photographs, and endures an unexpected collapse of the frame, a sudden loss of legibility. Moss recounts such a disintegration while viewing photos of Abu Ghraib, and attributes it not to the photos’ disturbing subject matter but to their uncanny registering of his look: when the spectator’s gaze appears within the framed spectacle his subjectivity is obliterated. Captured by the photograph, losing his privileged perspective and link to other audience members, Moss is momentarily rendered an object. Without a stable “I” he is unable to interpret. He concludes that the capacity to create a new frame and thereby regain distance depends on the re-establishment of a transferential “we” — a refinding of one’s place among an expanded and transformed community of viewers and readers.

The book’s most original and moving chapter, “I and You,” is the result of a yearlong collection of patients’ utterances. Moss wrote down one sentence from every session, collated each day’s lines, and published them in abridged form in At War With the Obvious (all 154 days are presented in a separate book). Together they constitute a dirge, a mournful cry made no less searing by its unstable and acousmatic authorship.

Anna Fishzon, PhD is Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK. She is a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, The Candidate Journal, Russian Literature Journal, Slavic and East European Journal, Laboratorium, and other academic publications. She can be reached at [email protected].

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In this podcast, Ashis Roy (Psychoanalyst (IPA) and author of the recently published book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships (Yoda Press, 2024) is in conversation with Dhwani Shah, MD. Shah is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Supervising Analyst and instructor at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.

Together they engage with Late Sudhir Kakar´s last book the Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations (Karnac, 2024). Shah reflects on Kakar´s contributions to psychoanalysis and on some of the pillars in Kakar´s writing.

About the Indian Jungle

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Western. Although the terroirs of psychoanalysis in South America, France, Italy, England, the United States, and so on have important differences, they all share a strong family resemblance which distinguishes them clearly from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other non-Western terroirs.

Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. Thus, ideas that are historically and culturally only true of and limited to modern Western, specifically European and North American middle-class experience, have been incorporated unquestioningly into psychoanalytic thought.

In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted. Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the modern West. This book of essays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities.

The perfect book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, cultural psychologists, anthropologists, students of South Asian, cultural, and post-colonial studies, and anyone interested in the current and possible future shape of psychoanalytic thought.

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Today I talked to Dianne Elise about her book Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field (Routledge, 2019).

To be in the presence of a person—a woman in fact, and Dianne Elise in particular—who follows her instincts, someone who builds theory from the ground up, and whose theories keep evolving, enlivens the interlocutor. I almost hesitate to say more about this interview for fear it will not live up to the interview itself!

We could not record our eye contact, such as it can be (hobbled and skewed) on Zoom, but that we were in a lot of contact during our time together can probably be felt, acoustically and otherwise. I think she is among the most cutting edge thinkers in our field, precisely because she says new things, or things we all know to be true but hesitate (our inhibiting ourselves for fear of making some people uneasy) to articulate. She dares to answer Freud’s question regarding what a woman wants, and then she goes even further explaining, deconstructing really, why that question needs to remain never-endingly elusive.

For about 25 years Elise has been persistently working on opening up psychoanalytic thinking about female development, creativity and the erotics of motherhood and clinical work. Here she shares with us a bit of the story of her own development which includes her foundational encounter with feminism in the 1970s and with the writings of Freudian the thinking of Ogden thereafter. Her first publication reflects her foray into the work of Mahler, Bergman and Pine, which led her coming to question the presumption that girls and boys share the same experience of early life. This was followed by her utter re-working of the so called “negative oedipal”, moving it from the category of anomaly and placing it in the realm of the average and the expectable for girls. Not quite Winnicottian, Feminist, Relational or Field, she has blended these schools of thought to create something of her own—dare I say, and the play on words is simply irresistible, Elysian?

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Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.

This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. 

An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.

You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. 

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists–including Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein.

In this three-part series in partnership with Canada’s National Observer, Cited Podcast investigates the forgotten legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the research that followed. This first part, an Alaskan Nightmare, covers the spill and its immediate effects. Subsequent episodes will run weekly. Subscribe today to ensure you do not miss part #2, 12 Angry Alaskans, and part #3, Damaging Rationality.

This is episode five of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Using one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s major ideas as a springboard for their discussion, “The truth will set you free,” the host and co-host discussed psychoanalytic mechanism of defense starting with denial which can emerge when a topic is too painful or difficult to face. A productive dialogue followed that focused on Dr. Filipe Copeland’s description of two different types of denial, Strategic Denial and Psychological Denial as described in “The American Psychoanalyst” (TAP) in an interview with Dr. Austin Ratner, editor-in-chief of the magazine. Amanual Elias’s paper, “Racism as Neglect and Denial” was also mentioned. Stay tuned for more discussions about the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking can help to explain racism in America.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited seven books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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In Cow Hug Therapy: How the Animals at the Gentle Barn Taught Me about Life, Death, and Everything in Between (New World Library, 2024), Ellie Laks recounts the extraordinary journey that started with her first teacher, Buddha -- not the religious figure, but a rescued miniature Hereford cow. One evening Buddha wrapped her neck around an exhausted and upset Ellie and transferred a singular form of healing and comfort with an incredible impact. Understanding that this was something to be shared with others, Ellie developed Cow Hug Therapy, a groundbreaking approach to emotional healing that has proved effective for trauma, illness, disabilities, addiction, grief, and stress.

This colorful and compelling narrative introduces the healing mavens of the barnyard, each with a unique story of being rescued from trauma and treated with love and respect. In their new role at Ellie's Gentle Barn sanctuaries, these animals have transformed lives and ignited breakthroughs and newfound purpose for visitors including a young mother who lost her baby, a suicidal teenager, a wounded serviceman, an open-heart-surgery patient, and many more. A testament to empathy and the mission to heal animals, people, and the planet, Cow Hug Therapy serves as a beacon of hope for all seeking healing and connection.

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The little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics. In Making Modern Medical Ethics: How African Americans, Anti-Nazis, Bureaucrats, Feminists, Veterans, and Whistleblowing Moralists Created Bioethics (MIT Press, 2024), Robert Baker tells the counter history of the birth of bioethics, bringing to the fore the stories of the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged the establishment. Drawing on his earlier work on moral revolutions and the history of medical ethics, Robert Baker traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by the many unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and healthcare professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The standard narrative for bioethics typically emphasizes the morally disruptive medical technologies of the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the dialysis machine, the electroencephalograph, and the ventilator, as they created the need to reconsider traditional notions of medical ethics. 

Baker, however, tells a fresh narrative, one that has historically been neglected (e.g., the story of the medical veterans who founded an international medical organization to rescue medicine and biomedical research from the scandal of Nazi medicine), and also reveals the penalties that moral change agents paid (e.g., the stubborn bureaucrat who was demoted for her insistence on requiring and enforcing research subjects’ informed consent). Analyzing major statements of modern medical ethics from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials and Nuremberg Code to A Patient’s Bill of Rights, Making Modern Medical Ethics is a winning history of just how respect and autonomy for patients and research subjects came to be codified.

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Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. 

In the decades after, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger: a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization are reduced to “crazy chick” and “madwoman” narratives. She searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her. Committed is a story of discovery and of questioning linear and neat ideas of recovery. It reclaims the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Audre Lorde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Shulamith Firestone, and others.

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of the memoir Committed, which was recently published with from Vintage in Spring 2024. She is also the author of two works of fiction, Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Granta, BOMB, Fence, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, and elsewhere. Scanlon has a BA from Barnard College and both an MFA and an MA from Northwestern University.

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On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives. 

Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done? 

In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nuria Silleras-Fernandez explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Dr. Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason.

Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Dr. Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in mediaeval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Stefanie Coché's Psychiatric Institutions and Society: the Practice of Psychiatric Commital in the “Third Reich,” the Democratic Republic of Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1941-1963 (London: Routledge, 2024; translated by Alex Skinner) probes how the serious and sometimes fatal decision was made to admit individuals to asylums during Germany’s age of extremes. The book shows that - even during the Nazi killing of the sick - relatives played an even more important role in most admissions than doctors and the authorities.

In light of admission practices, this study traces how ideas about illness, safety, and normality changed when the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945 and illuminates how closely power configurations in the psychiatric sector were linked to political and social circumstances in the early years of both German successor states.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner.

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A group of landholding elites waged psychological warfare on the El Salvadoran people, and oppressed them for generations. When a psychologist and Jesuit priest defended the rationality of the people against their oppressors, he paid the ultimate price.

This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also listen to the trailer for next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Public.

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Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism.

The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternatives simply pile up and seem to lead nowhere.

In an original and compelling account of radical experimentation in psychiatry, Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services throughout the 20th century: a radical current pushing totalizing and idealistic visions of care to their practical limits and a reactionary one content with managing or eliminating chronically idle surplus populations.

Moral treatment is read in light of the utopian socialist movement; the theory of communication in the French Institutional Psychotherapy of Félix Guattari is put into conversation with the Brazilian art therapy of Nise da Silveira; the Mexican anti-psychiatry movement's reflections on violence are thought together with theories of violence developed in Argentinian psychoanalysis and Frantz Fanon's anticolonial therapeutic practice; the social form of the Italian Democratic Psychiatry and Brazilian anti-institutional movements are contrasted with the anti-psychiatry factions of the 1960s-70s North American counterculture.

Storming Bedlam: Madness, Mental Health, and Revolt (Common Notions, 2024) subverts the divisions between social and biological approaches to mental health or between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. By exploring the history of psychiatry in the context of revolution, war, and economic development, Warren outlines a minor history of approaches to mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation.

Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis. His experiences within the psychiatric system and commitment to radical politics led him to cofound the group Hearing Voices Twin Cities, which provides an alternative social space for individuals to discuss often stigmatized extreme experiences and network with one-another. Following the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, he founded the project Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry, social work, and public health's connections to policing, prisons, and various disciplinary and managerial technologies.

Resources:

• North American Networks of Alternatives to Psychiatry altpsy.net
• Of Unsound Mind Substack

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Today I talked to Avgi Saketopoulou about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023).

My conversation with Dr. Saketopoulou begins in the clinic “one of the most scary and difficult places one can find oneself in” she says because it is in the consulting room that sometimes things “become traumatic for the first time.” It is here that Saketopoulou first shares her affection for “early radical psychoanalytic thinking” which

“put a lot of faith on the possibilities that come from that wounding and from the kind of potentialities that can arise in something becoming kind of like opening up in the consulting room into pain, as opposed to what we are mostly turning towards to as a field in ways that I find both distressing and disappointing, like the idea of healing wounds, of closing up injuries, as if we could ever do that anyway, which I think we can't, rather than embracing or giving ourselves over to what I think is both the insurgent and most interesting radical potential of psychoanalytic treatments in in getting to that place where sort of like injury, wound, like the past opens up to become not just something that we lived through or something that we were told about, but something that becomes yours.”

As clinicians we are susceptible to counter transferential enactments when we cooperate with terms such as damage and “too muchnesss”. To engage with these concepts without considering what they imply risks missing “the way in which whiteness is smuggled into our theories.” “This idea of damage implies the idea of intactness” an idea, says Saketopoulou, “allied with whiteness.” When considering what might be considered “too much” she asks us to “move us away from the almost moralizing concern that psychoanalysis has had about too muchness as if there is a way to do kind of like the Goldilocks measurement of like not too not too much, just right.”

Our discussion moved easily from the clinic, to a theoretical "geeking out" over how her concept of overwhelm is “not in the purview of the repetition compulsion” to “social contract theory 101”

During the interview, reference is made to the original 1905 edition of Freud’s Three Essays. Here, Saketopoulou relates to Freud as one might to an aging rock star; preferring their earlier work. She argues that this original text will help us live and practice a “psychoanalysis that is worth fighting for” and what “it means to take seriously, these kinds of entanglements with violence, with trauma, without seeking to make them disappear or to reduce them by, quote unquote, understanding them.”

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Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Dr. Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks.

Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 2024) examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The psychological establishment has long pathologized diverse forms of sexual identity and gender expression. In the mid-century, a brave movement of gays and lesbians fought back and claimed: no, actually, we’re healthy. But in the process, did they define other identities unhealthy?

This is episode two of Cited Podcast's returning season, the Rationality Wars. It tells stories about the political and intellectual battles to define rationality and irrational. For the rest of the series, visit citedpodcast.com. You will be able find this on all the relevant podcatchers (Apple, Spotify, etc.). If you use something else or you cannot find our feed, you can manually add our RSS feed.

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In Law and Personality Disorder: Human Rights, Human Risks, and Rehabilitation (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin considers the controversial and under-researched concern of what to do with dangerous people with severe personality disorders. She brings together scientific evidence, law and policy, to consider risk prevention, public security and human rights. This is a controversial area of law and policy, informed by ongoing debates about 'dangerous' offenders which exists at the intersection of liberal legal principles and advocates of social defence. 

In today's conversation, we spoke about preventative detention, the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention and risk management, gaps in human rights protections, and the assumptions that the legal principles and processes that govern this population are founded on. O'Loughlin draws out key issues for reform and calls for further evidence-based inquiry with regards to criminal defences, sentencing and dispositions. This will be an important book for policy makers, legal academics, psychiatrists and anyone who works with this category of offenders. 

Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin is a Senior Lecturer at York Law School, at The University of York. Her research focuses on the intersection between mental health and criminal justice.  

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To give up or not to give up? The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.

Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.

There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment--an attempt to make a different future.

In On Giving Up (FSG, 2024), the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?

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Every protest movement has been dismissed as a mere ‘mindless mob,’ caught in a psychological frenzy. Where did this idea come from, and why does it last? Gustave Le Bon.

This is episode one of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. You can also hear a trailer of next week’s episode, the (ir)Rational Rainbow, on their website.

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Why do we want what we want? Philosopher, theologian, and literary critic René Girard posits that we draw our desires largely from the people around us, a fact which has implications for everything from how we should plan our careers to the direction of foreign policy. Following a career spanning business, religious discernment, and academia, Luke Burgis joins Madison's Notes to explore Girard's philosophy of desire. Along the way, he delves into the concept of 'political atheism,' America's struggle with China, the future of social media, and why artificial intelligence will render the humanities more relevant than ever.

