New Books in Psychoanalysis

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.

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 [email protected]. 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 interview. Listen to Part 1 on our website.

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from Rachel Aviv, the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker.

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 [email protected]. 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://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

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