New Books in Psychology

• Gohar Homayounpour, "Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning" (Routledge, 2022)

  In this episode, Matthew Pieknik and Christopher Russell speak with Gohar Homayounpour about her book Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (Routledge, 2023) Psychoanalysis is, Homayounpour tells us early in the interview, “a profession for dreamers, for people who don't know what to do with themselves. for freaks. This is not a profession for people in suits at universities who have a clear idea of the status quo. It's the absolute opposite. It's the carnival, you know, it's still unofficial, it's the subversive because that's the discourse of the unconscious. But this is a dangerous business, you know, and it should be for both analytic subjects in the room. I'm in favor of absence. I'm in favor of disturbance. I'm in favor of pollution and darkness. I think these are things that need to be celebrated.” In Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning, Gohar Homayounpour plays a theme and variations on loss, love, and family against the backdrop of Iran’s chaotic recent past. Homayounpour is simultaneously Shahrzad, the fearless storyteller, and Shahrzad’s analyst: subjecting fairy tales to fierce new insights, while weaving an indigo thread through her own devastation on the death of her father and the wonders and horrors of motherhood. A blue thread, or melody, runs though the separations and emigrations of her family and patients driven or broken apart by war, and likewise through the fraught world inhabited by Persian women. This book breaks new psychoanalytic ground, offering a radical rejection of traditional clichés about Iran, and Iranian women, but its unsparing elegance transcends any political agenda, bridging the ocean of a shared and tragic humanity. Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed readers, as well as those interested in grief, Iran, and women’s experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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• Brain Rot: What Screens Are Doing to Our Minds (6)

  Drs. Messina and Gill talked about cognitive offloading in our digital age—how smartphones, AI, and other technologies are reshaping our mental habits, our memory, our capacity for attention, and ultimately, our emotional lives. Cognitive offloading refers to the process of using tools and technologies to take over mental functions we used to perform ourselves. Whether it's using GPS to navigate, storing phone numbers in our contacts, or asking ChatGPT for help organizing thoughts, we’re increasingly externalizing our thinking. They also discussed the psychoanalytic defense mechanisms involved in our reliance on technology, how AI impacts metacognition, and how this process influences us both individually and collectively. From a psychoanalytic perspective, cognitive offloading is similar to projection—placing uncomfortable labor or responsibility outside of ourselves. It may also involve disavowal: we know we’re becoming dependent, but we ignore or deny the psychological cost. Dr. Messina mentioned that Freud saw memory as a core element of identity adding that when we delegate memory to devices, we risk fragmenting the ego. She also elaborated on the concept of “metacognition” which refers to the awareness and regulation of one’s own thought processes, also described as “thinking about thinking.” It involves understanding how we learns, plans, monitors, and evaluates our cognitive strategies to achieve specific goals. Dr. Gill talked about cognitive offloading from a neuroscience perspective noting that the practice of using external tools or resources to reduce mental effort involves complex interactions between several brain regions. He discussed how the prefrontal cortex plays a central role in cognitive offloading while the hippocampus is critical for memory encoding and retrieval. How to mitigate problems that arise from cognitive offloading was also discussed as well as the risks of overreliance on AI chatbots which can lead to cognitive atrophy. This is now referred to as artificial intelligence chatbots induced cognitive atrophy or AICICA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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• Yellowlees Douglas, "Writing for the Reader's Brain: A Science-Based Guide" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

  What makes one sentence easy to read and another a slog that demands re-reading? Where do you put information you want readers to recall? Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, psychology and psycholinguistics, Writing for the Reader’s Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2025) provides a practical, how-to guide on how to write for your reader. It introduces the five 'Cs' of writing - clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence - and demonstrates how to use these to bring your writing to life. Dr. Yellowlees Douglas is the founder of ReadersBrain Academy and has spent over twenty-five years teaching writing to everyone from professors to freshmen. This interview was conducted by Renee Hale, who holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and works in R&D for the food and beverage industry. She is the author of The Nightstorm Files, a voracious reader, and enjoys sharing the joy of new perspectives with listeners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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• Book Talk 64 How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty

  What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by “experts,” influencers, and gurus. But these one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain.  In How to Fall in Love With Questions, Elizabeth Weingarten finds inspiration in a few famous lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and then takes this insight – to love the questions themselves – to modern science to offer a fresh approach for dealing with the uncertainty in our lives. What if our questions—the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose—are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with seemingly unsolvable questions, not as a quick fix but to deepen our sense of being fully alive. Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of others, including a part of my own story after the events of 9/11 in New York City when I first turned to Rilke’s letters, to chart a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty. Designed to inspire anyone who feels stuck, powerless, and drained, How to Fall in Love with Questions challenges us to unlock our minds and embark on the kind of self-discovery that’s only possible when we feel most alive—that is, when we don’t know what will happen next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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• Daryl Fairweather, "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

  The secret insights of economics, translated for the rest of us. Should I buy or rent? Do I ask for a promotion? Should I tell people I’m pregnant? What salary do I deserve? Should I just quit this job? Common anxieties about life are often grounded in economics. In an increasingly win-lose society, these economic decisions—where to work, where to live, even how to live—have a way of feeling fixed and mistakes terminal. Daryl Fairweather is no stranger to these dynamics. As the first Black woman to receive an economics PhD from the famed University of Chicago, she saw firsthand how concepts of behavioral economics and game theory were deployed in the real world—and in her own life—to great effect.  Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work (U Chicago Press, 2025) combines Fairweather’s elite knowledge of these principles with her singular voice in describing how they can be harnessed. Her great talent, unique among economists, is her ability to articulate economic trends in a way that is not just informative, but also accounts for life’s other anxieties. In Hate the Game, Fairweather fixes her expertise and service on navigating the earliest economic inflection points of adult life: whether to go to college and for how long; partnering, having kids, both, or neither; getting, keeping, and changing jobs; and where to live and how to pay for it. She speaks in actionable terms about what the economy means for individual people, especially those who have the sneaking suspicion they’re losing out. Set against her own experiences and enriched with lessons from history, science, and pop culture, Fairweather instructs readers on how to use game theory and behavioral science to map out options and choose directions while offering readers a sense of control and agency in an economy where those things are increasingly rare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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