New Books in Psychology

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge UP, 2025), written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.
Laurence J. Kirmayer is Distinguished James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

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Silence is frequently considered negative or harmful in both everyday life – for example, when we are silenced – as well as in psychiatry, where poverty of speech is a symptom of depression and pressure of speech is a symptom of mania. In Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2027), Dan Degerman argues for the need to consider silence in mental disorders in a nuanced way that recognizes different forms of silence and different, including positive, ways silences of speech and inner speech can be experienced. The poverty of speech in depression may lead to the fetishizing of silence-breaking that can cause more distress to a patient who simply does not have anything they want to say, while the pressure of speech in mania may involve disruption in a multicomponent capacity to reliably initiate and maintain silence that is usually habitual and occasionally deliberate. Degerman, who is a research fellow at the University of Bristol on the Epistemic Injustice in Health Care Project, provides an analysis of different types of silence, discusses first-person experiences of being silent in depression and mania, and points to ways in which philosophers and clinicians can enrich their understandings and practices involving silences.

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A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker. You Won’t Get Free: Stories of Mothers and Daughters (Knopf, 2026) of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,” Aviv writes. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.” Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world. You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.
Liza Veale is a clinician in Oakland, California. She teaches at Access Institute for Psychological Services and serves on the editorial board of fort da, the journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.

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Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard UP, 2026), a psychologist explains why—and how—moral views change across different life stages, situations, and historical eras.

We like to believe that moral truths are obvious and unchangeable: cheating is wrong, killing is wrong, slavery is wrong. Yet people have often cheated, killed, and enslaved without regret. The acts that feel glaringly wrong to us in the here and now can seem fine to someone who is younger, or faces different circumstances, or lived a century ago.

Why does morality appear so unstable? The popular explanation is that emotions, self-interest, and social pressure easily divert people from moral concerns because they lack sincere moral commitment. But the evidence shows otherwise. Drawing on studies of young children, adolescents, and adults, Audun Dahl argues that human morality is neither immutable nor capricious, neither fixed nor fickle. Rather, people change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to—reasons that they can articulate to themselves and would endorse for others.

The science of moral change cannot resolve our ethical dilemmas: it does not tell us what’s morally right or wrong. But it can help us understand why we have moral views in the first place, why those views keep changing, and why moral views that seem obvious to us aren’t obvious to everyone else. Separating moral psychology from moralizing, Between Fixed and Fickle reveals what’s behind our changing agreements and disagreements as we travel toward shared and hard-won moral truths.
Host: Renee Garfinkel
Guest: Audun Dahl

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Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems (MIT Press, 2026) explores a radical transformation taking place in intelligence research. Rather than focusing exclusively on brains and computer code, the book examines the important role that embodiment plays in producing intelligent, goal-directed behavior.
The book brings together experts from a range of disciplines to create conversations across fields that are often studied separately. Through these diverse perspectives, the contributors investigate how intelligence may develop and operate across different scales, physical forms and systems.
The book moves beyond the traditional divide between biological and artificial intelligence. It considers how intelligent behavior can emerge in humans, other living organisms, technological systems and unexpected forms that may not fit conventional definitions of intelligence.
By adopting a broader understanding of embodied intelligence, the contributors challenge long-held assumptions about what intelligence is, where it exists and how it manifests. This perspective could reshape how we understand ourselves, the technologies we create and the diverse forms of intelligent behavior found throughout the world.
Key Ideas:
Intelligence research is moving beyond its traditional focus on brains and computer code.
Embodiment plays an important role in intelligence and goal-directed behavior.
Intelligence can manifest across different scales, physical forms and biological or technological systems.
Collaboration among philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, biology, robotics and artificial intelligence can lead to a more complete understanding of intelligence.
Embodied intelligence challenges the traditional separation between biological and artificial systems.
Intelligent behavior may emerge in forms and places that researchers have not traditionally recognized.
A broader definition of intelligence could transform how we understand ourselves and design future technologies.
Takeaway from the Conversation:
One of the strongest ideas from the conversation is that intelligence may be far more diverse than we traditionally assume. It cannot always be understood by looking only at the brain or computer code. We must also consider the body, physical form, surrounding environment and the different ways a system pursues its goals.
Macrine and Fugate’s insights invite us to move beyond the traditional divide between biological and artificial intelligence. Whether you explore selected chapters through the book’s open-access edition for educational or research purposes or purchase the complete volume, you’ll encounter perspectives from numerous disciplines that challenge familiar assumptions and expand our understanding of where intelligence can exist, how it can emerge, and what it means to be intelligent.
About Podcast Host
Angela Marie Hutchinson is the author of “Create Your Yes! When You Keep Hearing No,” named a Forbes No. 4 book to advance your career. She is a podcast host for New Books Network, where she leads conversations for the neuroscience and Christianity channels. Hutchinson is also a talent and intellectual property executive, former social media professor and BBC commentator. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.

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