Luke Burgis is Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Director of Programs & Projects at the Ciocca Center at Catholic University of America, as well as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Business in the Busch School. He has founded and led multiple companies and is the founder and director of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator for people and companies that contribute to the formation of a healthy human ecology. He is a graduate of NYU's Stern School of Business and of a pontifical university in Rome, where he studied theology. He is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin's Press, 2021), and his next book, The One and the Ninety-Nine will be released in 2026. If you can't wait that long, he also has a popular Substack.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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John T. Maier's The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction (Routledge Press, 2024) defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities - disabilities of the will - and that addiction is best understood as a species of volitional disability. This theory serves to illuminate long-standing philosophical and psychological perplexities about addiction and addictive motivation. It articulates a normative framework within which to understand prohibition, harm reduction, and other strategies that aim to address addiction. The argument of this book is that these should ultimately be evaluated in terms of reasonable accommodations for addicted people and that the priority of addiction policy should be the provision of such accommodations. What makes this book distinctive is that it understands addiction as a fundamentally political problem, an understanding that is suggested by standard legal approaches to addiction, but which has not received a sustained defense in the previous philosophical or psychological literature. This text marks a significant advance in the theory of addiction, one which should reshape our understanding of addiction policy and its proper aims.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

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A nuanced, science-based understanding of the creative mind that dispels the pervasive myths we hold about the human brain—but also uncovers the truth at their cores. What is the relationship between creativity and madness? Creativity and intelligence? Do psychedelics truly enhance creativity? How should we understand the left and right hemispheres of the brain? Is the left brain, in fact, the seat of reasoning and the right brain the seat of creativity? 

These are just some of the questions Anna Abraham, a renowned expert of human creativity and the imagination, explores in The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths (MIT Press, 2024), a fascinating deep dive into the origins of the seven most common beliefs about the human brain. Rather than endorse or debunk these myths, Abraham traces them back to their origins to explain just how they started and why they spread—and what at their core is the truth. Drawing on theoretical and empirical work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Abraham offers an examination of human creativity that reveals the true complexity underlying our conventional beliefs about the brain. 

The chapters in the book explore the myth of the right brain as the hemisphere responsible for creativity; the relationship between madness and creativity, psychedelics and creativity, atypical brains and creativity, and intelligence and creativity; the various functions of dopamine; and lastly, the default mode revolution, which theorized that the brain regions most likely to be involved in the creative process are those areas of the brain that are most active during rest or mind-wandering. An accessible and engaging read, The Creative Brain gets to the heart of how our creative minds work and why some people are more creative than others, offering illuminating insights into what on its surface seems to be an endlessly magical phenomenon.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

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The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particularly projective identification was discussed as one specific reason why change has been slow. The host and co-host also talked about the some of the reasons why it is important for white people to listen to the Black experience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community was also considered because of its relevance today.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

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One of the most significant sources of suffering comes from our human tendency to avoid difficult emotions. We are not taught how to face these unpleasant, often daily inner experiences (mind-body energies) and so we tend to push them away, ignore them, or become unwittingly overwhelmed by them. Yet how we meet and greet these difficult emotions has everything to do with our well-being, resilience, and ability to connect with ourselves and others.Instinctually, we fight against our uncomfortable emotions; in doing so, we reinforce messages of “not good enough” or “something is wrong with me that I am feeling this way.”

In You Don't Have to Change to Change Everything (Health Communications, 2024), readers learn that instead of forcing themselves to feel “happy” and pushing away what is unpleasant, or instead of getting hooked by intense emotions, another path can lead to more profound well-being. Rather than trying to change one’s inner experiences, this book offers six ways to shift one’s vantage point when difficult emotions arise. Being aware from each of these six vantage points allows readers to cultivate inner stability, willingness to turn toward rather than away from themselves, greater perspective, internal strengths and inner resources, self-compassion, connection with the “Whole Self” versus identification with “hole self,” and interconnection with the world around them.

Beth Kurland  

Dr. Beth Kurland is a clinical psychologist, TEDx and public speaker, mind-body coach and author of four books. Her newest book, You Don’t Have to Change to Change Everything: Six Ways to Shift Your Vantage Point, Stop Striving for Happy, and Find True Well-Being, helps readers to discover a deep “well” of well-being within and realize they don’t need to fix or change themselves to awaken the power of inner transformation. Beth is also the author of three award winning books. Her book Dancing on the Tightrope: Transcending the Habits of Your Mind and Awakening to Your Fullest Life identifies five obstacles that get in the way of our well-being, and offers five tools to transform those obstacles into lasting inner resources for peace, resilience and joy. Her book The Transformative Power of Ten Minutes: An Eight Week Guide to Reducing Stress and Cultivating Well-Being offers readers practical tools for implementing short, daily practices within the course of their day to bring about lasting change. Her book Gifts of the Rain Puddle: Poems, Meditations and Reflections for the Mindful Soul invites readers to awaken to what is most important in their lives through poems, meditations, and questions for reflection.

Beth is a regular blog writer for Psychology Today and is a meditation teacher on the app Insight Timer.

Inspired by her personal experiences and her work with her clients, Beth is passionate about teaching mindfulness informed practices, mind-body strategies, and practical tools to help people cultivate whole person health and well-being. She is the creator of the Well-Being Toolkit online program and the creator of three audio courses to help people reduce stress, awaken to their fullest life, and set heartfelt intentions that stick. She offers individual and group coaching for powerful personal transformation. Visit her website at bethkurland.com to learn more.

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The 2020 Presidential Election in the United States marked, for many, a return to "compassionate politics." Joe Biden had run on a platform of empathy, emphasising his personal history as a means of connecting with everyone from American workers who had lost jobs to military families who had lost loved ones. Although perceptions of candidate compassion are broadly understood to influence vote choice, less understood is the question of how candidates convince voters they truly "care about people like them." In Feeling their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Jared McDonald provides a framework for understanding why voters view some politicians as more compassionate than others.

Dr. McDonald shows that perceptions of compassion in candidates for public office are based on the number and intensity of commonalities that bind citizens to political leaders. Commonalities can come in many forms, such as a shared experience ("I've been through what you've been through"), a shared emotion ("I feel the way you feel"), or a shared identity ("I am who you are"). Compassion is conceptualised through the lens of self-interest. Compassion may be universal, such as when candidates convey empathy to all individuals who are struggling. Or compassion may be exclusionary, such as when candidates express a preference for some groups over others. Thus, the way campaigns choose to wield compassion in their messaging strategies has important implications not only for election outcomes, but for American political polarisation as well.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears to argue that conservatorships are inherently abusive.

Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia UP, 2023) is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees, Alex V. Barnard takes readers to the streets where police encounter homeless people in crisis, the locked wards where people receiving treatment are confined, and the courtrooms where judges decide on conservatorship petitions. As he shows, California’s state government has abdicated authority over this system, leaving the question of who receives compassionate care and who faces coercion dependent on the financial incentives of for-profit facilities, the constraints of underresourced clinicians, and the desperate struggles of families to obtain treatment for their loved ones.

This book offers a timely warning: reforms to expand conservatorship will lead to more coercion but little transformative care until government assumes accountability for ensuring the health and dignity of its most vulnerable citizens.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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If you’ve ever worked with dementia patients before, you know how unique and bizarre the experience can be, and how little the stereotypes actually hold up to the experience. Even knowing about the diagnosis often does little to help us in caring for people, and many caregivers find themselves getting sucked into behavioral loops of their own. This is because your brain is not wired to deal with the altered form of reality that dementia patients inhabit. Evolution has not equipped us to deal with these dynamics.

Unpacking all this is our guest today, Dasha Kiper in her book Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain (Random House, 2023). Having both worked with dementia patients and run support groups for caregivers, she’s seen patterns play out over countless situations, and has mapped the cognitive landscape of people working to take care of those afflicted with the disease. In a series of engaging and provocative essays, she’s able to elucidate our limitations, the various neurological traps we are often tempted to fall into, hopefully offering caregivers some clarity on themselves and just how far from reality this work often takes them.

Dasha Kiper is the consulting clinical director of support groups at an Alzheimer’s organization, and holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University.

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Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with danah boyd, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, about her career and work. The pair discuss boyd's the genesis and intellectual background of boyd's now classic text, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Teens (Yale UP, 2014) as well as her more recent work on digital infrastructure and the US Census Bureau.

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Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills  who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies.

In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound’s use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while many disabilities were eliminated through medical interventions, a host of new disabilities were invented, especially within the realm of psychology. Mills’s historical work in the audio archives of American Foundation for the Blind reveals how auditory projective testing was used to diagnose blind people with additional psychological disabilities. As we listen to these strange archival sounds, we learn how culture and technology shape the history of human ability and disability.

Read Mara Mill’s article on auditory projective tests, “Evocative Object: Auditory Inkblot” and visit NYU’s Center for Disability Studies, which she co-directs with Faye Ginsburg.  Thanks to archivist Helen Selsdon and the American Foundation for the Blind for the use of the auditory projective tests.

This episode’s theme music is by Mack Hagood with additional music by Graeme Gibson, Blue Dot Sessions, Claude Debussy, and Duke Ellington. The show was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood.

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Did Woodrow Wilson's daddy issues cause World War II? And what might this teach us about our contemporary political plight? Jordan Osserman talks with psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and historian Patrick Weil about The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard UP, 2023). While conducting research at Yale, Patrick Weil chanced upon the unpublished and unredacted original manuscript of Sigmund Freud and Ambassador William Bullit's notorious psychobiography of former US President Woodrow Wilson - sat in an unlabelled dusty box. Weil's investigation of this incredible and poorly understood Freud-Bullit collaboration led him to radically reconsider Woodrow Wilson's role in the Treaty of Versailles, and the value of psychoanalysis in illuminating a self-sabotage of world historical proportions. 

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of the forthcoming On Breathing (Peninsula, 2025), Disorganisation & Sex (Divided, 2022), The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.

Patrick Weil is a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Professor Weil's work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and De La Laïcité en France (Grasset, 2021). Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières).

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Today I talked to Benjamin Breen about his book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024).

The generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.

At the centre of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists - and star-crossed lovers - Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists and the founders of the Information Age.

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In Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating category of face recognition and the "the face recognition spectrum," which ranges from face blindness at one end to super recognition at the other. Super recognizers can recall faces from only the briefest exposure, while face blind people lack the capacity to recognize faces at all, including those of their closest loved ones. Informed by archival research, the latest neurological studies, and testimonials from people at both ends of the spectrum, Dr. Pearl tells a nuanced story of how we relate to each other through our faces.

The category of face recognition is relatively new despite the importance of faces in how we build relationships and understand our own humanity. Dr. Pearl shows how this most tacit of knowledge came to enter the scientific and diagnostic field despite difficulties with identifying it. She offers a grounded framework for how we evaluate others and draw conclusions about them, with significant implications for race, gender, class, and disability. Dr. Pearl explores the shifting ideas around the face-recognition spectrum, explaining the effects of these diagnoses on real people alongside implications for how facial recognition is studied and understood. Face blindness is framed as a disability, while super recognition is framed as a superpower with no meaningful disadvantages. This superhero rhetoric is tied to the use of super recognizers in criminal detection, prosecution, and other forms of state surveillance. Do I Know You? demonstrates a humanistic approach to the study of the brain, one that offers an entirely new method for examining this fundamental aspect of human interaction.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Patriarchy and Its Discontents: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Routledge, 2022) joins luminaries in contemporary psychoanalysis with pioneers of feminism to provide a timely analysis of the crushing effects of patriarchy and the role that psychoanalysis can play in moving us into a future defined by mutuality and respect.

Departing from the contemporary psychoanalytic view that the socio-political and intrapsychic are inextricably linked, contributors use psychoanalysis as a tool to demystify and even dismantle patriarchy, while also examining how our theories, practices, and institutions have been implicated in it. The issues under examination here include important and often under-theorized topics such as institutional responses to boundary violations, the search for a black-feminist psychoanalytic theory, patriarchal enactments within the trans community, the persistence of patriarchy within contemporary psychoanalysis, and the impacts of patriarchy on diverse patient populations and ways to address this clinically.

This book represents the first anthology comprised of voices from both within and outside the psychoanalytic realm, outlining a contemporary feminist psychoanalysis for both an analytic and non-analytic audience. It is invaluable for both psychoanalysts and for those in gender studies wishing to draw on psychoanalytic thinking.

About the editors:

Jean Petrucelli is a training and supervising analyst, director and co-founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Service (EDCAS), a one-year certificate program, and founder and chair of the Conference Advisory Board (CAB) at the William Alanson White Institute.

Sarah Schoen is a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, faculty and supervisor at the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Program at the William Alanson White Institute, and clinical professor of Psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

Naomi Snider is a psychoanalyst in New York City and a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute’s Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. 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 (Routledge, 2023).

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Judith Herman is renowned for her groundbreaking work with survivors of trauma, including sexual trauma. Her earlier books include Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 2022) and Father-Daughter Incest (Harvard UP, 2000)

The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, in both domestic and work settings. However, the movement did not address the crime of sexual violence in war, and the use of rape as a weapon of war. In fact, when these historical horrors were brutally used once again in October 2023, the #MeToo movement, and other feminist and anti-rape organizations responded - not with outrage- but with silence.

In contrast, high profile, celebrity cases of sexual abuse and harasment in the U.S. and U.K. gained media coverage, with attention focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial. We heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse.

Professor Herman maintains that conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. She argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them.

In Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (Basic Books, 2023) she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.

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Masud Khan (1924-1989), was an eminent and, ultimately, scandalous British psychoanalyst who trained and practised in London during an important period in the development of psychoanalysis. From August 1967 to March 1980, he wrote his 39 volume Work Books, a diary containing observations and reflections on his own life, the world of psychoanalysis, his evolving theoretical formulations, Western culture, and the turbulent social and political developments of the time.

In Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst: The Work Books of Masud Khan 1967-1972 (Karnac, 2022), readers will find fascinating entries on Khan's colleague and mentor Donald Winnicott and other well-known analysts of the period, including Anna Freud. Also featuring in these pages are leaders in the world of culture and the arts such as Julie Andrews, the Redgraves and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory.

In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has written several books for a general readership, including In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2007), and The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018). 

In 2012 he spoke to the Institute about his book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012).

About the book: 

At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.

The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women's unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.

Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers--Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele--inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today's cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.

