New Books in Psychoanalysis

Professor Karl Figlio has accomplished a remarkable feat: Under the heading "seminal masculinity", he has named and described a seemingly new dimension of masculinity that heretofore has been hiding in plain sight. Listen to this interview discussing Rethinking the Psychoanalysis of Masculinity: From Toxic to Seminal (Routledge, 2023)

In true psychoanalytic fashion he started his exploration by wondering about a surface phenomenon, namely the widespread use of the term "toxic" in reference to "masculinity" in the culture and teased out its connections to unconscious phantasy in which toxic masculinity is only the destructive underbelly of seminal masculinity, the latter being a internal position of collaboration and reparation. He links the pair of seminal versus toxic masculinity to a primal seminal ambivalence that has the subject torn between hope for renewal, creativity and collaboration and the desolation of the seeds of reparation failing and turning toxic, destroying what they hoped to enliven. This ambivalence is akin to the Kleinian depressive position and is defended against by loud and shrill phallic posturing. Figlio offers a richness of clinical and cultural material to show how we have tended to miss the seminal dimension of masculinity by falling for and analysing phallic masculinity in order to escape the dread inherent in the unconscious phantasy of semen giving out, becoming toxic and erasing the very foundation of life. Just as in an analysis, the insight gained by the acknowledgement of such a fundamental phantasy in unconscious life is accompanied by anxiety as well as creativity. Take it from me: Once you have opened your third ear to seminal masculinity, you will not be able to unhear it in your own or your analysands' material.

In the interview, we discuss, among many ofter things, "seminal masculinity" and "seminal ambivalence", its develomental roots in primary narcissism, and its connection to the 2008 financial crisis in its toxic guise. The interview will therefore not only be of great interest to psychoanalytic clinical practitioners, but also to a lay audience looking for a deeper understanding of masculinity.

In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters. 

Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge. When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry (U California Press, 2026) excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.

Eric talks with host Emily Dufton about his research techniques, the meaning of Chestnut Lodge and Osheroff's challenge to its care, and the limits of psychiatry.

Emily Dufton is a drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America and Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs. 

Dr Mark Kinet (MD) discusses Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love: A Kaleidoscopic View (Routledge, 2026), published by Routledge in 2026. This book is a psychoanalytic foray into the rhetorics of struggle which shape love, desire and their production. Through readings of Freud, Lacan, Winnicott and Klein, it explores how the psyche is shaped by the complexities involved in coming to love and be loved. Later chapters examine how aspects of modern culture have introduced new modes of desire and new theatres for loving encounters. The book’s form, ‘a topography of [love’s] tensions,’ enacts the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in love, its idiosyncrasies, whilst also paying homage to the endurance of every generation’s fascination with love’s struggles. This conversation with Mark covers Lacan’s conception of desire, AI intimacy and the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry.

Strikingly clear, humane and helpful, this is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand autism and the autistic spectrum. Drawing on many years of clinical experience and research, as well as the testimonies of autistic people, Autisms (Penguin, 2026) is an up-to-the minute account of the many indicative features of autism and how they have been assessed and treated over almost a century.

As rates of autism diagnosis escalate in almost all high-income countries, researchers today mostly agree that there is no single cause or even single clinical picture of autism. Rather than a neat and well-defined entity, autism is described as a spectrum or constellation of traits, varying in intensity, distribution and severity, with practically everyone in the general population showing at least some autistic trait or feature.

At the same time, there has been a radical split between the ways in which autism is perceived. For many, it is a disorder, a pathology based on a deficit, whereas for others it is an identity, a natural variation in human cognitive and behavioural diversity.

For anyone facing the special challenges of autism, it can be hard to find clarity amid such complexity and contradiction, making Darian Leader’s illuminating guide to the field of autism research and treatment particularly welcome. 

 “For Laplanche we are constantly and radically de-centered, always adrift so to speak in terms of a center.”  - Dominque Scarfone 

“One of the very distinguishing things about Laplanche's work is that it is sort of topsy-turvy. It is this kind of free-floating thing where there's no chronological developmental anything. It's not this sort of cut and dry. – Bryan Batista Thomas 

1. De centered
2. Adrift
3. Topsy-turvy
4. Free Floating
5. No chronological development 

Welcome to a thoroughly Laplanchian conversation. 

To write Readings of Jean Laplanche in Process: Conversations Amplifying Differences (Routledge, 2026), author Batista-Thomas presented 9 scholars with 3 clinical vignettes and 14 “Problematized Questions” and then interviewed each one of four to five times. The interviews averaged 75 minutes. He did this to address his “frustration about what I felt was missing in the Laplanchian literature in the United States.”

The result is an extraordinary exploration of Laplanche’s “style” where even the idea that there is a style is called into question. 

Here are some of the questions we covered today:  

“What does Lorenza Escardó Zaldo mean when she says, ‘we are always trying to push the self-preservative out of the frame’?”

How does Udo Hock answer “where does the repressed come from?” And why does he seem to contradict Luiz Carlos Tarelho? 

What are Dominque Scarfone’s thoughts on why presenting clinical vignettes is “an impossible task” that precipitates “infinite digression”?

How do we understand Nicolas Evzonas when he says, “For me, theoretical countertransference determines clinical countertransference”?               

