The American Psychoanalyst
Contemporary writing on clinical practice, theory, art, politics, and everyday psychic life.
TAP is a digital and print publication exploring psychoanalysis in dialogue with culture, politics, art, and contemporary life.
Featured Article:
Fashion’s Deep Surface
Valerie Steele on Freud, fetishism, and the emotional life of clothing
“Sinners” is a film about Black Joy
Sinners invites viewers to face the realities of collective pain, hold the tensions of joy and injustice, and imagine a freer world.
Tell Me What I Want, Tell Me Who I Am
What happens to our sense of self when we are relating to an object that mirrors back simply what we want to see?
“I Am Appetite, Nothing More”
The trope of the vampire allows you to project your desire onto a supernatural being.
Music as unconscious chronicle
Author Jeremy Eichler: “It’s not just we who remember music, but music that remembers us as a society.”
Killing Me Softly with Insults
When our brains replace the actual lyric of a song with an erroneous substitution, is this a mere mishearing? Or is something more akin to Freudian parapraxis at play?
Kurt Cobain’s Rage and Bliss
The new edition … sheds more light on Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, but also the work of being a journalist and trying to get to the bottom of who your subject is.
Hear the Color, See the Music
Seeing music as a “body” awash in color, hearing it when no one else does, landed her in hospitals as a teenager and resulted in misdiagnoses such as bipolar and schizophrenia—along with the requisite medications.
Psychoanalytic Fiction Writers
Storytelling is central to both literature and psychoanalysis, as is language more generally: what is said and not said.
American Envy and Greed
This movie is a fanciful representation of what many Americans are experiencing now—a full-on identity crisis—and if we don’t discover who we are and what we’re here for, we’re in for a mental collapse.
CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS SAVE MARRIAGE? AND WHEN SHOULD IT?
How do we approach patients who are experiencing a downturn in their marriage, or marriage-like commitment, even a desiccation of love?
The Atheist and the Apologist
Sigmund Freud’s famous dictum “from error to error, one discovers the entire truth” seems entirely appropriate as a guide for attempting to critically evaluate Matthew Brown’s strange film adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s one-act play Freud’s Last Session.
THE TRAVELER
In season 8 of his CNN travel show Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain visits a psychoanalyst during a trip to Buenos Aires, a city some have called the psychoanalytic capital of the world.
PLAYING THE VILLAIN
Chukwudi Iwuji on creative process, childhood dreams, and his role in Guardians of the Galaxy 3…