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In An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey (Park Street Press, 2024), renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing Peter A. Levine shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma offering profound insights into the evolution of his innovative trauma healing method.

Casting himself as a modern-day Chiron, the wounded healer of Greek mythology, Dr. Levine describes, in graphic detail, the violence of his childhood juxtaposed with specific happy and exuberant memories, which helped him prepare for coming to terms with his horrifying experiences. He shares his inner experience of being guided through Somatic Experiencing (SE) to illuminate and untangle his traumatic wounds and describes the mysterious and unexpected dreams and visions that have guided him through his life’s work. Exploring his dream visitations from Albert Einstein in depth, he explains how he came to view Einstein as his personal spirit guide and mentor and how he later discovered his own personal and profound real-life connection to him through his mother.

Describing his breakthroughs in developing Somatic Experiencing, the author details how he helped thousands of others before resolving his own trauma years later with the support of his method. He explains how the SE method is derived from his studies of wild animals in their natural environments, neurobiology, and more than 50 years of clinical observations. He describes his education and career as well as his encounters with noteworthy figures such as somaticists Charlotte Selver and Ida Rolf, ethological zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, and autism pioneer Mira Rothenberg.

Unveiling the inner story of the man who changed the way psychologists, doctors, and healers understand and treat the wounds of trauma and abuse, this autobiography reveals how anyone suffering from trauma has a valuable story to tell. And by telling our stories, we can catalyze the return of hope, dignity, and wholeness.

Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Medical and Biological Physics from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in Psychology from International University. The recipient of four lifetime achievement awards, he is the author of several books, including An Autobiography of Trauma and Waking the Tiger, which has now been printed in 33 countries and has sold over a million copies.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. 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 (Routledge, 2023).

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Heather White brings two decades of environmental advocacy work and national nonprofit leadership to life with her joyful and practical books on tackling eco-anxiety, 60 Days to a Greener Life: Ease Eco-Anxiety through Joyful Daily Action (Harper Horizon, 2024) and One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet (Harper Horizon, 2022).

The CEO & Founder of the nonprofit OneGreenThing, Heather was named "One of the Top 15 Women Leaders in Sustainability" by Green Building & Design Magazine and "100 Women to Watch in Wellness" by mindbodygreen. Her trademark intelligence and accessibility on climate and environmental issues has been featured on Good Morning America, CBS, PBS, ABC, NBC, Fox News, and cited in The Washington Post, New York Times, and Teen Vogue. White's two decades of experience include serving as a presidential campaign staffer for Al Gore, the environmental counsel to a US Senator, and the executive director of three national environmental nonprofits.

In her books, Heather weaves together research-backed strategies for personal climate action with stories from her childhood in East Tennessee, career in Washington, DC and Yellowstone, and life with her family - including two GenZ daughters - in Bozeman, Montana. Her goal each day - through seminars, leadership training, consulting, social media, and now in her books - is to create culture change that will lead to climate policy solutions. She helps individuals address "climate anxiety" - the overwhelm of the climate crisis -- through identity & action. Her Service Superpower is Philanthropist-Wonk.

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We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, but efforts to spread this knowledge often encounter resistance to evidence. The phenomenon of resistance to evidence, while subject to thorough investigation in social psychology, is acutely under-theorised in the philosophical literature. 

Mona Simion's Resistance to Evidence (Cambridge UP, 2024) is concerned with positive epistemology: it argues that we have epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs on available and undefeated evidence. In turn, our resistance to easily available evidence is unpacked as an instance of epistemic malfunctioning. Simion develops a full positive, integrated epistemological picture in conjunction with novel accounts of evidence, defeat, norms of inquiry, permissible suspension, and disinformation. Her book is relevant for anyone with an interest in the nature of evidence and justified belief and in the best ways to avoid the high-stakes practical consequences of evidence resistance in policy and practice.

Mona Simion is a philosopher. She is professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Simion's work focuses on issues in epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience. 

In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays out the seemingly irreconciliable theoretical commitments of ecological psychology and neuroscience, and then defends a framework for reconciling them: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). According to Favela, who is an associate professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at the University of Central Florida, complexity science provides the conceptual tools that can help integrate these frameworks, such as by articulating the key notion of affordances in ecological psychology as a kind of dimensional reduction in complexity science.

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Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contributes to our scant knowledge about the practices that many would call a Soviet proto-type of 'aversion therapy'. It also helps us understand the way homosexual people faced "queer dilemmas" of the self and how they sought to reconcile their queer desire with being Soviet.

Tatiana Klepikova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

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If you're interested in memory, you'll find a lot in Memory Makes the Brain: The Biological Machinery That Uses Experiences To Shape Individual Brains (World Scientific, 2021), from cellular processes to unique and interesting perspectives on autism.

• Detailed descriptions of cellular processes involved in forming a memory.
• Connecting those cellular processes to everyday experiences - like the memorable image of a butterfly seen during a hike decades ago.
• Comparisons of plasticity in different brain areas, like cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum.
• Comparisons of plasticity and learning in different phases of the human life.
• Important milestones in the history of neuroscience. Like Wiesel and Hubel's work identifying the critical period for plasticity, or Huttenlocher's discovery of synaptic pruning.
• Up-to-date science and open questions about autism, a wide range of phenomena that seems to be connected both to synaptic pruning and to the funtion of the cerebellum.
• An outlook on non-synaptic plasticity.

Professor Christian Hansel starts both the book and the conversation with establishing a very broad definition of memory. Traditionally, a lot of research focused on the "observable outcome" of learning: acquiring new skills, changing behavior. Instead, he defines memory as any event that changes the brain.

The first 2 chapters introduce major discoveries from the 1960s and 1970s. David Hubel and Thorsten Wiesel examined the visual system of kittens. They recognized that it's much more adaptive in a "critical period", ca. 4-8 weeks after birth. Peter Huttenlocher discovered another fascinating phenomena during childhood: synaptic pruning. In the years 2-12, a lot of synapses (connections between neurons) disappear.

Chapter 3 describes the molecular machinery behind all these observations. We'll get to know the terms LTP (long-term potentiation) and LTD (long-term depression), which mean the long-term strengthening and weakening of synaptic connections respectively. We find a detailed description of these processes, incl. the enzymes, neurotransmitters and receptors contributing to them.

Chapter 4 continues examining these processes across the human life span. The (perhaps surprising) conclusion: The machinery for synaptic plasticity is quite similar in a small child an in an adult. What's different is the magnitude of these processes.

Autism is a central topic both in the book and in the Hansel Lab's work. Chapter 5 starts with describing the difficulties of a definition. ASD (autism spectrum disorder) is an umbrella term encompassing several symptoms and intensities. In the last years, it has turned out that low degree of synaptic pruning plays a significant role in multiple forms of autism. We'll see in the next years how the research about synaptic pruning and learning can be used for clinical purposes. Understanding the biological mechanism can also make it easier to relate to some peculiar-sounding symptoms. If we consider that an individual's brain contains an unusually high number of synapses, their reports about unusually intense perceptions suddenly become more understandable.

A thought-provoking chapter is number 6. It describes various experiments with mouse models to study autism-like symptoms. The chapter might also make you reflect about the merits and shortcomings of animal models generally.

The cerebellum was long considered to be the brain area for finetuning movements. Now, it's clear that its repertoire is much bigger. In the interview, Christian describes a hypothesis that the cerebellum has a capability of timing. This in turn makes it a crucial factor in several behaviors beyond sophisticated movements, including speech.

We know a lot about synaptic plasticity and its significance in learning. Chapter 8 tackles the big, open question, what else? Which other processes contribute to memory formation? It presents some hypotheses about intrinsic plasticity.

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Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis (Pi Press, 2024) is not merely a book but a call to action-a rallying cry for societal introspection and transformation. With meticulous research and unflinching honesty, Dr. Karyne E. Messina offers a roadmap for reclaiming our integrity and forging a more just and equitable future. Engaging, insightful, and indispensable, this book is essential reading for anyone invested in the fate of our nation and the preservation of our collective identity. 

In Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis, Dr. Messina ingeniously uses Barbie to symbolize the multifaceted identity crisis gripping America. Barbie's transformation from Lilli reflects the complexities of stolen identity and cultural appropriation, mirroring the broader societal struggle with individual and national identity.Just as Mattel co-opted Barbie's identity from a German toymaker, America grapples with a loss of authenticity and integrity in its own narrative. Dr. Messina's exploration of Barbie's evolution serves as a poignant allegory for the broader issues at play, inviting readers to contemplate the profound implications of identity theft and cultural commodification. In essence, Barbie is our metaphorical lodestar, guiding readers through the labyrinthine complexities of America's identity crisis.Through Barbie's lens, Dr. Messina illuminates the interconnectedness of personal and collective identity formation, shedding light on how societal pressures and external influences shape our sense of self and continue to perpetuate racism and patriarchal structures-that can hamper our ability to build an authentic sense of community free of tribal isolationism.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine.

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A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters (Doubleday, 2024), pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What's more, when we work with the brain's ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath's life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power-- and its quirks--we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

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In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Matt Qvortrup (Coventry University) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics (CEU Press, 2024).

Putting the “science” back into political science, The Political Brain shows how fMRI-scans can identify differences between liberals and conservatives, can predict our behaviour, and can explain the biology of uprisings, revolutions, and wars. The book also provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the organ that shapes our politics. It warns that if we rely on the evolutionarily primitive parts of the midbrain, those engaged when we succumb to polarised politics, we stand in danger of squandering the gains we made through the last eight million years.

Matt’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

  Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account (Bloomsbury, 2023) brings together the first English translations of Why Lacan, Betty Milan's memoir of her analysis with Lacan in the 1970s, and her play, Goodbye Doctor, inspired by her experience.

Why Lacan provides a unique and valuable perspective on how Lacan worked as psychoanalyst as well as his approach to psychoanalytic theory. Milan's testimony shows that Lacan's method of working was based on the idea that the traditional way of interpreting provoked resistance.

Prior to Why Lacan, Milan wrote a play, Goodbye Doctor, based on her experience as Lacan's patient. The play is structured around the sessions of Seriema with the Doctor. Through the analysis, Seriema discovers why she cannot give birth, namely, an unconscious desire to satisfy the will of her father who didn't authorize her to conceive. She ceases to be the victim of her unconscious, grasps the possibility of choosing a father for her child and thus becoming a mother. Goodbye Doctor has been adapted into a film, Adieu Lacan, by the director Richard Ledes.

Analyzed by Lacan features an Introduction by Milan to both works as well as a new interview with Mari Ruti about her writing and Lacan.

Matthew Pieknik, LCSW, MA is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in Manhattan. He can be reached at [email protected]. www.matthewlpieknik.com

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Our stress response system is magnificent - it operates beneath our awareness, like an orchestra of organs playing a hidden symphony. When we are healthy, the orchestra plays effortlessly, but what happens when our bodies face chronic stress, and the music slips out of tune? 

The alarming rise of stress-related conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and depression, show the price we're paying for our high-pressure living, while global warming, pandemics and technology have brought new kinds of stress into all our lives. But what can we do about it? 

Explore the fascinating mysteries of our hidden stress response system with Dr. Wulsin, who uses his decades of experience to show how toxic stress impacts our bodies. In Toxic Stress: How Stress Is Making Us Ill and What We Can Do About It (Cambridge UP, 2024), Wulsin gives us the expert advice and tools needed to prevent toxic stress from taking over. Chapter by chapter, learn to help your body and mind recover from toxic stress.

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A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.

Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today. It delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

When it was first published in 1951. the New Yorker wrote, “Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” The Wall Street Journal agreed, calling The True Believer the famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.

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A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks.

Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neuroscience researcher. His work combines insights from evolutionary neuroscience, comparative psychology, and AI. As each chapter describes how a skill evolved, it also explains whether(!) and how an AI system has managed to implement something similar. A recurring theme is how human brains and neural circuits have influenced AI architecture. The other side of this bi-directional connection is also intriguing. AI has often served as a litmus test, giving a clue how a not well understood neurobiological phenomenon might work, how plausible a hypothesis is.

The organzining principle of this book is a framework of five breakthroughs, which compares evolution to technological innovation. Like a new technology enables several innovative products, a new brain capability enables several new skills. For example, mammals show several new intelligent behaviors compared to their ancestors: vicarious trial and error, episodic memory, and planning. The foundation of all these novelties, is probably the same capability: simulation.

The five breakthroughs are:

1.  steering in bilaterians
2. learning from trial and error in vertebrates
3. simulating in mammals
4. mentalizing in primates
5. speaking in humans

This framework guides the readers through a time travel of 600 million years. We learn about the environment in which these capabilities evolved: Who were the first mammals and why did planning benefit them? We see what contemporary animals can and can't do: Fish aren't as dumb as folklore suggests. And we take a look at AI's baffling achievements and limitations: Why can AI write decent essays but not load a dishwasher?

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A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well. Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother. 

Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis (Regalo Press, 2024) is a deeply researched account of Greg turning to coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca to heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, Greg takes his readers on a journey across the globe. In his search for healing from personal and ecological trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche—and finds they have a lot in common. Mothership is one man’s audacious search for healing when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late—and what well-being means in a fracturing society on a dying planet.

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Sociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between.

In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologist Neil M. Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment, two drastically different forms of community psychiatric services have developed: public safety-net clinics focused on keeping patients housed and out of jail, and elite private care trying to push clients toward respectable futures.

In Downtown Los Angeles, many people in psychiatric crisis only receive help after experiencing homelessness or arrests. Public providers engage in guerrilla social work to secure them housing and safety, but these programs are rarely able to deliver true rehabilitation for psychological distress and addiction. Patients are free to refuse treatment or use illegal drugs—so long as they do so away from public view.

Across town in West LA or Malibu, wealthy people diagnosed with serious mental illness attend luxurious treatment centers. Programs may offer yoga and organic meals alongside personalized therapeutic treatments, but patients can feel trapped, as their families pay exorbitantly to surveil and “fix” them. Meanwhile, middle-class families—stymied by private insurers, unable to afford elite providers, and yet not poor enough to qualify for social services—struggle to find care at all.

Gong’s findings raise uncomfortable questions about urban policy, family dynamics, and what it means to respect individual freedom. His comparative approach reminds us that every “sidewalk psychotic” is also a beloved relative and that the kinds of policies we support likely depend on whether we see those with mental illness as a public social problem or as somebody’s kin. At a time when many voters merely want streets cleared of “problem people,” Gong’s book helps us imagine a fundamentally different psychiatric system—one that will meet the needs of patients, families, and society at large.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?

