New Books in Psychology

What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (ICU) settings. Schulman is a classical guitar player and performer and author of Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador, 2016). Schulman did not receive training as a music therapist and only began working in ICUs after he had a near-death experience at one. Waking the Spirit offers a gripping account of his medical journey and his decision to give back to others. As a result of his collaboration with his former doctors, Schulman became what he terms, a “medical musician.” During the podcast, Schulman briefly describes his journey and reflects upon what he has learned about music from working in the ICU. He also talks about how his work in the ICU has made him a better concert performer. In our conversation, we explore how music heals, what forms of music seem most suited for healing, and the role of musicians and music therapists in ICUs. Andrew Schulman is the resident musician in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital in New York City and Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He is the founder and artistic director of the Abaca String Band. He is also a solo guitarist and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Improv Comedy Club, and the White House. He lives in New York City with his wife, Wendy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities, whether or not those match what’s on their birth certificates. But the journeys of these gender creative children are often bumpy, as they encounter psychological, physical, and even legal challenges. This all raises important question for these children’s parents, teachers, doctors, and therapists, such as: What are the best ways to support these children’s gender paths? How do we help them face the challenges ahead with courage and authenticity? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we deal with our own fear, ignorance, or resistance to currents of change that we don’t always understand? Dr. Diane Ehrensaft tackles these issues in her prescient and essential new book, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes (TheExperiment, 2016). She is a developmental and clinical psychologist with over 30 years of experience working with gender-nonconforming children and their families. She joined me on New Books in Psychology to discuss her book and topics such as the difference between gender-dysphoric “persisters”versus “desisters,” the dangers of making children wait and see before undergoing gender transition, and the cutting-edge gender-affirmative treatment model used by doctors and therapists working with these children. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and working with cultural minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher and author, delves into the complexities of anger in our moral lives, arguing that anger can often be morally confused and pernicious. She advocates for replacing anger with generosity, friendship, justice, and kindness, drawing lessons from the Stoics, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. The podcast explores the different realms of anger, from intimate personal relationships to political landscapes, and emphasizes the importance of hope, work, and love in successful revolutionary movements.

What exactly is ADHD, and is it time to update our ideas about it? In her new book, Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD (Balboa Press, 2016), Carol Gignoux turns our ideas about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder on their head and introduces a strengths-based rather than deficits-based perspective on this brain type. In her forty-plus years coaching individuals with ADHD, Gignoux has witnessed how ADHD stigma stymies these individuals’ creativity and self-esteem. They often adopt views of themselves predominated by what they can’t do rather than what they can. But these “innovators,” as she calls them, have unique capacities for creative problem-solving and productive risk-taking that others often envy. Look no further than Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, and Jonas Salk–innovators whose unique brain type helped them make extraordinary contributions to modern society. To make best use of their gifts, innovators need help with their very real limitations and greater understanding and appreciation for their assets. As she explains in our interview, Gignoux has made it her mission to help innovators find such understanding and support. In her book, she advances a paradigm shift in our conceptions of ADHD and outlines specific strategies for dealing with day-to-day challenges. This celebratory and useful first book from a decades-long advocate is a long-awaited update to our long-standing ideas about these unique individuals. I spoke with Gignoux about her book and her coaching experiences with individuals and their loved ones. I hope you enjoy the interview. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and working with cultural minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jonathan Garb, the Gershom Scholem Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the rich psychological tradition in modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism. Tracing Kabbalistic writing from sixteenth-century Safed to contemporary New York, he shows how both psychoanalysis and modern Kabbalah have been expressions of the process of modernization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Why do relationship partners so often feel isolated and unsatisfied despite all their efforts to show love and caring to one another? And how do they break out of the self-defeating cycles that get them there? In their new book, Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy (Central Recovery Press, 2015), Mark Borg, Grant Brenner, and Daniel Berry address these daunting questions. They explain how parental disappointments during childhood can set one up for a life of compulsive caregiving at the expense of true human connection, which they call “irrelationship.” They address a growing epidemic by which, in later adulthood, partners use those well-honed caregiving skills to hide from one another rather than become closer. Drawing from cutting-edge neuroscience, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical experience, the authors address how these habitual patterns take shape in the brain and in the soul, and how partners can find their way out of them. The book is full of relatable anecdotes and practical suggestions that any reader who has ever struggled with love and intimacy will find illuminating and helpful. I spoke with two of the authors, Mark Borg and Grant Brenner, about how they arrived at the idea of “irrelationship” and how their skill-based approach has improved the lives of their patients and readers. I hope you enjoy the interview. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating andbody image problems, and working with cultural minorities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and personal context must be negotiated. In Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human (Oxford University Press, 2016), Samuel Morris Brown approaches the problem of end-of-life care with a clinician’s eye and a scholar of religion’s touch. The book places advance directives in the clinic in their historical context while unpacking their ethical and legal nature, describes the psychological aspects of medical decision-making and how moral distress clouds judgment, and provides recommendations on how to heal the process of healing in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). An ICU physician himself, Brown’s account is interwoven with powerful stories that render his argument for humanistic care particularly salient. As such, Through the Valley of Shadows offers as much to dyed-in-the-wool humanists as it does to those focused on measuring and improving outcomes. This is the second of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, preceded by Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care, by Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting account of a decade of research on improving outcomes by incorporating patients’ individual life contexts into planning of care. Their groundbreaking studies showed that physicians, while getting the biological details largely correct, frequently disregard personal circumstances that lead to medical errors. Such an assertion might appear intractable or unfit for empirical study, but Listening for What Matters describes a series of creative experiments that strongly support it. From placing fake patients into real clinical contexts to measure the appropriateness of recommendations, to recording interactions between real patients and doctors (for which they developed a system, Content Coding for Contextualization of Care), and finally training groups of medical students to ask about individual context, Weiner and Schwartz build a case for the existence of a widespread problem while simultaneously offering compelling solutions. This is the first of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, to be followed by Samuel Morris Brown’s Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of a disease to an instance of sexual abuse. How might creative expression help with the healing process? What can we learn and teach others from the writing and artwork that emerge from these traumas? How might we come to value personal writing as worthy of increased scholarship? In Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image (Parlor, 2015), Roy Fox, shares his reflections based on years spent developing a graduate course that asks students to come to terms with the most difficult moments in their lives. Fox joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at foxr@missouri.edu. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at info@trevormattea.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology