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The affective life of the transference modality is also explicated; as is Webster's proto-feminist approach to psychoanalysis, female sexuality and desire, and the cultural history of hysteria. This essay provides a review of the book I Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis i (2019), written by psychoanalyst and professor Dr Jamieson Webster. [Extracted from the article]

Yet the literature on Internet addiction fails to establish the agent of this presumptive malady, Friedman points out, as well as what it is that users are actually doing or desiring that constitutes an addiction. In her new book, I Internet Addiction: A Critical Psychology of Users i (Routledge, 2021), Emaline Friedman takes on an enormous and weighty task. [Extracted from the article]

Swales and Owens begin by expounding upon Freud's notion that one can be of two minds about something, and proceed to elaborate on the place of this ambivalence in contemporary culture. Stephanie Swales and Carol Owens' I Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence With Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch i suggests that human beings are constituted by an unconscious fundamental ambivalence. [Extracted from the article]

Highlights from the article: Love and narrative form in Toni Morrison's later novels: Jean Wyatt University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 299, $29.95 paper, ISBN: 0820350869 In I Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, i Jean Wyatt offers a brilliant and accessible examination of how theme and form complement and augment one another in Morrison's work. Wyatt begins her exploration with a quotation that reveals Morrison's own ideas about love and about structure in her novels. True to her reading of Morrison, Wyatt's own structure continually illuminates and expands upon her own theme, the structure marking directly for the reader the concepts she hopes to illustrate in a lovely mirroring of the ethical imperative driving Morrison's work.

I Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire i brings together an unlikely pair: the private and intimate domain of psychoanalysis; and the public and shared space of democracy. Freud and Lacan may be more allies in this project than Gentile takes them to be. While Freud did find it hard to fathom women's desire, was this because - as many, including Gentile, charge - in "abandoning" the seduction hypothesis, he stopped listening to his female patients? As Joel Whitebook discusses in his intellectual biography of Freud, by 1897 Freud was beginning to expand his original view that hysterics suffered from reminiscences of an early trauma that, if recalled, could relieve the patient's suffering. [Extracted from the article]

Philip Cushman's I Travels With The Self i is a well integrated and compelling collection of journal articles and presentations that serves as a much anticipated follow-up to his monograph I Constructing The Self, Constructing America i : I A Cultural History of Psychotherapy i (Perseus Publishing, [1]). Cushman challenges theorists and practitioners alike to consider the ways in which psychotherapy, in attempting to "cure" or "heal" the self, inadvertently reifies the very self that is, he claims, the most pressing and insidious of maladies. [Extracted from the article]

In this intriguing but frustrating book, Jon Mills tries to do three things. However, Mills, like so many new atheists, misunderstands the issue of scientific meaning, in stating that "[t]he God question is not a legitimate scientific topic because it does not meet the basic requisite of falsifiability through testability." Mills struggles to uphold a standard something like this, but in the end the need to falsify religion wins the day, as exemplified by the following statement: "There is no evidentiary or verifiable proof for believing that God is anything but an idea" (p. 75). [Extracted from the article]

Highlights from the article: Jessica Benjamin, a renowned leader in the relational movement of psychoanalysis, brings to her latest book[1] her characteristic theoretical sophistication as well as her dense, difficult style of writing. Benjamin's occasional difficulty occupying the position of someone who does not know, of letting the patient's unconscious guide her, of staying out of intellectual debates, far from enabling thirdness, instead lends itself to Benjamin being the doer with the patient as done-to.

Highlights from the article: Essential to Bowker's exposition is Winnicott's notion of the true/false self and the generative conditions of its mirroring and intersubjective co-constitution, leading to a mature, autonomous self. Within the fissures Roberts tracks, he finds the possibility of creativity and agency that Bowker strictly separates from any ontology of trauma. This may be different from Bowker's reading of Winnicott, but it is not out of the spectrum of important readings of Winnicott's work.

Farhad Dalal tells the story of a brazen heist that occurred in plain view. By way of example, Dalal examines a paper by Wiles I et al. i ([7]) that recruited 469 patients with treatment-resistant depression for a randomized controlled trial. Both CBT and pharmacological treatments are tied to a belief in symptom relief rather than in the much more labor-intensive and less quantifiable approach that psychoanalysis and related therapies employ. Dalal says that a hyper-rational approach cherry-picks evidence, such that it is impossible to consider alternative therapies or to acknowledge the place of clinical wisdom, narrative evidence, or any other qualitative, ethical, or philosophical factors that might allow for a more critical examination of what constitutes the good life or the nature of human suffering. [Extracted from the article]