In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorised and demonised, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomised the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.

Dr. Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Charlie Hertzog Young became a climate activist in his early teens. His journey led him onto airport runways and into the halls of power, but also to a serious mental health breakdown. He had to rebuild himself physically and psychologically, before focusing his efforts on collective mental recovery in response to a planet in crisis.

Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future (Footnote Press, 2023) explores how climate chaos and the failure of those in power to tackle it are causing an inevitable mental health crisis across the globe. The relationship between the climate and our emotional wellbeing goes far deeper than eco-anxiety. It goes to the roots of our civilization - its principles, its practices and its false solutions.

With testimony from dozens of activists, organizers and researchers across every habitable continent, Spinning Out is a celebration (of other ways to be) and a manual for anyone who wants to fight for a better world, while avoiding burnout and despair.

Wedding the needs of the earth with the needs of the human mind, Spinning Out offers a powerful, collective vision for change.

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Why do we sleep? How can we improve our sleep?

A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness.

In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research participants (including himself) to a dizzying array of tests and tortures. But the tipping point came in 1938, when his cave experiment awakened the general public to the unknown—and vital—world of sleep. Kleitman went on to mentor the talented but troubled Eugene Aserinsky, whose discovery of REM sleep revealed the astonishing activity of the dreaming brain, and William Dement, a jazz-bass playing revolutionary who became known as the father of sleep medicine. Dement, in turn, mentored the brilliant maverick Mary Carskadon, who uncovered an epidemic of sleep deprivation among teenagers, and launched a global movement to fight it.

In Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep (Hachette Books, 2023), award-winning Kenneth Miller weaves together science and history to tell the story of four outsider scientists who took sleep science from fringe discipline to mainstream obsession through spectacular experiments, technological innovation, and single-minded commitment.

Mapping the Darkness was named the Best Book of the Year 2023 by the New Yorker.

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What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind. The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports (MIT Press, 2024)," influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact. Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness. From there, he assembles a big picture—the elephant in the parable, from which the book’s title comes—of what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness. Freeing pure awareness from new-age gurus and old religions, The Elephant and the Blind combines personal reports of pure consciousness with incisive analysis to address the whole consciousness community, from neuroscientists to artists, and its accessibility echoes the author’s career-long commitment to widening access to philosophy itself.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

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By viewing psychoanalysis through the lens of embodiment, Brothers and Sletvold suggest a shift away from traditional concept-based theory and offer new ways to understand traumatic experiences, to describe the therapeutic exchange and to enhance the supervisory process.

Since traditional psychoanalytic language does not readily lend itself to embodied experience, the authors place particular emphasis on the words I, you, we and world, to describe the flow of human attention. Offering new insights into trauma, this book demonstrates how traumatic experiences and efforts to regain certainty in one’s psychological life involve profound disruptions of this flow. With a new understanding of transference, resistance and interpretation, the authors ultimately show how much can be gained from viewing the analytic exchange as a meeting between foreign bodies.

Grounded in detailed case material, A New Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory, Practice and Supervision: Talking Bodies (Routledge, 2023) will change the way therapists from all disciplines understand the therapeutic process and how viewing it in terms of talking bodies enhances their efforts to heal.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. 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 (Routledge, 2023).

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Today I spoke with Dr. Louis Rothschild about his new book Rapprochement Between Fathers and Sons Breakdowns, Reunions, Potentialities (Karnac, 2024). Our conversation moved freely between theory, generational attitudes, thinkers, and personal vignettes.

What is a good enough father? What is the difference between a man of achievement and a man of power? Who is the father of the mother’s mind? What happens when a father enables holding? How is masculinity valued by other men? What is meant by phrases such as a “man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do?” Why exactly do we need to “call the boy’s father?” How is the father’s role rendered invisible? These are some of the questions subsumed in the broader question of “Who nurtures and who is nurtured?” (And does the myth of the “self-made-man” indicate a man who exists without nurturing?)

“What I'm arguing”, says Rothschild, “is that that sexist dichotomy is a mirage in its own right and that attachment strings needn't be severed. They can be reworked over the lifespan and this idea of having this clean tidy break and going off to live your life where liberating the kid from this regressive maternal bond is the path to individuation, I think that's just patently false.”

Like an analyst, the book has been in formation for many years. “Percolating and distilling” as Dr. Rothschild says at the top of the interview. Motivated by the “way the culture was shifting” he sensed “that things I take for granted are actually a minority opinion.” Rothschild’s survey of sons includes mythology; Oedipus scripture; Issac. As well as the sons of literature; Sendak’s Max, Silverstein’s Boy, White’s Swan, and others. Affect rich case illustrations are also presented. The issues addressed in the book are the ones we are contending with in in analysis. They are the discussions we are having with our fathers, sons, and families. Rothschild’s book is essential and meets the clinical moment.

“Louis Rothschild’s book is both an outstanding representative of ‘return to the father’ and a unique explication of psychoanalytic thought on its own. This is a book of great literary elegance and impressive psychological wisdom.” Salman Akhtar, MD

Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. He is a member of the faculty and supervising analyst at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and The New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. His primary theorists are Sándor Ferenczi and Hyman Spotnitz.

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Anna Dako,'s book Dances with Sheep: On RePairing the HumanNature Condition in Felt Thinking and Moving towards Wellbeing (Intellect Books, 2023) presents the methodology of Felt Thinking in Movement as an eco-somatic practice inspired by re-thinking nature of being human, as well as contextualises it within wider frameworks of cultural, philosophical and therapeutic viewpoints on wellbeing.

Felt Thinking is a self-inquiry practice grounded in somatic movement experience that originates in site-specific and embodied dialoguing between what is felt and what shapes as a responsive thought, as creative movement itself, and which paths ways for ecologically inclusive care for being well with self and other.

The book elaborates on creative processes in and with the natural environment in relation to the movers’ overall wellbeing and covers creative journeys of opening up to the living agency of Nature itself through the emergent three phases of experiential relatedness in embodied experience of the self. The book presents its original contribution to eco-phenomenology with its ontological principle of embodied relationality in towards and away from movement as a primal gateway to wellbeing and its creative inter-constitution.

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Mimi Khúc is a PhD, writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is currently the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. Her work includes Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project decolonizing Asian American mental health; the Asian American Tarot, a reimagined deck of tarot cards; and the Open in Emergency Initiative, an ongoing national project developing mental health arts programming with universities and community spaces. 

Her new creative-critical, genre-bending book on mental health and a pedagogy of unwellness, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press, 2024), is a journey into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

Julia H. Lee is professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of three books: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011), Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and The Racial Railroad (New York University Press, 2022). With Professor Josephine Lee, she is co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022. You can find her on Instagram @julia.x.lee.

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The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche (Unconscious in Translation, 2023) compiles papers written by Dominique Scarfone. Each paper is followed by a conversation about the paper between the author and Avgi Saketopoulou.

"I propose we have a conversation after each of your essays as a way to engage your work, to ask for clarifications on the reader's behalf, and to multiply the entry points to your thinking. I imagine that these conversations will work cumulatively, talking the reader deeper into each chapter and also showing your way of thinking not by describing it but by exposing the reader to it 'in vivo.' Part of what your work has offered me personally, which I hope these exchanges will also convey to the reader, is the sheer pleasure of thinking about theory with you -- that it's not a stale or inert process but that, on the contrary, it is an experience in itself." -Avgi Saketopoulou

"While an indisputable fact about human reality is that of communication and its corollary, making sense of what is communicated, only psychoanalysis takes notice of the particular situation created when communication happens between an adult and an infans-literally: the one who does not speak. Nor is it given much attention, even among psychoanalysts, that there is a special 'noise' carried over in the channels of communication between the two, a noise resulting from the difference regarding the unconscious sexual dimension." -Dominique Scarfone

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Vulnerable narratives of fatherhood are few and far between; rarer still is an ethnography that delves into the practical and emotional realities of intensive caregiving. Grounded in the intimate everyday lives of men caring for children with major physical and intellectual disabilities, Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities (U California Press, 2021) undertakes an exploration of how men shape their identities in the context of caregiving. Anthropologist Aaron J. Jackson fuses ethnographic research and creative nonfiction to offer an evocative account of what is required for men to create habitable worlds and find some kind of “normal” when their circumstances are anything but. Combining stories from his fieldwork in North America with reflections on his own experience caring for his severely disabled son, Jackson argues that care has the potential to transform our understanding of who we are and how we relate to others.

Aaron J. Jackson is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University. His research focuses on fatherhood, care, and disability.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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C. S. Sherrington said “All the brain can do is to move things". The Brain in Motion: From Microcircuits to Global Brain Function (MIT Press, 2023) shows how much the brain can do "just" by moving things. It gives an amazing overview of the large variety of motor behaviors and the cellular basis of them. It reveals how motor circuits provide the underlying mechanism not just for walking or jumping, but also for breath or chewing.

The book emphasizes the evolutionary perspective. It demonstrates how the basic structures are the same across all vertebrates, suggesting that these systems have been around for more than 500 million years.

At the very beginning, Grillner introduces the analogy of an orchestra: The microcircuits are the musicians, and the forebrain acts as the conductor. In the following chapters, the readers get to know all the important actors and their contribution to this "performance":

• the CPGs and motor centers that execute the movements,
• the tectum that synthesizes input from the direct surroundings of the animal,
• the basal ganglia and the cortex that together direct the microcircuits,
• and the cerebellum, which plays a crucial role in adapting the movements according to the environment and learning new motor behavior.

The Brain in Motion provides both a great overview of the motor system and a detailed presentation of its major contributors.

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Today’s book is: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024), by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, a book that asks why stimulating jobs and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible, due to something called habituation. Because of habituation, people get used to dirty air, become unconcerned by their own misconduct, and become more liable to believe misinformation. But what if you could dishabituate? Could you find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don’t try to change? 

In Look Again, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to “dishabituate.” This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption—to seeing, feeling, and noticing again—is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with—or even just stepping back and imagining change—you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good.

Our guest is: Cass R. Sunstein, who is the nation’s most-cited legal scholar. For the past fifteen years, he has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers. He is the co-author [along with Tali Sharot, who could not join us for this episode] of Look Again.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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What is the relationship between aesthetic presentation of thought and scientific conceptions of cognition? Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2021) answers this question by offering incisive commentary on a range of contemporary fictions that combine language, maps, photographs, and other images to portray thought. Situating literature within groundbreaking debates on memory, perception, abstraction, and computation, Ghosal shows how stories not only reflect historical beliefs about how minds work but also participate in their reappraisal.

Out of Mind makes a compelling case for understanding narrative forms and cognitive-scientific frameworks as co-emergent and cross-pollinating. To this end, Ghosal harnesses narrative theory, multimodality studies, cognitive sciences, and disability studies to track competing perspectives on remembering, reading, and sense of place and self. Through new readings of the works of Kamila Shamsie, Aleksandar Hemon, Mark Haddon, Lance Olsen, Steve Tomasula, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others, Out of Mind generates unique insights into literary imagination’s influence on how we think and perceive amid twenty-first-century social, technological, and environmental changes.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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With the avalanche of information we get every day, closing down our minds and hearts seems to be the only way to survive. We close down to our inner experience by compulsively checking our devices. We close down to others by getting caught in echo chambers of outrage. But what if there's another way? What if being more open to life is actually what brings us sanity and happiness? In this climate of distraction and division, Nate Klemp's Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World (Sounds True, 2024) offers a path back to a way of living that is expansive, creative, and filled with wonder.

Drawing on new science, age-old practices, and personal stories, Klemp examines why we close down when faced with stressors or threats, then reveals how we can train ourselves to open up to the fullness that life offers--even when frightened, outraged, or heartbroken.

Nate Klemp, PhD, is a philosopher, writer, and mindfulness entrepreneur.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Why do some of our identity-defining commitments resist reason and critical reflection, and why do we persist in them even when they threaten our happiness, safety, and comfort?

Paul Katsafanas argues in his book Philosophy of Devotion:The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals (Oxford UP, 2023) that these commitments involve an ethical stance that he calls devotion to sacred ideas. 

A sacred value is one that we cannot trade with ordinary values, or even consider trading off. When a value is sacred, no rational considerations will disrupt commitment to it. Philosophy of Devotion offers a detailed philosophical account and defense of these features both reasonable and unreasonable, beneficial and detrimental. Katsafanas explains that a life with meaningful commitments is richer and more meaningful than a life without deep, sustained commitments. 

At the same time, that same devotion can deform into forms of individual and group fanaticism that can be alienating, extremist, and violent. This fanaticism is driven by feelings of persecution and threat to a fragile self, and exacerbated by feelings of ressentiment, a growing anger and resentment of opposition that becomes self-perpetuating.   

In this book Katsafanas also provides an alternative to fanaticism, a way to express non-pathological forms of devotion. With this approach, individuals can avoid the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and an empty lack of meaning on the other. This perpetual quest requires maintaining a form of existential flexibility, which may include oscillation between affirming these sacred values and deepening understanding through consideration of challenging questions. 

Recommended reading: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

Meghan Cochran studies belief and action as a technologist working in customer experience and as a student of religion, business, and literature.

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Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters?

Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards.

In Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books, 2023) Dr. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan's kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. Understanding the psychology of cuteness can help answer some of the biggest questions in evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication.

This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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What makes a person want to become a terrorist? Who becomes involved in terrorism, and why? In what ways does participating in violent extremism change someone? And how can people become deradicalized?

John Horgan―one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of terrorism―takes readers on a globe-spanning journey into the terrorist mindset. Drawing on groundbreaking personal interviews as well as decades of research from psychologists and others, he traces the pathways that lead people into violent extremism and explores what happens to them as their involvement deepens. Horgan provides an up-to-date, evidence-based understanding of the patterns, motives, and mentalities of violent extremists from the Islamic State and al-Shabaab to white supremacists and incels. He argues that there is not a straightforward psychological profile of a terrorist, in part because of the great variety of today’s extremists, who are able to attract a more diverse pool of recruits than ever before. But even though there is no one-size-fits-all profile, psychological study can provide crucial insight into why and how people become terrorists.

