New Books in Psychoanalysis

• The Unconscious Calculus of Justice: Racial Bias in Legal Outcomes

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

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• Vanessa Sinclair et al., "The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond" (Routledge, 2024)

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

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• Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, "Hatred of Sex" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

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

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• Tom Wooldridge, "Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction" (Routledge, 2022)

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

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• Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith

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

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