New Books in Psychoanalysis

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 contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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Once dismissed as unscientific, psychoanalytic therapy is proving to be among our most effective medical treatments of any kind - outperforming psychiatric drugs and rivaling vaccines in its power to prevent and heal. Why does it work so well?Perhaps because one of the most controversial figures in psychology was right all along. Neuroscience now confirms much of what Sigmund Freud conjectured over a century ago: our deepest struggles stem, not from chemical imbalances, but from buried memories and unconscious conflicts that no pill can touch.Using enthralling case studies and cutting-edge brain science, pioneering neuroscientist Mark Solms makes the case that psychoanalysis should resume its position as our master theory of the mind. Yet modern research also reveals where Freud got important things wrong. Could correcting these errors make therapy even more effective?As psychiatric diagnoses soar and standard treatments continue to fail many patients, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing (Pegasus, 2026) offers a revolutionary hope: a real science of healing, rooted in the radical idea that our suffering arises from truths we haven't yet faced.
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Self-Sabotage: How We Try Not to Flourish (Polity Press, 2026) contends
that an unconscious impulse to undermine our own interests plays a
dominant role in our lives. The idea of a primary drive to
self-destruction is at odds with the prevailing common sense in a world
where almost everyone believes that we strive to flourish. Yet often we
fail to flourish not because some people are wicked but because the
drive to sabotage ourselves outweighs the pleasures of flourishing. Our
tendency to self-sabotage distorts our politics, throws off our romantic
relationships, and generally makes human existence difficult. It is why
we become involved with partners who continually create unhappiness for
us, and also why we elect leaders who derail the nation. Although the
act of self-sabotage is clearly self-destructive, it appeals to us
because it has a creative power. Through sacrificing ourselves, we
create sublime value in the world. Our willingness to sacrifice our own
interest elevates the value of the object we pursue and lifts it out of
the realm of the ordinary. Self-sabotage leads to immense amounts of
social harm. But at the same time, the tendency to self-destruction
provides the basis for our ability to act ethically and surmount social
pressure in the name of some higher value.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the co-host of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley.

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 contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm (Routledge, 2024), featuring a foreword by Donald Kalsched, examines the integration of the subjectively experienced body in the practice of depth psychology. Barbara Holifield draws from philosophical perspectives, neuroscientific and infant research, developmental theory, and trauma studies to offer a comprehensive overview of embodiment within a relationally based psychoanalytic approach. Clinical vignettes demonstrate the critical value of working with the bodily-felt dimension of implicit relational memory and emphasize how bodily-felt sense facilitates access to feelings.

The primacy of bodily-based knowing revealed through infant research illuminates an interior world of sensorial apprehension that conceptually based knowing and psychoanalytic thought often overlook. Furthermore, it establishes the body as intrinsic to relational life. Freud’s 1923 statement that “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego,” is as cogent today as it was then (1961, p. 26). It has only been confirmed by infant research and affective neuroscience. Psychic life is born in the body and is sustained by the body. It is in and through the body that relationship begins. Disruptions in one’s earliest relationship with the primary caregiver are synonymous with disruption of the integral unity of psyche and body.

Further, the book highlights the organizing role that felt sensation, sensory perception, and affective experience have on facilitating the re-establishment of psyche indwelling the soma. Because disruptions of the felt sense of psyche integral to soma occur in infancy, work of this nature falls out of the purview of traditional psychoanalysis. “It requires instead a working-through focused on the present, on the heart of the analytic relationship, and on the activation of an awareness of one’s own inner mode of functioning” (Lombardi, 2017, p. 23). Focus on direct sensorial and relational experience in the body is foundational in working with the analysand’s unformulated experience. As this occurs, affects are able to be borne, reflected on, and lived as feelings-in-the-body while simultaneously making way for the establishment of new relational organizations. Throughout the book, clinical examples show how the mythopoetic imagination and soma entwine––at times, attention to the somatic dimension stirs the creative unconscious in the form of dreams, active imagination, artworks, and movement. Reciprocally, the imaginal world informs and stimulates somatic experience. In this way, the mythopoetic reality revealed in a depth analysis weaves somatic experience into a tapestry of personal meaning, facilitating deep psychophysical transformation. Here the body serves as a portal to the numinous––healing that goes far beyond the relief of symptoms to a renewed sense of aliveness.

This book offers guiding principles for psychotherapists and clinicians of all levels to engage the bodily basis of experience in their clinical practice. It will appeal to general readers interested in integrating mind and body, including those in the healing arts, fine arts, dance, athletics, meditation, yoga, and martial arts.

Barbara Holifield, MSW, LMFT, SEP is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. With over forty years of clinical practice in depth psychotherapy and somatic healing — and her certification as a Jungian Analyst since 2006 — her work lives at the intersection of Jung and the body, bringing together somatic experiencing, affective neuroscience, relational psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the bodily-felt sense to offer a path of healing for those who have suffered developmental trauma and its long aftermath.

A certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) trained directly by Dr. Peter Levine, Barbara taught Somatic Psychology for approximately twenty years at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) — one of the foremost graduate programs in somatic and depth psychology in the United States. She is also an internationally recognized teacher of Authentic Movement, a contemplative body practice rooted in Jungian active imagination that she has taught across the United States and abroad for approximately forty years.

Her clinical writing explores the relationship of body, trauma, self, and our participation in the dream of the earth. Her articles have been published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Psychological Perspectives, and the Journal of Analytic Psychology. She has also contributed a chapter to The Body in Psychotherapy (North Atlantic Press) and a chapter to the anthology Authentic Movement: Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). She maintains memberships in the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP), the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT).

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 contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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A fascinating introductory volume, Existential Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2025) integrates existential philosophy with psychoanalysis, drawing on key
theorists from both areas and expertly guiding the reader on how to
incorporate these two disciplines, which may appear disparate on the
surface, into their clinical and theoretical work.

This unique
and accessible book sees M. Guy Thompson explore key concepts, such as
experience, authenticity, freedom, psychic change, agency, and the
pervasive role of suffering in our lives. Throughout, he draws on a wide
range of thinkers from both fields, including Sartre, Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Freud, Winnicott, Bion, Laing, and Lacan. Exquisitely lucid
and engaging, Thompson deftly brings the reader into thoughtful and
enlightening territory typically inaccessible to the general reader.
Although existential philosophy and psychoanalysis are often thought of
as incompatible fields, Thompson shows how they share far more in common
than is usually supposed. This volume will help clinicians, scholars,
and students of all persuasions learn how integrating the two
disciplines introduces a more personal and revolutionary understanding
of what psychoanalysis can be in the twenty-first century.

This
compelling assimilation of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis
will be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners and
psychotherapists, as well as philosophers, social scientists and any
student of the human condition
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