Accessible and nuanced, Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right (Columbia UP, 2023) is an essential book for readers interested in what psychology can explain about extremist behavior.

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Many books on happiness suggest that we have considerable control over our level of happiness by doing or not doing specific things, like mediation, exercise, and maintaining social ties. 

Approaching happiness through the lens of economics, Vani Kant Borooah takes a different approach in his book Economics, Religion and Happiness: God, Mammon and the Search for Spiritual and Financial Wealth (Routledge, 2024). He argues that while it is true that we can take such actions to improve our relative level of day-to-day happiness, there are also significant influences which fall outside of our control and depend heavily upon the attitudes and actions of other people.

The book identifies the internal factors of personal happiness and measures the relative strength of their contribution, then contrasts that with an analysis of the externalities that people impose upon the happiness of others. 

These externalities are the direct result of intolerance and feelings of envy and superiority. Taking a cue from Jean-Paul Sartre's aphorism, "hell is other people", this book examines those often negative and even violent externalities, a theme explored in the areas of religion, money, and prejudice where our happiness is contingent upon the perspectives and actions of those around us. 

Recommended read: 

Slaughter Among Neighbors: The Political Origins of Communal Violence (Human Rights Watch, 1995)

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Matthew Rubery's book Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the influence neurodivergence has on the ways individuals read. This alternative history of reading is one of the few books which tells the stories of "atypical" readers and the impact had on their lives by neurological conditions affecting their ability to make sense of the printed word: from dyslexia, hyperlexia, and alexia to synesthesia, hallucinations, and dementia. Rubery's focus on neurodiversity aims to transform our understanding of the very concept of reading. Drawing on personal testimonies gathered from literature, film, life writing, social media, medical case studies, and other sources to express how cognitive differences have shaped people's experiences both on and off the page, Rubery contends that there is no single activity known as reading. Instead, there are multiple ways of reading (and, for that matter, not reading) despite the ease with which we use the term. Pushing us to rethink what it means to read; Reader's Block moves toward an understanding of reading as a spectrum that is capacious enough to accommodate the full range of activities documented in this fascinating and highly original book.

Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. His earlier books include The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford, 2009) and The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016). He has also edited or co-edited Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge, 2011), Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Broadview, 2012), and Further Reading (Oxford, 2020). Currently, he is working on a history of “projected reading”, a form of assisted reading that involves projecting books on ceilings which a patient can read while lying in bed. This was first used to help World War 2 soldiers injured on duty who could not read conventionally. Matthew also likes to collaborate with charities and other organisations to think about ways of reading more suited to people with disabilities or neurodivergent readers.

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Barbara Richter is an accomplished author, public speaker, French-to-English translator, and founder of DIYBook and In Ink Ghostwriting. Raised in a home steeped in books and greatly influenced by her father, an award-winning editor and National Book Award finalist, Barbara's upbringing richly nurtured her literary heritage and profoundly honed her critical thinking skills. Barbara’s multifaceted career, marked by her roles as the Managing Editor for Literary Features Syndicate, columnist for Fine Books and Collections Magazine, and contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, and The Sewanee Review, has firmly established her as a prominent figure in both modern literature and entrepreneurship.

Building off her extensive writing expertise, Barbara launched DIYBook in 2023, a comprehensive solution designed to make book writing and publishing accessible and affordable for authors at all levels, from novices to seasoned professionals. The platform is a step-by-step process equipped with weekly email prompts catering to various categories such as trauma, military service, relationships, and more. This tailored approach simplifies writing and publishing by providing structured guidance, helping users overcome writer's block, lack of direction, and feeling overwhelmed. DIYBook's support system includes various tools and resources to enhance writing quality and efficiency, thereby making the publishing journey more approachable for anyone with a story to tell.

Barbara is also the founder of In Ink Ghostwriting (2014), one of the premier ghostwriting firms in the NYC area with clients from around the world, which delivers an assortment of writing services. From business books to memoirs and novels, the firm caters to a diverse clientele, such as best-selling authors, NFL players, Fortune 500 CEOs, artists, musicians, doctors, entrepreneurs, and attorneys. This all-inclusive service range sets In Ink Ghostwriting apart, offering not just writing and publishing mastery but also essential design services with a skilled graphic design artist who can provide clients with the option to enhance the visual appeal of their books. Her foray into ghostwriting was spurred by her distinctive ability to encapsulate the voices and ideas of those with compelling stories but limited writing proficiency or time.

Barbara holds a BA and MA in French Language and Literature from Smith College and Tufts University. She is a founding member of the Ticknor Society, a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, and a member of the Grolier Club, the country’s oldest bibliophilic association. Currently residing in Westchester, New York, with her family and beloved basset hounds, Barbara continues to enrich the landscape of literature and entrepreneurship, contributing significantly to the domains of storytelling and literary access.

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How does human language arise in the mind? To what extent is it innate, or something that is learned? How do these factors interact? The questions surrounding how we acquire language are some of the most fundamental about what it means to be human and have long been at the heart of linguistic theory. 

Harry van der Hulst's book A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a comprehensive introduction to this fascinating debate, unravelling the arguments for the roles of nature and nurture in the knowledge that allows humans to learn and use language. An interdisciplinary approach is used throughout, allowing the debate to be examined from philosophical and cognitive perspectives. It is illustrated with real-life examples and the theory is explained in a clear, easy-to-read way, making it accessible for students without a background in linguistics. An accompanying website contains a glossary, questions for reflection, discussion themes and project suggestions, to further deepen students’ understanding of the material.

Madhumanti Datta completed her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, USA.

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In 1998 the phrase “internet addiction” was first used to describe problematic prolonged internet use, and encompassed a wide range of online activities including reading news, connecting in chat rooms, viewing pornography, and gambling. Since then, particular focus has been placed on internet gaming, and in 2022 the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (11th edition) classified Gaming Disorder as a "mental disorder due to addictive behaviors." But as Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti and Dr. Yaewon Jin explain, there is far from universal consensus on what “gaming disorder” exactly is. They share their insights as researchers of the ORE (Ontological Reconstruction of Gaming Disorder), a five-year interdisciplinary project funded by the European Research Council, and discuss the difficulties not only in identifying “gaming disorder” but in categorizing the various kinds of games that are considered. They share their own experiences with computer gaming, from early 1990s Finnish schools to South Korea’s PC bangs (internet cafés). They leave us to contemplate culturally and historically dependent perspectives not only on what constitutes a so-called disorder, but why individuals play games.

This episode is supported by the Otto A. Malm Foundation.

Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti is the ORE project’s principle investigator and is an interdisciplinary senior researcher of play, games, and the philosophy of science at the University of Jyväskylä. Dr. Yaewon Jin is a post-doctoral researcher at Jyvaskyla, and focuses on South Korea as part of the project. She is also currently a visiting professor at Yonsei University and principal researcher at the Game-n-Science institute.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

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Listen to Episode No.5 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and also Gang Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is what decision means.

Decision is no simple matter, whether the decider in question is human or machine. In a sense, both are black boxes to us, and yet the urgency today to open the lid on A.I. is heightened because of how human-like the machine seems to be able to do decision. This is why, across disciplines, we need to convene and discuss and decide together on how to understand and use A.I. The alternative is grisly: Everyone using a tool that no one fully understands — no one using the tool in full understanding or for that matter, in any understanding at all.

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It can be so easy to feel like we’re not enough or that we’re somehow insufficient. According to meditation teacher Tara Brach, this feeling of unworthiness is fundamentally a disease of separation, as it alienates us from ourselves and the people around us. For Brach, one way to free ourselves from this trance of unworthiness is the practice of radical acceptance. In the twentieth-anniversary edition of her classic book, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (Random House, 2004), she uses a blend of psychology and Buddhist insights to lay out a path to freedom in the face of pervasive feelings of inadequacy and isolation.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Brach to discuss what she’s learning by revisiting the book now, why she believes we’re living in a collective spiritual crisis, and how we can learn to recognize our own basic goodness.

Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

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Let's Talk: An Essential Guide to Skillful Communication (2022) is a transformative guide to elevate your everyday conversations. Authored by Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman, this practical handbook equips you with essential skills to navigate challenging topics, boost self-expression confidence, and foster respectful influence. Drawing from psychology, sociology, learning theory, and spiritual traditions, the book offers a comprehensive yet accessible approach to one-on-one communication. It's an invitation to revolutionize your connections—one conversation at a time.

Ohad Fedida lives in Miami and is a psychology research and clinical assistant. He is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, and is involved in a wide array of initiatives and studies from legal philosophy, Jewish programming, and psychology.

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How could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good (Oxford UP, 2023), Krista Thomason flips the script on popular ways of dealing with our emotions, including neo-Stoicism, mindfulness, and even the prosperity gospel. She makes the case that we should get rid of the double standard we have towards "good" and "bad" emotions, and that we should not aim to be emotional saints. Instead, because "bad" emotions are an essential part of our attachments to our selves, they help us discover what we care about. Thomason, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College, guides the reader through philosophical traditions regarding the relation of emotion to reason and the various approaches thinkers have come up with to deal with our "bad" emotions.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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What does it mean to perceive and just how capable are we of perceiving reality? This is a core question in the work of Christian Coseru, who is today’s guest. He is the Lightsey Humanities chair and Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. Christian works in the fields of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Indian and Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy and cognitive science.

He is the author of Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2012, pbk 2015), and editor of Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality. Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits (Springer, 2023).

Christian spent four and a half years in India in the mid 1990s pursuing studies in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy. While in India, he was affiliated with several research institutes, including the Maha Body Society, the Asiatic Society of Calcutta and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies.

We discuss;

• Perceiving Reality and where current ongoing debates are on this immense topic.
• How confident we can be that phenomenological experience of reality is real and accurate.
• Where current theories are on the question of consciousness.
• The social role of cognition and the topic of mediation.
• What he makes of panpsychism andits return and relationship with physicalism.
• How such theories are represented in Buddhism.
• Working definitions of human flourishing and whether they are at all indebted to Buddhism.
• The question of Self, no-self without Buddhism.

The episode is sponsored by O’Connell Coaching. Music is supplied by Cosmic Link.

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

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In this eye-opening and compelling work, psychologist Melanie Joy reveals the common denominator driving all forms of injustice. The mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse humans is the same mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse nonhumans and the environment, as well as those in our own groups working for justice.

How to End Injustice Everywhere: Understanding the Common Denominator Driving All Injustices, to Create a Better World for Humans, Animals, and the Planet (Lantern Publishing & Media, 2023) offers a fascinating examination of the psychology and structure of unjust systems and behaviors. It also offers practical tools to help raise awareness of these systems and dynamics, reduce infighting, and build more resilient and impactful justice movements.

Melanie Joy, PhD, is a Harvard-educated psychologist, celebrated speaker, and the author of seven books, including the bestselling Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows; and Getting Relationships Right: How to Build Resilience and Thrive in Life, Love, and Work. Melanie’s work has been featured in major media outlets around the world, and she has received a number of awards, including the Ahimsa Award – previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela – for her work on global nonviolence. Melanie has given talks and trainings in over 50 countries, and she is also the founding president of the international NGO Beyond Carnism.

Kyle Johannsen is a Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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In Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (Basic Books, 2019), Matthew Gutmann examines how cultural expectations viewing men as violent and sex driven becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dubious interpretations of the scientific study of the effects of testosterone, comparisons to the animal kingdom and the persistence of sex segregation reinforces ideas about what is natural. The idea that masculinity is the result of biology allows the “boys will be boys” excuse and reinforces patriarchal values harmful to women and setting false limits for male behavior. Presenting a cross-cultural survey Gutmann demonstrates how the variations across culture from Mexico to China contradict notions of a fixed masculinity. Seeing masculinity as a product of culture and malleable allows us to reimagine fathering, who is capable of leadership and offers new possibilities for how men and women will relate to each other.

Matthew Gutmann is professor of anthropology at Brown University.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Today I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018) is a collection of letters which were carefully curated by Erika and Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, and Patrick Farrell. During our discussion, Erika recounts the special relationship between two intellectual juggernauts, Huxley and Osmond, and their discussions about drugs, addiction, and death and dying. This important set of letters raises fascinating questions about medicines, the "psychedelic renaissance," the nature of the mind, and perceptions of reality.

Dyck is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) as well as Culture's Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada (Manitoba, 2017).

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Boredom is an enduring problem. In response, schools often do one or both of the following: first, they endorse what novelist Walker Percy describes as a 'boredom avoidance scheme,' adopting new initiative after new initiative in the hope that boredom can be outrun altogether, or second, they compel students to accept boring situations as an inevitable part of life. Both strategies avoid serious reflection on this universal and troubling state of mind. 

In Why Boredom Matters (Cambridge UP, 2022)k, Gary argues that schools should educate students on how to engage with boredom productively. Rather than being conditioned to avoid or blame boredom on something or someone else, students need to be given tools for dealing with their boredom. These tools provide them with internal resources that equip them to find worthwhile activities and practices to transform boredom into a more productive state of mind. This book addresses the ways students might gain these skills.

From reviews: 

‘Kevin Gary’s important and insightful book challenges readers to consider the moral and practical dimensions of boredom so that we might educate for lives of meaning. He gathers a range of sources from across time, traditions, and disciplines, and he puts these in conversation with our everyday experiences of boredom in the modern world, while also exploring ways that boredom has been written about and experienced in the past. It is an excellent book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.’--Jeff Frank 

‘Why Boredom Matters is one of those delightful books in which the author seamlessly draws from thinkers from across multiple disciplines such as education, theology, philosophy, literature, and pop culture. Søren Kierkegaard, Walker Percy, David Wallace Foster, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Dewey, Albert Bormann, Simone Weil, Josef Pieper, St. Benedict, Groundhog Day, and The Karate Kid all contribute to a richer understanding of boredom.’-- Elizabeth Amato

Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago.

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Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary 'post-truth era'. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States' counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to make war more humane and less violent. 

On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.

Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Today we spoke with Dr. Helena Vissing about her new book Somatic Maternal Healing Psychodynamic and Somatic Trauma Treatment for Perinatal Mental Health (Routledge, 2023). What does the research of neuro science, immunology and biology tell us about the complex links between trauma, stress, inflammatory responses, and postpartum depression? What are the somatic counter transferences specific to the perinatal transition? What is the difference between empowered mothering and feminist mothering? What are the five tenets of empowered mothering? These are some of the questions we discuss with Dr. Vissing. All of them aimed at answering the larger clinical question, “What do you do with a new mother who walks into your office - how do we sit with new mothers and parents who are shaking to their core?” 

