Podcast appearances and mentions of Tracy D Morgan

What makes racist feelings and ideas objectionable? In his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Red Globe, 2011), M. Fakhry Davids, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, argues that racism, like the impulse to destroy or act on hatred, is an ineluctable part of us all. Borrowing, but also augmenting the work of his fellow neo-Kleinians (particularly John Steiner and Herbert Rosenfeld) on “psychic retreats” and “defensive organizations”, he names the “internal racist organization” as a normal part of the mind, deeming it a non-pathological component of psychic structure. David’s thinking has a decidedly hopeful tinge. If accepted, it promises to help open up the kinds of conversations clinically and otherwise that can be had about racist feelings. After all, if they are average and expectable, they are human. And what is accepted as human can potentially be talked through and about, which promises to constrain harmful action. What I love about David’s thinking is that in updating a psychoanalytic model of mind that accounts for racism, he wipes political correctness and the super ego off the table. By placing the “internal racist organization” as an equal player inside of us, alongside the Oedipal, the ego and the id, it becomes something that you just can’t wish away. That said, if we accept his argument, we do find ourselves contending with the age old problem of the drives, or the paranoid schizoid, wherein managing ourselves in relation to the lure of destructiveness (of which racist feelings play their part) is a life long project. The hope is that if we can come to accept racist thinking as a response to overwhelming and primitive anxieties, (rather than a moral failing), we can see it as a warning sign that internally we are askew. Following David’s, racism can never be expunged (as seems to be the neoliberal fantasy) from the self. In fact, and truly this is the last word, it follows us to the grave. Tracy D. Morgan: Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., Editor, New Books in Psychoanalysis.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What makes racist feelings and ideas objectionable? In his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Red Globe, 2011), M. Fakhry Davids, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, argues that racism, like the impulse to destroy or act on hatred, is an ineluctable part of us all. Borrowing, but also augmenting the work of his fellow neo-Kleinians (particularly John Steiner and Herbert Rosenfeld) on “psychic retreats” and “defensive organizations”, he names the “internal racist organization” as a normal part of the mind, deeming it a non-pathological component of psychic structure. Davids' thinking has a decidedly hopeful tinge. If accepted, it promises to help open up the kinds of conversations clinically and otherwise that can be had about racist feelings. After all, if they are average and expectable, they are human. And what is accepted as human can potentially be talked through and about, which promises to constrain harmful action. What I love about Davids' thinking is that in updating a psychoanalytic model of mind that accounts for racism, he wipes political correctness and the super ego off the table. By placing the “internal racist organization” as an equal player inside of us, alongside the Oedipal, the ego and the id, it becomes something that you just can't wish away. That said, if we accept his argument, we do find ourselves contending with the age old problem of the drives, or the paranoid schizoid, wherein managing ourselves in relation to the lure of destructiveness (of which racist feelings play their part) is a life long project. The hope is that if we can come to accept racist thinking as a response to overwhelming and primitive anxieties, (rather than a moral failing), we can see it as a warning sign that internally we are askew. Following Davids, racism can never be expunged (as seems to be the neoliberal fantasy) from the self. In fact, and truly this is the last word, it follows us to the grave. Tracy D. Morgan: Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., Editor, New Books in Psychoanalysis.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

What makes racist feelings and ideas objectionable? In his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Red Globe, 2011), M. Fakhry Davids, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, argues that racism, like the impulse to destroy or act on hatred, is an ineluctable part of us all. Borrowing, but also augmenting the work of his fellow neo-Kleinians (particularly John Steiner and Herbert Rosenfeld) on “psychic retreats” and “defensive organizations”, he names the “internal racist organization” as a normal part of the mind, deeming it a non-pathological component of psychic structure. Davids' thinking has a decidedly hopeful tinge. If accepted, it promises to help open up the kinds of conversations clinically and otherwise that can be had about racist feelings. After all, if they are average and expectable, they are human. And what is accepted as human can potentially be talked through and about, which promises to constrain harmful action. What I love about Davids' thinking is that in updating a psychoanalytic model of mind that accounts for racism, he wipes political correctness and the super ego off the table. By placing the “internal racist organization” as an equal player inside of us, alongside the Oedipal, the ego and the id, it becomes something that you just can't wish away. That said, if we accept his argument, we do find ourselves contending with the age old problem of the drives, or the paranoid schizoid, wherein managing ourselves in relation to the lure of destructiveness (of which racist feelings play their part) is a life long project. The hope is that if we can come to accept racist thinking as a response to overwhelming and primitive anxieties, (rather than a moral failing), we can see it as a warning sign that internally we are askew. Following Davids, racism can never be expunged (as seems to be the neoliberal fantasy) from the self. In fact, and truly this is the last word, it follows us to the grave. Tracy D. Morgan: Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., Editor, New Books in Psychoanalysis.