New Books in Psychology

Professor Karl Figlio has accomplished a remarkable feat: Under the heading "seminal masculinity", he has named and described a seemingly new dimension of masculinity that heretofore has been hiding in plain sight. Listen to this interview discussing Rethinking the Psychoanalysis of Masculinity: From Toxic to Seminal (Routledge, 2023)
In true psychoanalytic fashion he started his exploration by wondering about a surface phenomenon, namely the widespread use of the term "toxic" in reference to "masculinity" in the culture and teased out its connections to unconscious phantasy in which toxic masculinity is only the destructive underbelly of seminal masculinity, the latter being a internal position of collaboration and reparation. He links the pair of seminal versus toxic masculinity to a primal seminal ambivalence that has the subject torn between hope for renewal, creativity and collaboration and the desolation of the seeds of reparation failing and turning toxic, destroying what they hoped to enliven. This ambivalence is akin to the Kleinian depressive position and is defended against by loud and shrill phallic posturing. Figlio offers a richness of clinical and cultural material to show how we have tended to miss the seminal dimension of masculinity by falling for and analysing phallic masculinity in order to escape the dread inherent in the unconscious phantasy of semen giving out, becoming toxic and erasing the very foundation of life. Just as in an analysis, the insight gained by the acknowledgement of such a fundamental phantasy in unconscious life is accompanied by anxiety as well as creativity. Take it from me: Once you have opened your third ear to seminal masculinity, you will not be able to unhear it in your own or your analysands' material.
In the interview, we discuss, among many ofter things, "seminal masculinity" and "seminal ambivalence", its develomental roots in primary narcissism, and its connection to the 2008 financial crisis in its toxic guise. The interview will therefore not only be of great interest to psychoanalytic clinical practitioners, but also to a lay audience looking for a deeper understanding of masculinity.

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Professor Pierce Salguero sits down with Professor Harold Roth, Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. Hal is the person who coined the term “contemplative studies,” and he has been a pioneer in this emerging academic field. Together, we explore the benefits of combining third-person critical study with first-person contemplative approaches, as well as the entrenched resistance to this kind of scholarship within religious studies. Along the way, we touch on contemplative education, the need to overcome dualistic thinking, and Hal’s transcendent vision of how contemplative studies can benefit humanity.
If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in multidisciplinary conversations about Asian religious, medical, healing, and mystical traditions, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts.
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One last thing: we are planning an “Ask Me Anything” episode in the future, so reach out via Substack or my website here, and let me know your questions.
Resources relevant to this episode:
Brown University’s Contemplative Studies Initiative
Richard Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes (1967)
Harold Roth et al, The Essential Huainanzi (2012)
Harold Roth, The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021)
R.H. Sharf, “The rhetoric of experience and the study of religion” (2000)
Roth, “Critical Subjectivity in the New Field of Contemplative Studies” Yin-Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism (2026)
B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness(2000)
Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (2001)
International Society for Contemplative Research
Contemplative Education Network
Subscribe on Substack to unlock our members-only benefits, including all of the following:
Roth, “Against Cognitive Imperialism A Call for a Non-Ethnocentric Approach to
Cognitive Science and Religious Studies” (2008) [PDF]
Roth, “Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines” (2014
Hal’s list of Contemplative Studies programs [PDF]
Hal’s interviews with Joseph Needham, Benjamin Schwartz, KC Chang, AC Graham, Sarah Allan, and other famous Sinologists [MP3]
Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. See www.piercesalguero.com.

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In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters.
Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge. When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry (U California Press, 2026) excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.
Eric talks with host Emily Dufton about his research techniques, the meaning of Chestnut Lodge and Osheroff's challenge to its care, and the limits of psychiatry.
Emily Dufton is a drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America and Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs.

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Dr Mark Kinet (MD) discusses Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love: A Kaleidoscopic View (Routledge, 2026), published by Routledge in 2026. This book is a psychoanalytic foray into the rhetorics of struggle which shape love, desire and their production. Through readings of Freud, Lacan, Winnicott and Klein, it explores how the psyche is shaped by the complexities involved in coming to love and be loved. Later chapters examine how aspects of modern culture have introduced new modes of desire and new theatres for loving encounters. The book’s form, ‘a topography of [love’s] tensions,’ enacts the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in love, its idiosyncrasies, whilst also paying homage to the endurance of every generation’s fascination with love’s struggles. This conversation with Mark covers Lacan’s conception of desire, AI intimacy and the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry.

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Strikingly clear, humane and helpful, this is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand autism and the autistic spectrum. Drawing on many years of clinical experience and research, as well as the testimonies of autistic people, Autisms (Penguin, 2026) is an up-to-the minute account of the many indicative features of autism and how they have been assessed and treated over almost a century.
As rates of autism diagnosis escalate in almost all high-income countries, researchers today mostly agree that there is no single cause or even single clinical picture of autism. Rather than a neat and well-defined entity, autism is described as a spectrum or constellation of traits, varying in intensity, distribution and severity, with practically everyone in the general population showing at least some autistic trait or feature.
At the same time, there has been a radical split between the ways in which autism is perceived. For many, it is a disorder, a pathology based on a deficit, whereas for others it is an identity, a natural variation in human cognitive and behavioural diversity.
For anyone facing the special challenges of autism, it can be hard to find clarity amid such complexity and contradiction, making Darian Leader’s illuminating guide to the field of autism research and treatment particularly welcome.

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