Initially a school psychologist specializing in Developmental Psychology Play Therapy, Dr. Vissing was already interested in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic perspectives. When beginning her training in somatic approaches she was really excited to “learn a new modality to deepen my work in the maternal mental health specialization and specifically the transition to motherhood.” However, working in a “pretty big” community of somatic training practitioners Vissing was “a bit surprised and also a bit disappointed” to discover that there was not really a subgroup specifically dedicated to maternal mental health adaptations and that a “particular focus on the mother's perspective was missing.” Struck by this this lack Vissing became motivated and determined to “create a bridge between the two.”

For Vissing the bridge is a biopsychosocial approach which is both a “clinical attitude” and a “guiding principle” that addresses the frustrations she encountered when studying maternal mental health felt like “jumping from one paradigm to the other where the paradigms were not connecting…were not communicating and I was frustrated by that because we know all of this interacts … we know that the enormous intensity of the hormonal shifts of the perinatal transitions will impact emotional health and mental health.”

Dr. Vissing’s hope is that by reading this book, “as a clinician you will feel less apprehension about the tender work of trauma healing in the perinatal period.”

As hosts we both noted that Somatic Maternal Healing is a rigorously researched and clinically informed book. The majority of the citations reflect current findings, including research into pandemic stress and resonances in telehealth. 

Golzar Selbe Naghshineh, is a training and supervising licensed Psychoanalyst with special expertise in reproductive and maternal mental health. She created and built the Network For The Advancement of Perinatal Support – an integrative mental health program for OBGYN offices and fertility clinics that she launched in 2014 at the renowned Downtown Women OBGYN practice in New York City. Naghshineh is also teaching faculty at the New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York.

Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. He is a member of the faculty and supervising analyst at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and The New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. His primary theorists are Sándor Ferenczi and Hyman Spotnitz.

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Can the kindness of strangers help with the loneliness crisis? Whether you are a student, staff, or have gone alt-ac, you’ve likely had to move at least once recently for your education and career goals. It can get lonely when family and friends are far away or they just don’t understand what you are doing with your life, and you are left wondering who you can talk to, who has your back, and who will be your people. In this episode, a podcaster and a psychotherapist sit down to talk about how their respective jobs regularly place them in conversations with strangers, and the unexpectedly good things that have come of that. As Christina Gessler and Charlotte Fox Weber consider reports of a global loneliness crisis, they offer up the idea that perhaps one of the answers to dealing with loneliness is not in cultivating or stressing big relationships, but in recognizing the value of all of the smaller roles played by the people you encounter, and in re-valuing daily interactions.

Along with consideration for caring for mental wellbeing, having boundaries, making a safety-plan or setting up guardrails, and having realistic expectations for the roles people can fill in our lives, this episode reflects on how we can value the cumulative effect of all the smaller conversations that make up a life, and on the surprising kindness and wisdom that might be offered by strangers.

Our guest is: Charlotte Fox Weber, who is a psychotherapist and writer. She cofounded Examined Life and was the founding head of The School of Life Psychotherapy. She grew up in Connecticut and Paris and now lives in London with her family. She is the author of Tell Me What You Want. Find out more at CharlotteFoxWeber.com.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

• An Academic Life conversation on the good-enough life
• An Academic Life conversation on making a meaningful life
• An Academic Life conversation on community-building
• An Academic Life conversation about handling difficult conversations
• An Academic Life conversation about figuring out what you really want

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Body art, especially tattoos and piercings, has enjoyed an explosion of interest in recent years. However, the response of many health professionals and researchers to this phenomenon is often negative, as body art continues to be associated with issues ranging from ill mental health to offending behaviors.

Arguing for a reappraisal of the diverse range of practices that fall under this heading, Brian Brown and Virginia (Ginger) Kuulei Berndt reconsider body art as an underappreciated yet accessible source for mental and physical wellbeing. How, they ask, does body art open up new sources of community, sociality, and aesthetics? How is it used for the reclamation of one’s body, as a marker of success or accomplishment, or for building friendships? How does participation in these practices impact the health and wellbeing of body artists themselves?

Providing a radical rethink that integrates tattoos and other body modifications within health, wellbeing, and positive psychology, Body Art (Emerald Publishing, 2023) disrupts the narrative of stigmatisation that so often surrounds these practices to welcome a broader discussion of the benefits they can offer.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Whenever a person engages with music--when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or a wedding guest gets down on the dance floor--countless neurons are firing. Playing an instrument requires all of the resources of the nervous system, including cognitive, sensory, and motor functions. Composition and improvisation are remarkable demonstrations of the brain's capacity for creativity. Something as seemingly simple as listening to a tune involves mental faculties most of us don't even realize we have.

Larry S. Sherman, a neuroscientist and lifelong musician, and Dennis Plies, a professional musician and teacher, collaborate to show how our brains and music work in harmony. They consider music in all the ways we encounter it--teaching, learning, practicing, listening, composing, improvising, and performing--in terms of neuroscience as well as music pedagogy, showing how the brain functions and even changes in the process. Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music (Columbia UP, 2023) draws on leading behavioral, cellular, and molecular neuroscience research as well as surveys of more than a hundred musical people. It provides new perspectives on learning to play, teaching, how to practice and perform, the ways we react to music, and why the brain benefits from musical experiences.

Written for both musical and nonmusical people, including newcomers to brain science, Every Brain Needs Music is a lively and easy-to-read exploration of the neuroscience of music and its significance in our lives.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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What is the role of contemplative practice in times of crisis? And how can meditation actually support us in meeting the greatest challenges of our time?

Oren Jay Sofer takes up these questions in his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love (Shambhala, 2023). As a meditation teacher and a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, Sofer has spent decades exploring the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, he lays out twenty-six qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Sofer to talk about how spiritual practice can help us navigate personal and political crises, the power of everyday devotion, how we can reclaim our right to rest, and how curiosity can open the door to empathy and connection.

Life As It Is is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

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Austin Ratner has an interesting background. After graduating from medical school he decided to change careers. Rather than continuing in medicine he became a fiction writer. This shift seemed to be a good decision since he won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature for his first novel, The Jump Artist. He also wrote The Psychoanalyst’s Aversion to Proof which demonstrated his thorough understanding of Freud’s brilliance as well as some of the difficulties he encountered.

Currently, Austin has taken on a new role as the editor of The American Psychoanalyst (TAP). He intends to increase the visibility of psychoanalysis by broadening the scope of issues that psychoanalysis can help solve. With the assistance of Austin Hughes who creates new ways of telling stories that inspire readers and creative designer, Melissa Overton, who has designed many impressive projects including collaborative creations at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Austin and his team are redefining how powerful psychoanalysis can be to a myriad of professions.

Along with artistic and design changes, the magazine now includes regular sections on research, art and culture, work and education written in part by professional lay writers who know how to “speak” to people in other fields. A social media content manager is helping to develop strategies that are intended to engage readers by organizing and delivering digital content to online platforms.

Lucas McGranahan who was copyeditor for the old TAP is making major contributions as managing editor for the new TAP. In addition to being a vital part of this new initiative Lucas is also editor of Tableau, the humanities magazine of the University of Chicago.

Austin also has contributed to the new magazine by writing about racism and the challenges we face due to its devastating effect on all of us. In “Beyond Immolation and Infighting” he points out the fact that diversity takes work while highlighting the importance of the Holmes Commission Report, “In one of the many rhetorically powerful passages, the Holmes Report offers this gateway to a psychoanalytic understanding of systemic racism and obstacles to seeing it and stopping it” (Ratner, 2023).1

1“The Holmes Commission on Racial Equality (CO-REAP) was established within the American Psychoanalytic Association on recommendation of the Black Psychoanalysts Speak national organization. CO-REAP’s purpose is to identify and to find remedies for apparent and implicit manifestations of structural racism that may reside within American psychoanalysis. The Final Report is based on the study of American psychoanalytic institutes, training centers and societies within and across different organizational auspices.

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Emma K. Sutton's William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician (U Chicago Press, 2023) is the first book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the breadth of his work.

William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known is how his interest in medicine influenced his life and work, driving his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, MD offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought.

James lived at a time when old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises that warned against humanity's decline, these ideas were part of the eugenics movement and reflected a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James's life have portrayed a distressed young man, who then endured a psychological or spiritual crisis to emerge as a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma K. Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether.

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All of us would like to live longer, or to slow the debilitating effects of age. In How We Age: The Science of Longevity (Princeton UP, 2023), Coleen Murphy shows how recent research on longevity and aging may be bringing us closer to this goal. Murphy, a leading scholar of aging, explains that the study of model systems, particularly simple invertebrate animals, combined with breakthroughs in genomic methods, have allowed scientists to probe the molecular mechanisms of longevity and aging. Understanding the fundamental biological rules that govern aging in model systems provides clues about how we might slow human aging, which could lead in turn to new therapeutics and treatments for age-related disease.

Among other vivid examples, Murphy describes research that shows how changing a single gene in the nematode worm C. elegans doubles its lifespan, extending not only the end of life but also the youthful, healthy part of life. Drawing on work in her own lab as well as other recent research, Murphy chronicles the history and current state of the field, explaining longevity's links to reproduction and mating, sensory and cognitive function, inheritances from our ancestors, and the gut microbiome. Written with clarity and wit, How We Age provides a guide to the science: what we know about aging, how we know what we know, and what we can do with this new knowledge.

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Honesty is an important virtue. Parents want to develop it in their children. Close relationships depend upon it. Employers value it in their employees. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have said very little about the virtue of honesty over the past fifty years. In Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (Oxford UP, 2021), Christian B. Miller aims to draw much greater attention to this neglected virtue.

The first part of the book looks at the concept of honesty. It takes up questions such as: What does honesty involve? What are the motives of an honest person? How does practical wisdom relate to honesty? Miller explores what connects the many sides of honesty, including not lying, not stealing, not breaking promises, not misleading others, and not cheating. He argues that the honest person reliably does not intentionally distort the facts as she takes them to be.

Miller then examines the empirical psychology of honesty. He takes up the question of whether most people are honest, dishonest, or somewhere in between. Drawing extensively on recent studies of cheating and lying, the model Miller articulates ultimately implies that most of us have a long way to go to reach an honest character.

Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue provides both a richer understanding of what our character looks like, as well as what the goal of being an honest person actually involves. Miller then leaves it up to us to decide if we want to take steps to shrink the character gap between the two.

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is currently the Director of the Honesty Project. He is the author of over 100 academic papers as well as four books, including Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Moral Psychology (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP),Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP),Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press)

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Life presents us all with challenges. Most of us at some point will be struck by major traumas such as the sudden death of a loved one, a debilitating disease, or a natural disaster. What differentiates us is how we respond. In this important book, three experts in trauma and resilience answer key questions such as What helps people adapt to life's most challenging situations?, How can you build up your own resilience?, and What do we know about the science of resilience? 

Combining cutting-edge scientific research with the personal experiences of individuals who have survived some of the most traumatic events imaginable, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a practical resource that can be used time and time again. The experts describe ten key resilience factors, including facing fear, optimism, and relying on role models, through the experiences and personal reflections of highly resilient survivors. Each resilience factor will help you to adapt and grow from stressful life events and will bring hope and inspiration for overcoming adversity.

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These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?

In The Age of Insecurity (House of Anansi Press, 2023), author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.

Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at [email protected].

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Ran Zwigenberg’s Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores early efforts by the American military, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists to understand the effects of the atomic bombings on the minds of those who had survived. In positioning the book as “a prehistory of PTSD,” Zwigenberg draws attention to the historicity of the idea of psychological “trauma” before the concept was institutionalized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. 

Nuclear Minds shows that the ideological temperament of Cold War science and the gendered nature of scientific knowledge production versus psychological care were among the factors that led scientists and researchers to minimize, deny, or simply not register as meaningful the suffering of survivors, but also that without the concept of “trauma” as we use it now (or even the category of “survivor”) the experience of the affected did not always cleanly conform to our contemporary expectations.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Humans have been so dominant on Earth in large part because of their capacity to innovate – but how does that work exactly? Why can they innovate so much? That issue has been studied by Professor Min W. Jung from the Center for Synaptic Brain Dysfunctions at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea. He is the author of A Brain for Innovation: The Neuroscience of Imagination and Abstract Thinking (Columbia UP, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Today I spoke with Dr. Dhwani Shah about his new book The Analyst’s Torment: Unbearable Mental States in Countertransference (Karnac Books, 2022). The son of a sculptor mother and an internist father Shah has always been interested in subjectivity, aesthetics, art, and “how to find objectivity in subjectivity.” He began his practice with the fantasy that “I could understand things, I would know things and then I would be able to treat my patients, heal them, heal myself.” However, when his two-year-old son became (and remains) non-verbal and got the diagnosis of autism these fantasies were “dismantled”. This changed his “attitude about this search for knowledge” and evolved into different way of being with patients and learning how to “painfully accept emotional truth.”

Shah’s torments are broken into 8 chapters aimed at helping us understand “what really gets in our way of us really being able to be with our patients.” 

1. Arrogance: the manner in which we can arrogantly transform people into cartoon characters for our arrogant purposes.
2. Racism: if you do not come across any racist or prejudiced parts of yourself or your patients, you have not been paying close enough attention. 
3. Dread: which signals an unbearable emotional truth.
4. Erotic Dread: of our own erotic desire to work with patients.
5. Dissociation: as a process or a structure. 
6. Shame: How shame lies uncomfortably close to the core of psychoanalysis.
7. Hopelessness: undermines the inherent vitality and exploration in the analytic space. 
8. Jealousy: In analysis we are all excluded from paradise.

Shah hopes that the structure of these chapters will give us ways to talk “about the struggle of what to do with our feelings”. The interview ends with a question familiar to all clinicians: Since these unbearable mental states are unavoidable and ubiquitous in analytic practice, why would anyone do it? “Because” Shah answers, “eventually we break apart, and we’re left with the beauty of the work and a shift from an epistemological way of knowing to a way of being.

Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan. He is a member of the faculty and supervising analyst at The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and The New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. His primary theorists are Sándor Ferenczi and Hyman Spotnitz.