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you may have in your mind of Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in flagrante delicto. If this reference does not ring a bell, perhaps you can just consider yourself lucky. What follows are some head spinning facts: Sabina Spielrein was the first female member of Freudʼs inner circle. As a young Russian woman from a prominent, educated and chaotic Jewish family, she fell ill and was treated at the Burghozli Hospital for psychiatric illnesses in Zurich. There she began to recover and to do research into the psyche. On regaining her emotional balance, she attended medical school. She wrote a paper that argued for the existence of a death instinct in 1912, pre-empting Freudʼs work in that area by 8 years. She developed ways of working with children that also preceded the thinking of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. Her dissertation was on the language of schizophrenia. She comingled evolutionary ideas with psychoanalytic ideas. She was interested in sex and sexuality. She treated Jean Piaget. She worked with Vygotsky. She was involved with the project under Trotsky to link communism with psychoanalysis. She endeavored to mend the rift between Freud and Jung. She was killed by the Nazi regime. Her life resembles a nodal point; she stood at the crossroads of extraordinary changes in world politics and psychoanalysis. She was not necessarily happy. She wrote in ways that could hide her strong points of view. She was on the scene yet left almost no footprint. She was a person with breakdown knowledge who became an analyst. She was with people, working, and yet she comes off as solitary. I have written all of this and not mentioned she had a youthful affair and fascination with Carl Jung. Why do I not lead with this story you may ask? After all that is the story we all know if we know anything about her. But given what has been detailed above, a life with many contours, doesnʼt the young adult dalliance with Jung seem more or less a footnote? Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and first host of NBIP. A psychoanalyst, practicing in NYC and Rome, she serves on the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. Trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Write to her at tracedoris@gmail.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Fong's Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2016) revitalizes two oft' maligned psychoanalytic concepts, the death drive and the drive to mastery, and makes lively and thoroughgoing use of both to revisit arguments about the power of the culture industry and how we might resist its narcotizing allure. For instance, we know Facebook is the devil, offering us relief from real strife via impotent political engagement; like prisoners in solitary we write on its wall. We know Netflix is a platform for product placement that we pay for, meanwhile losing track of our myriad subscriptions. We know we ought to think twice before inhaling the contents of either yet we simply cannot seem to stop ourselves.  What gives? This--our compliant involvement with what promises to decrease our power and increase our alienation—is an old Frankfurt School obsession and query. Fong attempts to explain our complicity by using Freud altogether differently than his forebears. (Fong has been a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry which, having turned ghosts into ancestors, strikes me as the closest thing we have to a contemporary version of the Institut fur Sozialforschung going today, although I believe most of its members are American born.) He reminds us that the Frankfurt School ignored the death drive. In fact, the Freud engaged by the Frankfurt School appears to have stopped writing around 1919. (It is very odd to think that they did not absorb and make use of Beyond The Pleasure Principle, forget Civilization and Its Discontents.) I admit I found myself wondering if Freud's conclusions about man as wolf to man, the impossibility of loving our neighbor as ourselves, and our desire to go out as we came in, were simply too bleak even for Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? Of course, the death drive is tough for politics: how to organize people to fight for what is just if, at the end of the day, they simply seek the cessation of tension, and furthermore, are compulsively drawn to repeat their worst experiences? Freud's thinking after 1920 can be read as offering a devastating critique of neoliberal “just do it” life with its appeals to progress and perfectibility. And Fong puts this Freud to great use. Attempting to construct a way out of being subsumed by the culture industry, with its promise of ruin, Fong champions a reappraisal of the super-ego as a friendly presence. He borrows from Hans Loewald, who argued for the super-ego as being future oriented, and harboring a hopeful fantasy, like a kind parent, about the fate of the ego over time. Fong also engages the thinking of Jacques Lacan, and with his help, tries to answer a question derived from a debate between Freud and Wilhelm Reich, about “where does the misery come from?” (Thanks to Jacqueline Rose for bringing this question to all of our attention). He develops a new theory (!) about aggressivity that locates it as arising neither solely from within nor from without. Interestingly, he does not rely on Laplanche to make his argument. That said, mastery as a concept scares me. Can “the master's tools,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, “dismantle the master's house?” Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development did come to mind as I read, and I was left at times feeling a bit like one of Carol Gilligan's adolescent girls, putting my feet, talk about returning to the primordial ooze, into the shoes of another. Then there is Freud's idea that women lack sufficient super-egos. Following this logic, it is not too strange to ask if women can exercise mastery? And finally, what about Kerry James Marshall's evocative and resonant use of the word, albeit spelled differently (Mastry), to refer to both slavery, the slave master, and the lives of those who survived it and his aftermath? Mastery is not a neutral word. Tracy D. Morgan is a psychoanalyst and the founding editor of NBiP. Write to her at tracedoris@gmail.com

