New Books in Psychoanalysis

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1. Autisms with Darian Leader (Penguin, 2026)

   31 oktober 2026 · 38 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.

2. Readings of Jean Laplanche in Process: Conversations Amplifying Differences with Bryan Batista-Thomas (Routledge, 2026)

   11 oktober 2026 · 49 min

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

   “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 ca…

3. Galit Atlas, "Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, And The Secrets of Emotional Intimacy" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

   21 september 2026 · 1 uur 3 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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 m…

4. Sarah Meehan O'Callaghan, "Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body" (Routledge, 2026)

   17 september 2026 · 47 min

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   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. Lees meer

5. Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" Part 2 (Bloomsbury, 2026)

   11 september 2026 · 51 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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).

   This is Part 2 of a 2 Part inter…

6. Rachel Aviv, "You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters" (Knopf, 2026)

   7 september 2026 · 52 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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.

7. Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

   23 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 25 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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).

   Support our show by becoming a…

8. Mark Solms, "The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing" (Pegasus, 2026)

   14 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 8 min

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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. Lees meer

   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

9. Todd McGowan, "Self-Sabotage: How We Try Not to Flourish" (Polity Press, 2026)

   25 juli 2026 · 1 uur 11 min

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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. Lees meer

   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).

   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooks…

10. Barbara Holifield, "Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm" (Routledge, 2024)

    24 juli 2026 · 59 min

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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. Lees meer

    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 sensori…

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