And finally, why should both sides of the couch heed Avgi Saketopoulou when she says, “Autonomy has less to do with the availability of more translational possibilities aka a wider mytho symbolic domain and being exposed to/better educated about it and more to do with the capacity to exercise translational variety and not be punished for it.”

In short, what can we get away with? 

What must we get away with as we pursue an unconscious “that always eludes us”?  

As the popular jazz standard tells us, “comes love, nothing can be done”, or can it? Galit Atlas begs to differ in her most recent book Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, which describes six kinds of emotional styles, as we might call them, made manifest when we are young. Atlas, whose work has endeavored to sexualize the Relational School, here turns an eye both keen and wistful, towards love.

So, I admit to having read a few, but only a few, well maybe more than a few books like this, books that are psychoanalytically informed yet meant for a popular audience. In fact I credit one of them, Harriet Goldhor Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, for edging me towards the study of psychoanalysis. (Yes she is the mother of the author Ben Lerner btw, a fact I love.)

As a kind of preview to Atlas’ book, I want to share a little about how I read for NBiP interviews as on reading this book, my usual mode slipped away. I think that reveals something essential about Come Closer.

As an interviewer who speaks almost exclusively to authors of psychoanalytic books, I tend to read what populates my chosen queue tuned into a writer’s lineages. I am curious to see how the author situates themselves within the field’s family tree.

As an analyst who interviews, I also read hoping to find some help, like what to do with the fact that yesterday serious psychic quicksand started to seep its seep into my consulting room and I am scared. Can you, dear author, can you keep me from being pulled under?

Between a book’s covers I look for whether the author’s hand is grabbing mine, are our eyes meeting, do we share a wink, a nod, or get a leg up? And when a piece of psychoanalytic writing gives forth the new or the unexpected, like Dianne Elise, like Avgi Saketopolou? I live for it.

I am sometimes a demanding reader and my “process” is quasi-athletic, certainly physical: as a child I slumbered with novels that tumbled from my hands to collapse on my chest as I lost consciousness. I have spent the night together with many an NBiP author whose book ended up under my pillow crooking my neck.

I carried many of you on every train line. You gave me tennis elbow. I read you before the lights go out at the cinema and again as the curtain comes up, taking notes in the margins that I often cannot read three days later.

I highlight. I underline. I fold pages in half, leave exclamation points, write the words ‘yes’ or ‘no’ emphatically and if I don’t have a pen? I swipe the lipstick off my lips touching a page so as to denote my interest, positive or negative.

All my NBIP books come to resemble well loved rag dolls: they probably even smell like me.

So how to understand that when I read Galit Atlas’ Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, And The Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, my pen lay fallow?

I can say this: the book got a hold of me, and then once I was in it I got lost, so my hands they but held the book and nothing more, and they held it closely. Come Closer was telling me about myself.

It has the quality of a beach read, which is rare in our field for sure, and often such an assignation is meant as an insult, but it is the kind of book that you can put down precisely because you are so into it. And because you are hooked you put that sunscreen on your companion’s back and then run to the sea realizing you are overheated, maybe need to pee, get a coffee, call for a dinner reservation and when you come back to it, it’s as if you had never left, forget that you touched a body with lotion and tended to your own. Like an engrossing film where after you exit the cinema you see its visual remnants everywhere, like a friendly hallucination, this book’s world remains with you.

You cannot not find in yourself aspects of Atlas’ taxonomy: the guilty child who learns to lie, the melancholic child who won’t let go, the invisible child who sees it all, the frightened child who needs no explanation, the ashamed child who seeks perfection, and the chosen child who perhaps takes the hardest hit.

Freud said, in paraphrase, that our thoughts cannot but turn to work and love. Who among us doesn’t see the remnants of our early lives in the strange debris and the funny shapes our love lives take? And who, in their secret heart of hearts, doesn’t want to read a book of stories, cases sure, but by a psychoanalyst who has prose that flows, psychoanalytic formulations secreted in, a book that almost masquerades as self help, but, in refusing easy answers, in sticking with the truth of the unconscious, seduces believers and unbelievers both: we cannot get away from early life and in our love lives we cannot pretend otherwise. Come Closer comes so close it can feel like a second skin.

Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expression within representational systems and is core to the being of any subject. In Part One, The Epistemology of the Body, Meehan O'Callaghan approaches a theory of the body as traumatic by framing it as a question, a gap in knowledge through the lens of psychoanalysis and theatre studies. Part Two, The Body of Drama, is devoted to a study of the body in the works of Beckett and Artaud from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Part Three, The Body Between Being and Non-Being, provides a deeper exploration of how the interrogation of the body opens onto a question of being and uses the insights gained from the dialectical encounter of psychoanalysis with the specific works of Beckett and Artaud to apply them to contemporary and scholarly issues of the body. Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives through Beckett and Artaud will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for academics and scholars of Lacanian studies, psychoanalytic studies, the body, disability studies, and literary and theatre studies.

This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.

The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality—in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint—names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear.

Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2026) shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically—serially—connected.

Ryan Engley is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).

This is Part 2 of a 2 Part interview. Listen to Part 1 here

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker. You Won’t Get Free: Stories of Mothers and Daughters (Knopf, 2026) of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,” Aviv writes. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.” Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world. You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

Liza Veale is a clinician in Oakland, California. She teaches at Access Institute for Psychological Services and serves on the editorial board of fort da, the journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.

This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the

The serial

Through formal

Ryan Engley

Helena Vissing,

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