Benjamin Fong’s Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2016) revitalizes two oft’ maligned psychoanalytic concepts, the death drive and the drive to mastery, and makes lively and thoroughgoing use of both to revisit arguments about the power of the culture industry and how we might resist its narcotizing allure. For instance, we know Facebook is the devil, offering us relief from real strife via impotent political engagement; like prisoners in solitary we write on its wall. We know Netflix is a platform for product placement that we pay for, meanwhile losing track of our myriad subscriptions. We know we ought to think twice before inhaling the contents of either yet we simply cannot seem to stop ourselves.  What gives? This--our compliant involvement with what promises to decrease our power and increase our alienation—is an old Frankfurt School obsession and query. Fong attempts to explain our complicity by using Freud altogether differently than his forebears. (Fong has been a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry which, having turned ghosts into ancestors, strikes me as the closest thing we have to a contemporary version of the Institut fur Sozialforschung going today, although I believe most of its members are American born.) He reminds us that the Frankfurt School ignored the death drive. In fact, the Freud engaged by the Frankfurt School appears to have stopped writing around 1919. (It is very odd to think that they did not absorb and make use of Beyond The Pleasure Principle, forget Civilization and Its Discontents.) I admit I found myself wondering if Freud’s conclusions about man as wolf to man, the impossibility of loving our neighbor as ourselves, and our desire to go out as we came in, were simply too bleak even for Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? Of course, the death drive is tough for politics: how to organize people to fight for what is just if, at the end of the day, they simply seek the cessation of tension, and furthermore, are compulsively drawn to repeat their worst experiences? Freud’s thinking after 1920 can be read as offering a devastating critique of neoliberal “just do it” life with its appeals to progress and perfectibility. And Fong puts this Freud to great use. Attempting to construct a way out of being subsumed by the culture industry, with its promise of ruin, Fong champions a reappraisal of the super-ego as a friendly presence. He borrows from Hans Loewald, who argued for the super-ego as being future oriented, and harboring a hopeful fantasy, like a kind parent, about the fate of the ego over time. Fong also engages the thinking of Jacques Lacan, and with his help, tries to answer a question derived from a debate between Freud and Wilhelm Reich, about “where does the misery come from?” (Thanks to Jacqueline Rose for bringing this question to all of our attention). He develops a new theory (!) about aggressivity that locates it as arising neither solely from within nor from without. Interestingly, he does not rely on Laplanche to make his argument. That said, mastery as a concept scares me. Can “the master’s tools,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, “dismantle the master’s house?” Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development did come to mind as I read, and I was left at times feeling a bit like one of Carol Gilligan’s adolescent girls, putting my feet, talk about returning to the primordial ooze, into the shoes of another. Then there is Freud’s idea that women lack sufficient super-egos. Following this logic, it is not too strange to ask if women can exercise mastery? And finally, what about Kerry James Marshall’s evocative and resonant use of the word, albeit spelled differently (Mastry), to refer to both slavery, the slave master, and the lives of those who survived it and his aftermath? Mastery is not a neutral word. Tracy D. Morgan is a psychoanalyst and the founding editor of NBiP. Write to her at tracedoris@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Fong's Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2016) revitalizes two oft' maligned psychoanalytic concepts, the death drive and the drive to mastery, and makes lively and thoroughgoing use of both to revisit arguments about the power of the culture industry and how we might resist its narcotizing allure. For instance, we know Facebook is the devil, offering us relief from real strife via impotent political engagement; like prisoners in solitary we write on its wall. We know Netflix is a platform for product placement that we pay for, meanwhile losing track of our myriad subscriptions. We know we ought to think twice before inhaling the contents of either yet we simply cannot seem to stop ourselves.  What gives? This--our compliant involvement with what promises to decrease our power and increase our alienation—is an old Frankfurt School obsession and query. Fong attempts to explain our complicity by using Freud altogether differently than his forebears. (Fong has been a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry which, having turned ghosts into ancestors, strikes me as the closest thing we have to a contemporary version of the Institut fur Sozialforschung going today, although I believe most of its members are American born.) He reminds us that the Frankfurt School ignored the death drive. In fact, the Freud engaged by the Frankfurt School appears to have stopped writing around 1919. (It is very odd to think that they did not absorb and make use of Beyond The Pleasure Principle, forget Civilization and Its Discontents.) I admit I found myself wondering if Freud's conclusions about man as wolf to man, the impossibility of loving our neighbor as ourselves, and our desire to go out as we came in, were simply too bleak even for Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? Of course, the death drive