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Why would a twin sacrifice her own needs to make sure her same-age sibling is always cared for? What would cause a twin to have panic attacks when he and his brother go away to separate colleges? Why do some twins find it so difficult to develop friendships and romantic relationships? The "twin mystique" and twins' own expectations of their relationship contribute to their difficulties. A therapist who understands the psychology of twins can articulate what's going on between the siblings. Clients will feel validated as well as relieved to gain clarity about a defining aspect of their identity. 

Twins in Session: Case Histories in Treating Twinship Issues (Rocky Pines Press, 2018) shows therapists how important the twin connection is, what it means, why it's sometimes more important than the relationship to either parent, and why some twins don't know who they are apart from the twinship. It will help therapists become a trusted outsider who can give twin clients perspective about their twinship issues and assist them in developing healthy relati

Judith Tanen is an LP candidate at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.

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In her first book, How to Do Nothing, artist Jenny Odell examined the power of quiet contemplation in a world where our attention is bought and sold. Now, she takes up the question of how to find space for silence when we feel like we don’t have enough time to spend.

In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (Random House, 2023), Odell traces the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures of productivity to the deeper existential dread underlying the climate crisis. In the process, she explores alternative ways of experiencing time that can help us get past the illusion of the separate self and instead open us to wonder and freedom.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Odell to discuss the social dimensions of time, how paying attention can unsettle the boundaries between us, why she views burnout as a spiritual issue, and how love can bring us out of linear time.

Life As It Is is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. This approach has enabled Tricycle to successfully attract readers from all walks of life, many of whom desire to enrich their lives through a deeper knowledge of Buddhist traditions.

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Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017) explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, Alexa Weik von Mossner develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology. This approach helps to clarify how we interact with environmental narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds.

How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and eco-dystopian texts? Weik von Mossner explores these central questions that are important to anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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What is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in different ways. Some see meaning as a uniquely human achievement, others extend it to trees, microbes, and even to the bonding of DNA and RNA molecules. In this groundbreaking book, Gary Tomlinson defines a middle path. Combining emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs, he tracks meaning far out into the animal world. At the same time he discerns limits to its scope and identifies innumerable life forms, including many animals and all other organisms, that make no meanings at all.

Tomlinson’s map of meaning starts from signs, the fundamental units of reference or aboutness. Where signs are at work they shape meaning-laden lifeways, offering possibilities for distinctive organism/niche interactions and sometimes leading to technology and culture. The emergence of meaning does not, however, monopolize complexity in the living world. Countless organisms generate awe-inspiring behavioral intricacies without meaning. The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning (Zone Books, 2023) offers a revaluation of both meaning and meaninglessness, uncovering a foundational difference in animal solutions to the hard problem of life.”

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).

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The debate about whether mental health law should be abolished or reformed is one that is highly charged and to which there are no easy solutions. In Mental Health Law: Abolish Or Reform? (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr Kay Wilson does not shy away from these controversial debates. Examining the work that dignity can do, she makes the case for an holistic interpretation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In thinking about mental health reform, she provides a core framework which may guide support and intervention in a way that compels respect for the dignity of the person. This book makes an important contribution to the literature. Its nuanced approach and fearlessness in delving into the hard issues should be required reading for policy makers, lawyers and mental health practitioners. 

 Dr Kay Wilson is a postdoctoral fellow at the convenor of The Disability Law Network at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. She is also a co-editor of The Future of Mental Health, Disability and Criminal Law, (Routledge, 2023). 

Jane Richards is a Lecturer in Law at York Law School, UK.

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Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Humanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice (Routledge, 2023) brings together a global community of mental health professionals to offer an impassioned defense of relationship-based depth psychotherapy. Expressing ideas that are integral to the mission of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), the authors demonstrate a shared vision of a world where this therapy is accessible to all communities. They also articulate the difficulties created by the current mental health diagnostic system and differing conceptualizations of mental distress, the shortsightedness of evidence-based care and research, and the depreciation of depth therapy by many stakeholders. 

The authors thoughtfully elucidate the crucial importance of therapies of depth, insight, and relationship in the repertoire of mental health treatment and speak to the implications of PsiAN’s mission both now and in the future.With a distinguished international group of authors and a clear focus on determining a future direction for psychotherapy, this book is essential reading for all psychotherapists.

With a distinguished international group of authors and a clear focus on determining a future direction for psychotherapy, this book is essential reading for all psychotherapists.

Linda Michaels is not only an editor of this book, but the chair and co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), consulting editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, clinical associate faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and fellow of the Lauder Institute Global MBA program. Linda is a psychologist with a private practice in Chicago.

Judith Tanen is an LP candidate at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. 

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Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters from the two parties have become increasingly distinct and hostile to one another along the lines of race, religion, geography, and culture. In Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young illustrates how political leaders and media organizations capitalize on social and cultural identities to separate, enrage, and mobilize people. Because humans are motivated to comprehend, to feel in control, and to be part of a community, they seek information that satisfies these needs – including misinformation that favors their political team. They don’t want to be wrong.

Bringing together tools from political science, communications, and social psychology, Dr. Goldthwaite Young creates a model to explain how public officials, journalists, and social media platforms encourage what she calls identity distillation. Dr. Young both describes the dynamics and provides suggestions for how to disrupt “identity-driven wrongness.” These include journalists abandoning conflict framing in the coverage of politics, social media platforms increasing transparency about their algorithmic content rankings and ad targeting, and individuals cultivating intellectual humility and disrupting performances of political identity to increase the demand for democracy-centered political information.

Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of Communications and Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her areas of expertise include political media effects, media psychology, public opinion, and the psychology of misinformation. I’m delighted to welcome her to the New Books Network.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research?

Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. Thousands of studies show that they can be effective and make us happier and healthier. Yet confusion about what placebos are and how to measure their effects prevents some doctors from using them to help patients. Meanwhile, damage caused by the nocebo effect—the negative effect of expecting something bad—is not widely recognized.

In The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos and nocebos based on more than twenty years of research and data from over 300,000 patients. This book, the culmination of that research, offers practical ways for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to put placebo and nocebo research into practice to improve health outcomes.

In addition to providing an overview of placebos and nocebos and explaining how belief systems and context can create physiological effects in the body, Howick advocates for a number of controversial positions, including why it may be unethical to include placebos in most clinical trials in which there are already established therapies and why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices. Howick also underscores the importance of the therapeutic effects of interactions between health care practitioners and patients, in the context of care. The Power of Placebos dispels the confusion surrounding placebos and paves the way for doctors to help patients by enhancing placebo effects and avoiding the pitfalls of nocebos.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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For the last twenty-thousand years, dogs and people have shared a unique bond in the animal kingdom. In How Our Love of Dogs Creates Social Conflict (Lexington Books, 2022), Dr. James K. Beggan uses symbolic interaction to examine the meaning that dogs have for people as friends and family members. Although many animal rights advocates express dismay over the subordinate status ownership implies, the author argues that ownership creates a powerful psychological connection that makes it easier for people to imbue dogs with humanlike characteristics.

Dr. Beggan outlines how dogs’ sensitivity to inequity, in combination with a high degree of cognitive capacity, makes it possible for dogs to be active agents in creating conflict between people. The author's analysis of social conflict between people over their dogs connects to profound philosophical concepts about the nature of mind, the relationship between humans and animals, and the moral responsibility human beings have to dogs and other animals.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?

In this interview, Dr. Cohn discusses some common misconceptions about comics, the ability to read and make comics, and how drawings are at the core of so many creations.

Who Understands Comics? was Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Dr. Niel Cohn is currently an Associate Professor at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist best known for his pioneering research on the overlap in cognition between graphic communication and language. His books, The Visual Language of Comics (2013) and the 2021 Eisner-nominated Who Understands Comics? (2020), establish a foundation for the scientific study of comics' structure.

Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.

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Even before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, chronic loneliness was a private experience of profound anguish that had become a public health crisis. Since then it has reached new heights. Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. Jeremy Nobel founded Project UnLonely to bring creativity as well as social and medical strategies to address this societal problem. 

In his book Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection (Avery, 2023), Dr. Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection. Dr. Nobel brings together many voices, from pioneering researchers, to leaders in business, education, the arts, and healthcare, to lonely people of every age, background, and circumstance. He discovers that the pandemic isolated us in ways that were not only physical, and that, at its core, a true sense of loneliness results from a disconnection to the self. He clarifies how meaningful reconnection can be nourished and sustained. And he reveals that an important component of the healing process is engaging in creativity, a powerful opportunity he shows us can be accessed by all.

Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

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Is it really harder to pay attention to something than it used to be? No doubt the world is getting faster, and social media platforms are so good at grabbing attention. But how real is the problem and in particular, does it impact our creativity? Carolyn Dicey Jennings is based at the University of California, Merced, and has just co-written a chapter called “Attention, Technology, and Creativity” in a book called Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses published by Columbia UP (2023) Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Note: This episode contains a discussion of suicide. A list of resources is available below. 

In Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide (Temple UP, 2023), Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among suicidal people through forms of criminalization, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization, and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups experiencing multiple oppressions, including queer, trans, disabled, or Mad people.

Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework. Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers.

An open access edition of Undoing Suicidism, made available by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, is available here.

Alexandre Baril ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa. His work is situated at the crossroads of gender, queer, trans, disability/crip/Mad studies, critical gerontology and critical suicidology. His commitment to equity has earned him awards for his involvement in queer, trans and disabled communities, including the Canadian Disability Studies Association Tanis Doe Francophone Award, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion President’s Award at the University of Ottawa. A prolific author who won the Young Researcher Award from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa (2023), he has given over 200 presentations at the international level and has over 80 publications.

Resources:

SAFE HOTLINES and ONLINE SUPPORT GROUPS:

• Trans LifeLine (trans/non-binary): 1-877-330-6366 (Canada) and 1-877-565-8860 (USA)
• Autisme Soutien: Online support for autistic people (French Canada)
• BlackLine (BIPOC): 1-800-604-5841 (USA)

REGULAR HOTLINES (might trace your call and contact emergency services):

• Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566
• Suicide.ca (Québec): 1-866-APPELLE
• The Hope for Wellness Helpline (Indigenous people in Canada): 1-855-242-3310
• The Samaritains (USA): 1-212-673-3000

A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility.

Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast.

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For two decades, Sébastien Tutenges has conducted research in bars, nightclubs, festivals, drug dens, nightlife resorts, and underground dance parties in a quest to answer a fundamental question: Why do people across cultures gather regularly to intoxicate themselves?

Vivid and at times deeply personal, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry (Rutgers UP, 2022) offers new insights into a wide variety of intoxicating experiences, from the intimate feeling of connection among concertgoers to the adrenaline-fueled rush of a fight, to the thrill of jumping off a balcony into a swimming pool. Tutenges shows what it means and feels to move beyond the ordinary into altered states in which the transgressive, spectacular, and unexpected take place.

He argues that the primary aim of group intoxication is the religious experience that Émile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, the essence of which is a sense of connecting with other people and being part of a larger whole. This experience is empowering and emboldening and may lead to crime and deviance, but it is at the same time vital to our humanity because it strengthens social bonds and solidarity.

The book fills important gaps in Durkheim’s social theory and contributes to current debates in micro-sociology as well as cultural criminology and cultural sociology. Here, for the first time, readers will discover a detailed account of collective effervescence in contemporary society that includes: an explanation of what collective effervescence is; a description of the conditions that generate collective effervescence; a typology of the varieties of collective effervescence; a discussion of how collective effervescence manifests in the realm of nightlife, politics, sports, and religion; and an analysis of how commercial forces amplify and capitalize on the universal human need for intoxication.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Bullies, bad bosses, human traffickers, and mean girls all manipulate their victims without lifting a finger. This sinister form of mind control is known in the psychoanalytical community as projective identification and blame shifting. Many millions of Americans suffer from this kind of abuse, but they don’t have to anymore—escape and healing is possible.  It’s Not Me, It’s You! How Narcissists Get What They Want and How To Stop Them (Cascade, 2023) will guide readers on their path to exiting toxic relationships and provide tangible, actionable solutions. It’s Not Me, It’s You! is for victims of psychological abuse and provides tips and tools to both fight the pain and to heal. Throughout the text are stories based on representations of the thousands of patients author Dr. Karyne Messina has helped in her practice as a licensed psychologist. Some examples involve actual people, like musicians and businessmen, and the details of those cases are based on public records that are cited throughout. Healing from the pain inflicted by narcissists is possible. It’s Not Me will help you realize that you’re not to blame and that you can take steps towards a positive and healthy life lived on your own terms.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina, EdD, is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Today we have a  group session (read: an hour and a half) with the authors Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michal Levin discussing their new book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). Acknowledging that “We’re not the first to think about music in the clinical situation” the authors focused on the analytic project “as a kind of music in its own right.” With an interest in sensory, non-representational experiences. “We settled on music as a primordial operating system that all human beings are brought into.”

We begin the interview with each author sharing their ideas on a key tenet of the book which is that “Before we can become fully functioning emotional, rational, linguistic, cultural, social, or political animals, human beings first become musical animals.” From here we explore the questions posed in the book. “What does the frame, frame?” What is meant by “Music is never the creation of an individual in isolation… there is no such thing as private music”, “What is the process of human musicalization”, “What happens to us when the rhythm changes?”

This was a rich discussion and each author sharpened my thinking. One of the more meaningful exchanges came around my reaction to this line in the book, "the analytic frame may be usable as rhythm from the get-go; the analyst drops the beat, and the dance begins."  In my reading I disagreed sharply. It is the patient who comes in an drops the beat!  Peter's clarifying response to me may be the highlight of many highlights in this enchanting jam session of an interview. 

Near the end of our discussion in which the vicissitudes of induction as enchantment have made repeated appearances, I quote a passage that synthesizes much of the previous 90 minutes and speaks to the emotional resonance of the book.

“There is a good reason why psychoanalysis has been ambivalent about, if not terrified, of enchantment, which is that it’s overwhelmingly powerful and potentially extremely hazardous. Why? Because at bottom the human being seeks and needs induction. We are thus radically suggestible and susceptible to influence and in-form-ation (and possibly ex-form-ation) by the environment, a “dethroning of the ego” that Freud could never accept. Our need for enchantment renders us essentially and permanently vulnerable to being taken over, and the crucial distinction between whether we are malevolently exploited or benevolently induced into culture is harrowingly historical, a matter of what world into which one is born.” (p.70)

Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan.

