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
De centered
Adrift
Topsy-turvy
Free Floating
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”?