Diagnosing from a Distance: Debates over Libel Law, Media, and Psychiatric Ethics from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a new book by a BPSI Candidate Member, John Martin-Joy, MD. Ever since the rise of Adolf Hitler, mental health professionals have sought to use their knowledge of human psychology to understand – and intervene in – political developments. From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump,...

The Trouble With Modern Psychiatry: A Basis in Science For the Subjective Mind (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017) is a recent book by a BPSI Member, Ronald Abramson, MD. Why do people hate psychiatrists? In the past decades enormous advances have been made in understanding the biology of mental disorders which lead to more effective biological treatments, and yet there is a growing anti-psychiatry movement whose members often feel that...

Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders and Citizens (Phoenix Publishing House, 2020) is a new book by a BPSI member, Edward R. Shapiro, MD. What stands between us and authoritarianism seems increasingly fragile. Democratic practices are under attack by foreign intrusion into elections; voter suppression restricts citizen participation. Nations are turning to autocratic leaders in the face of rapid social...

In her new book, The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (Routledge, 2019), Nancy J. Chodorow brings together her two professional identities, psychoanalyst and sociologist, as she also brings together and moves beyond two traditions within American psychoanalysis, naming for the first time an American independent tradition. The book’s chapters move inward, toward fine-tuned discussions of...

Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis: Attachment, Separation, and the Undifferentiated Unintegrated Mind, (Routledge, 2019) is a new publication by a BPSI Member, Michael Robbins, MD. The book proposes a major revision of the psychoanalytic theory of the most severe mental illnesses including schizophrenia. Freud believed that psychosis is the consequence of a biologically determined inability to attain and sustain a normal or neurotic mental...

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership (Routledge, 2019) is a new book, edited by BPSI Members, Stephanie Brody and Frances Arnold. In addition to several of Brody’s and Arnold’s papers, the book includes essays and clinical cases written by Rosemary Balsam, Brenda Bauer, Andrea Celenza, Diane Elise, Adrienne Harris, Dorothy Holmes, Nancy Kulish, Vivian Pendar, Dionne Powell, and...