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Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation. 

In Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (U Chicago Press, 2023), E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms—and particularly forms of expertise—emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Today I talked to Jenni Silverstein and Elizabeth Bechard about their study (co-authored wiht Jennifer Walker) "What are the Impacts of Concern about Climate Change on the Emotional Dimensions of Parents’ Mental Health? A Literature Review" published in the Journal of Health Care Communications (September, 2023).

Jenni Silverstein is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Infant-Family Mental Health Specialist, working at the intersection of Climate Justice and Early Childhood Mental Health. 

Elizabeth Bechard is Senior Policy Analyst for Moms Clean Air Force and leads the organization’s work on climate change and mental health. She is author of Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Rob Schneider, Professor of History at Indiana University-Bloomington, about the political effects of resentment. Schneider begins by discussing the psychological complexity of resentment and then delves into its understanding by other authors such as Nietzsche and its relationship with Catholicism. Moving forward, Schneider discusses how resentment is related to identity politics and how some sectors of the population have been neglected on the basis of the claim that they are privileged. Finally, he elaborates on the making of forgiveness in divided societies and how it is often imposed on some who are not yet ready to forgive.

Schneider is the author of The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion (U Chicago Press, 2023). 

International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes.

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What makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition?

Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets (Columbia University Press, 2022) shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs―which is also why they tend to fail. Authors Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for dieters. They demonstrate how fad diets help people cope with widespread anxieties and offer tantalizing glimpses of attainable self-transformation. Chrzan and Cargill emphasize the social contexts of diets, arguing that beliefs about nutrition are deeply rooted in pervasive cultural narratives.

Considering dietary beliefs and practices in terms of culture, nutrition, and individual psychological needs, Anxious Eaters refrains from moralizing or promoting a “right” way to eat. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the popularity of a wide range of eating trends, including the Atkins Diet and other low- or no-carb diets; beliefs that ingredients like wheat products and sugars are toxic, allergenic, or addictive; food avoidance and “Clean Eating” practices; and paleo or primal diets. Anxious Eaters sheds new light on why people adopt such diets and why these diets remain so attractive even though they often fail.

Janet Chrzan teaches nutritional anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context (2013) as well as coeditor of Research Methods for the Anthropological Study of Food and Nutrition (2017) and Organic Food, Farming, and Culture (2019).

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

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Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research—trauma studies and comics studies—to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in American comics after the Vietnam War, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible.

Using texts from across the form and placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics, Earle suggests that comics are the ideal artistic representation of trauma. Because comics bridge the gap between the visual and the written, they represent such complicated narratives as loss and trauma in unique ways, particularly through the manipulation of time and experience. Comics can fold time and confront traumatic events, be they personal or shared, through a myriad of both literary and visual devices. As a result, comics can represent trauma in ways that are unavailable to other narrative and artistic forms.

With themes such as dreams and mourning, Earle concentrates on trauma in American comics after the Vietnam War. Examples include Alissa Torres’s American Widow, Doug Murray’s The ’Nam, and Art Spiegelman’s much-lauded Maus. These works pair with ideas from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. Through these examples and others, Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War (UP of Mississippi, 2017) proves that comics open up new avenues to explore personal and public trauma in extraordinary, necessary ways.

Dr. Harriet Earle is a senior lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University and a Research Fellow at the Centre for War, Atrocity, and Genocide at the University of Nipissing. 

Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.

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Mass shootings have become a defining issue of our time. Whenever the latest act of newsworthy violence occurs, mental illness is inevitably cited as a preeminent cause by members of the news media and political sphere alike. Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis's book Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety (NYU Press, 2023) exposes how mental illness is vastly overemphasized in popular discussion of mass violence, which in turn makes us all less safe.

The recurring and intense focus on mental illness in the wake of violent tragedy is fueled by social stigma and cognitive bias, strengthening an exaggerated link between violence and mental illness. Yet as Elbogen and Verykoukis clearly and compellingly demonstrate in this book, a wide array of empirical data show that this link is much weaker than commonly believed-numerous other risk factors have been proven to be stronger predictors of violence. In particular, the authors argue that overweighting mental illness means underweighting more robust risk factors, which are external (e.g., poverty, financial strain, inadequate social support), internal (e.g., younger age, anger, substance abuse), or violence-defining (e.g., lacking empathy, gun access, hate group membership). These risk factors need to be incorporated more fully into public policies around public safety. These risk factors need to be taken into consideration when crafting policies that concern public safety, with emphasis on strategies for reducing the viability and acceptability of violence as a choice.

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Is free will an illusion? Is addiction a brain disease? Should we enhance our brains beyond normal? Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science (Oxford UP, 2023) blends philosophical analysis with modern brain science to address these and other critical questions through captivating cases. The result is a nuanced view of human agency as surprisingly diverse and flexible. With a lively and accessible writing style, Neuroethics is an indispensable resource for students and scholars in both the sciences and humanities.

Joshua May is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Agency in Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? In Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question (Stanford UP, 2023), philosopher Philippe Huneman describes the different meanings of "why," and how those meanings can, and should (or should not), be conflated.

As Huneman outlines, there are three basic meanings of why: the cause of an event, the reason of a belief, and the reason why I do what I do (the purpose). Each of these meanings, in turn, impacts how we approach knowledge in a wide array of disciplines: science, history, psychology, and metaphysics. Exhibiting a rare combination of conversational ease and intellectual rigor, Huneman teases out the hidden dimensions of questions as seemingly simple as "Why did Mickey Mouse open the refrigerator?" or as seemingly unanswerable as "Why am I me?" In doing so, he provides an extraordinary tour of canonical and contemporary philosophical thought, from Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Spinoza, to Elizabeth Anscombe and Ruth Millikan, and beyond.

Of course, no proper reckoning with the question "why?" can afford not to acknowledge its limits, which are the limits, and the ends, of reason itself. Huneman thus concludes with a provocative elaboration of what Kant called the "natural need for metaphysics," the unallayed instinct we have to ask the question even when we know there can be no unequivocal answer.

Philippe Huneman is Research Director at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS/ Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and the author of several books in French and English, including Philosophical Sketches of Death in Biology: An Historical and Analytic Investigation (2022). 

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications--for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.

An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.

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Build healthy boundaries, manage difficult relationships, and live a happy life in accordance with your personal values with this unique, activity-based supplement to start or support your therapy practice.

Setting boundaries can be tough—you don’t want to disappoint other people, but you also don’t want to be stuck in a situation that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy. The good news is that setting healthy boundaries is really a good thing that can make you happier and strengthen those relationships you were so worried about.

So how do you get started? Setting boundaries is an important skill, and the only way to get better is by practicing. In Setting Boundaries: 100 Ways to Protect Yourself, Strengthen Your Relationships, and Build the Life You Want...Starting Now! (Adams Media, 2023), you’ll find 100 activities that will help you become better at setting boundaries. Dive into activities that will get you thinking about and practicing those boundaries that are most important to you.

You’ll learn:

-How to find your boundary-setting role model to encourage you in those tough moments

-How to consider your authentic schedule…and then how to give up on tasks and activities that don’t match your values to set boundaries around your personal time

-How to develop authentic holiday celebrations while navigating complicated family situations

-How to say no gently

-And much more!

Whether you’re a recovering people pleaser or want to build new boundaries that match other changes in your life, these activities will give you the tools you need to get started. Boundaries are healthy, important, and even necessary to create the life you want—so start building your happier life today!

Krystal Mazzola Wood is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She founded the Healthy Relationship Foundation to help people experience greater self-love and deeper intimacy with others. Krystal is the author of two bestselling books: The Codependency Recovery Plan: A 5 Step Guide to Understand, Accept, and Break Free from the Codependent Cycle and The Codependency Workbook: Simple Practices for Developing and Maintaining Your Independence. She also maintains the blog, Confidently Authentic, which focuses on mentally healthy dating advice. Krystal lives in Phoenix, AZ, with her husband and their rescue pets, a cat and a dog.

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Traci Cipriano's book The Thriving Lawyer: A Multidimensional Model of Well-Being for a Sustainable Legal Profession (Routledge, 2023) is based on an innovative model, grounded in science. This book serves as a resource for promoting well-being and culture-change in the legal community by educating about pertinent issues impacting lawyers, and how to address them. It is a roadmap, highlighting the many over-arching and inter-connected aspects of well-being, and enabling readers to identify and target the issues most relevant to their unique situations.

Along with practical strategies, the book provides a big-picture framework, illustrating how the many intersecting individual and organizational factors which influence well-being are all related, yet separate and distinct. The framework provides a foundation for creating change, and where you focus first will depend on the needs, the situation, and any unique challenges faced by you or your organization.

The Thriving Lawyer explains why, in addition to self-care, change is needed on the organizational level in terms of workplace culture and policies, as well as normalizing self-care and eradicating stigma. This book is intended to benefit individual lawyers, their organizations, and professionals who support them, by educating, motivating, and promoting self-care and healthy work environments.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

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Video games are temporal artifacts: They change with time as players interact with them in accordance with rules. In Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach (Transcript, 2020), Federico Alvarez Igarzábal investigates the formal aspects of video games that determine how these changes are produced and sequenced. Theories of time perception drawn from the cognitive sciences lay the groundwork for an in-depth analysis of these features, making for a comprehensive account of time in this novel medium.

This book-length study dedicated to time perception and video games is an indispensable resource for game scholars and game developers alike. Its reader-friendly style makes it readily accessible to the interested layperson.

Federico Alvarez is a scholar of games and play working at the intersection of aesthetics and cognitive science. He specializes in time in video games, both concerning the formal analysis of the medium and the psychology of time perception. This combination of fields has allowed him to work on national and international projects both in the humanities (game studies, media studies) and the natural sciences (psychology, neuroscience), combining theoretical and experimental approaches.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer's disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease's relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease.

Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer's threatens--memory, for example--are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer's. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging.

Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer's contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer's disease and aging in America.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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Drawing on deep reserves of experience and theoretical and research knowledge, Nancy McWilliams presents a fresh perspective on psychodynamic supervision in this highly instructive work. In Psychoanalytic Supervision (Guilford Publications, 2021), McWilliams examines the role of the supervisor in developing the therapist's clinical skills, giving support, helping to formulate and monitor treatment goals, and providing input on ethical dilemmas. Filled with candid clinical examples, the book addresses both individual and group supervision. Special attention is given to navigating personality dynamics, power imbalances, and various dimensions of diversity in the supervisory dyad. McWilliams guides mentors and mentees alike to optimize this unique relationship as a resource for lifelong professional learning and growth.

Jacob Goldberg is a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Children of all ages are abused in every country in the world, by members of every society, culture, religion, and socio-economic class. About 120 million children under twenty, or one child in ten, report sexual abuse.

We often blame children for their own abuse instead of holding the perpetrators responsible for their crimes. When perpetrators are prosecuted, punishments are rarely severe. Remarkably, we sometimes justify child sex abuse, or even facilitate it, allowing it to continue, not only in hidden places, but even in the open. Beverley Chalmers' book Child Sex Abuse: Power, Profit, Perversion (Grosvenor House, 2022) exposes the stunning extent of child sex abuse in today's world.

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Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself.

The authors discuss how technosleep, at its simplest denotes the ‘coming together’ or ‘entanglements’ of sleep and technology and sensitizes us to various shifts in sleep–technology relations through culture, time and place. In doing so, it pays close attention to the salience and significance of these trends and transformations to date in everyday/night life, their implications for sleep inequalities and the related issues of sleep and social justice they suggest.

Katie Coveney, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist with expertise in social and ethical aspects of medicine and health care. She has particular research interests in the sociology of sleep, medical technology, and disability. Katie is the School of Social Sciences and Humanities Ethics Lead and Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy Lead Admissions officer.

Katie has been a senior lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough since 2018. She was co-convener of the British Sociological Association Medical Sociology Group (2019 – 2021). Before this she worked as a research fellow in the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University (2017-8), the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex (2014-7), the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (2010-2014) and the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy at the University of Nottingham (2009 -2010).

Eric L. Hsu, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Justice & Society Academic Unit at the University of South Australia, where he also serves as a Research Platform Leader at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. With Dr Louis Everuss, Dr Hsu hosts and produces the Sociology of Everything podcast. This podcast aims to stimulate interest in sociological ideas by offering a sideways and engaging look at the wonders of sociology. More information can be found on his website: www.ericlhsu.com. 

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at emotional labor performed by employees and passengers at airports. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Matisyahu Shulman's Reimagining Repentance: Experiencing the High Holidays Through the Lens of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Kodesh, 2023) is unique in its attempt to bridge Torah content on the High Holidays with modern psychological theory about change. The book reviews the major themes of each part of the High Holidays and explores psychological principles related to each theme. The text contains clinical anecdotes weaved with Torah ideas and will be both a meaningful and enjoyable read for anyone wishing for a psychological perspective on the High Holidays. Excerpts from theoretical sessions with patients seeking help with drug or alcohol use disorders make the book more relatable and highlight the intersection between addiction treatment and Jewish philosophy.

Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org.

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How can we challenge and change inequalities? In Seeing Others: How Recognition Works— and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Atria, 2023), Michele Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, at Harvard University, explores this question by empirically substantiating the concept of recognition. Using a huge range of case studies, interview data, as well as wealth of cross-disciplinary research, the book shows the problems of our unequal societies and the people, and ideas, that can contribute to solving them. It looks at art, politics, media and culture, as well as social policy and generational conflicts, all of which show how individuals and social groups need and can give recognition to each other. An accessible as well as detailed analysis, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone who wants to make a better world.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

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Folk psychology (on a standard reading) is the way we attribute contentful mental states to others in order to explain and predict their behavior – for example, saying that John thinks the plant needs water as an inner mental state that explains why he is looking for the watering can. 

In Mind As Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism (Oxford UP, 2023), Adam Toon argues that this view is incorrect: we do not have mental representations. Instead, while our concept of mind is of an inner world, this inner world is a fiction. What we are really doing is picking out complex patterns of behavior and projecting this inward; intentionality resides in public language, not in the mind. Toon, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter, also distinguishes his view from Ryle’s and Dennett’s positions, and argues that while the ascriptions should not be taken literally, their purpose is serious and our practice of ascribing them is indispensable.