is tough for politics: how to organize people to fight for what is just if, at the end of the day, they simply seek the cessation of tension, and furthermore, are compulsively drawn to repeat their worst experiences? Freud's thinking after 1920 can be read as offering a devastating critique of neoliberal “just do it” life with its appeals to progress and perfectibility. And Fong puts this Freud to great use. Attempting to construct a way out of being subsumed by the culture industry, with its promise of ruin, Fong champions a reappraisal of the super-ego as a friendly presence. He borrows from Hans Loewald, who argued for the super-ego as being future oriented, and harboring a hopeful fantasy, like a kind parent, about the fate of the ego over time. Fong also engages the thinking of Jacques Lacan, and with his help, tries to answer a question derived from a debate between Freud and Wilhelm Reich, about “where does the misery come from?” (Thanks to Jacqueline Rose for bringing this question to all of our attention). He develops a new theory (!) about aggressivity that locates it as arising neither solely from within nor from without. Interestingly, he does not rely on Laplanche to make his argument. That said, mastery as a concept scares me. Can “the master's tools,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, “dismantle the master's house?” Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development did come to mind as I read, and I was left at times feeling a bit like one of Carol Gilligan's adolescent girls, putting my feet, talk about returning to the primordial ooze, into the shoes of another. Then there is Freud's idea that women lack sufficient super-egos. Following this logic, it is not too strange to ask if women can exercise mastery? And finally, what about Kerry James Marshall's evocative and resonant use of the word, albeit spelled differently (Mastry), to refer to both slavery, the slave master, and the lives of those who survived it and his aftermath? Mastery is not a neutral word. Tracy D. Morgan is a psychoanalyst and the founding editor of NBiP. Write to her at tracedoris@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Benjamin Fong’s Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2016) revitalizes two oft’ maligned psychoanalytic concepts, the death drive and the drive to mastery, and makes lively and thoroughgoing use of both to revisit arguments about the power of the culture industry and how we might resist its narcotizing allure. For instance, we know Facebook is the devil, offering us relief from real strife via impotent political engagement; like prisoners in solitary we write on its wall. We know Netflix is a platform for product placement that we pay for, meanwhile losing track of our myriad subscriptions. We know we ought to think twice before inhaling the contents of either yet we simply cannot seem to stop ourselves.  What gives? This--our compliant involvement with what promises to decrease our power and increase our alienation—is an old Frankfurt School obsession and query. Fong attempts to explain our complicity by using Freud altogether differently than his forebears. (Fong has been a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry which, having turned ghosts into ancestors, strikes me as the closest thing we have to a contemporary version of the Institut fur Sozialforschung going today, although I believe most of its members are American born.) He reminds us that the Frankfurt School ignored the death drive. In fact, the Freud engaged by the Frankfurt School appears to have stopped writing around 1919. (It is very odd to think that they did not absorb and make use of Beyond The Pleasure Principle, forget Civilization and Its Discontents.) I admit I found myself wondering if Freud’s conclusions about man as wolf to man, the impossibility of loving our neighbor as ourselves, and our desire to go out as we came in, were simply too bleak even for Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? Of course, the death drive is tough for politics: how to organize people to fight for what is just if, at the end of the day, they simply seek the cessation of tension, and furthermore, are compulsively drawn to repeat their worst experiences? Freud’s thinking after 1920 can be read as offering a devastating critique of neoliberal “just do it” life with its appeals to progress and perfectibility. And Fong puts this Freud to great use. Attempting to construct a way out of being subsumed by the culture industry, with its promise of ruin, Fong champions a reappraisal of the super-ego as a friendly presence. He borrows from Hans Loewald, who argued for the super-ego as being future oriented, and harboring a hopeful fantasy, like a kind parent, about the fate of the ego over time. Fong also engages the thinking of Jacques Lacan, and with his help, tries to answer a question derived from a debate between Freud and Wilhelm Reich, about “where does the misery come from?” (Thanks to Jacqueline Rose for bringing this question to all of our attention). He develops a new theory (!) about aggressivity that locates it as arising neither solely from within nor from without. Interestingly, he does not rely on Laplanche to make his argument. That said, mastery as a concept scares me. Can “the master’s tools,” to paraphrase Audre Lorde, “dismantle the master’s house?” Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development did come to mind as I read, and I was left at times feeling a bit like one of Carol Gilligan’s adolescent girls, putting my feet, talk about returning to the primordial ooze, into the shoes of another. Then there is Freud’s idea that women lack sufficient super-egos. Following this logic, it is not too strange to ask if women can exercise mastery? And finally, what about Kerry James Marshall’s evocative and resonant use of the word, albeit spelled differently (Mastry), to refer to both slavery, the slave master, and the lives of those who survived it and his aftermath? Mastery is not a neutral word. Tracy D. Morgan is a psychoanalyst and the founding editor of NBiP. Write to her at tracedoris@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss' edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy's affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy's son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy's three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who's who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud.  Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview.  We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family.  In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life.  Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted.  Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son.  Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law.  Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries.  Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst.  Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing.  Almost all the students have analytic sessions.  The Dewey method is applied.  We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position.  We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children.  And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others’ development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva’s appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America. Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali’s most famous paintings, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, from 1929. Discoursing upon his creation, also in an interview, Dali had this to say: “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait, since one can perfectly well love one’s mother and still dream that one spits upon her . . . now go and try to make people understand that.” Atlas’ book takes up Dali’s demand for work (as well as Andre Green’s plea for the re-establishment of sexuality as central to psychoanalysis), emphasizing sexuality and its many emanations in the clinic as speaking a language of its own. A clinically rich book, Atlas’ work schools its readers in a new way of listening for that which is inchoate and ineffable and worth hearing. Her thinking takes us on a trip beyond the mother-infant dyad, stopping to drink at the house of Laplanche with a little Ruth Stein only to deposit us closer to the drives, opening the door to the land of the autoerotic. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as an historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others’ development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva’s appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America. Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali’s most famous paintings, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, from 1929. Discoursing upon his creation, also in an interview, Dali had this to say: “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait, since one can perfectly well love one’s mother and still dream that one spits upon her . . . now go and try to make people understand that.” Atlas’ book takes up Dali’s demand for work (as well as Andre Green’s plea for the re-establishment of sexuality as central to psychoanalysis), emphasizing sexuality and its many emanations in the clinic as speaking a language of its own. A clinically rich book, Atlas’ work schools its readers in a new way of listening for that which is inchoate and ineffable and worth hearing. Her thinking takes us on a trip beyond the mother-infant dyad, stopping to drink at the house of Laplanche with a little Ruth Stein only to deposit us closer to the drives, opening the door to the land of the autoerotic. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as an historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others' development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva's appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America. Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali's most famous paintings, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, from 1929. Discoursing upon his creation, also in an interview, Dali had this to say: “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother's portrait, since one can perfectly well love one's mother and still dream that one spits upon her . . . now go and try to make people understand that.” Atlas' book takes up Dali's demand for work (as well as Andre Green's plea for the re-establishment of sexuality as central to psychoanalysis), emphasizing sexuality and its many emanations in the clinic as speaking a language of its own. A clinically rich book, Atlas' work schools its readers in a new way of listening for that which is inchoate and ineffable and worth hearing. Her thinking takes us on a trip beyond the mother-infant dyad, stopping to drink at the house of Laplanche with a little Ruth Stein only to deposit us closer to the drives, opening the door to the land of the autoerotic. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as an historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others' development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva's appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America. Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali's most famous paintings, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, from 1929. Discoursing upon his creation, also in an interview, Dali had this to say: “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother's portrait, since one can perfectly well love one's mother and still dream that one spits upon her . . . now go and try to make people understand that.” Atlas' book takes up Dali's demand for work (as well as Andre Green's plea for the re-establishment of sexuality as central to psychoanalysis), emphasizing sexuality and its many emanations in the clinic as speaking a language of its own. A clinically rich book, Atlas' work schools its readers in a new way of listening for that which is inchoate and ineffable and worth hearing. Her thinking takes us on a trip beyond the mother-infant dyad, stopping to drink at the house of Laplanche with a little Ruth Stein only to deposit us closer to the drives, opening the door to the land of the autoerotic. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as an historian, she writes about many things.