New Books Network

Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm (Routledge, 2024), featuring a foreword by Donald Kalsched, examines the integration of the subjectively experienced body in the practice of depth psychology. Barbara Holifield draws from philosophical perspectives, neuroscientific and infant research, developmental theory, and trauma studies to offer a comprehensive overview of embodiment within a relationally based psychoanalytic approach. Clinical vignettes demonstrate the critical value of working with the bodily-felt dimension of implicit relational memory and emphasize how bodily-felt sense facilitates access to feelings.

The primacy of bodily-based knowing revealed through infant research illuminates an interior world of sensorial apprehension that conceptually based knowing and psychoanalytic thought often overlook. Furthermore, it establishes the body as intrinsic to relational life. Freud’s 1923 statement that “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego,” is as cogent today as it was then (1961, p. 26). It has only been confirmed by infant research and affective neuroscience. Psychic life is born in the body and is sustained by the body. It is in and through the body that relationship begins. Disruptions in one’s earliest relationship with the primary caregiver are synonymous with disruption of the integral unity of psyche and body.

Further, the book highlights the organizing role that felt sensation, sensory perception, and affective experience have on facilitating the re-establishment of psyche indwelling the soma. Because disruptions of the felt sense of psyche integral to soma occur in infancy, work of this nature falls out of the purview of traditional psychoanalysis. “It requires instead a working-through focused on the present, on the heart of the analytic relationship, and on the activation of an awareness of one’s own inner mode of functioning” (Lombardi, 2017, p. 23). Focus on direct sensorial and relational experience in the body is foundational in working with the analysand’s unformulated experience. As this occurs, affects are able to be borne, reflected on, and lived as feelings-in-the-body while simultaneously making way for the establishment of new relational organizations. Throughout the book, clinical examples show how the mythopoetic imagination and soma entwine––at times, attention to the somatic dimension stirs the creative unconscious in the form of dreams, active imagination, artworks, and movement. Reciprocally, the imaginal world informs and stimulates somatic experience. In this way, the mythopoetic reality revealed in a depth analysis weaves somatic experience into a tapestry of personal meaning, facilitating deep psychophysical transformation. Here the body serves as a portal to the numinous––healing that goes far beyond the relief of symptoms to a renewed sense of aliveness.

This book offers guiding principles for psychotherapists and clinicians of all levels to engage the bodily basis of experience in their clinical practice. It will appeal to general readers interested in integrating mind and body, including those in the healing arts, fine arts, dance, athletics, meditation, yoga, and martial arts.

Barbara Holifield, MSW, LMFT, SEP is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. With over forty years of clinical practice in depth psychotherapy and somatic healing — and her certification as a Jungian Analyst since 2006 — her work lives at the intersection of Jung and the body, bringing together somatic experiencing, affective neuroscience, relational psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the bodily-felt sense to offer a path of healing for those who have suffered developmental trauma and its long aftermath.

A certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) trained directly by Dr. Peter Levine, Barbara taught Somatic Psychology for approximately twenty years at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) — one of the foremost graduate programs in somatic and depth psychology in the United States. She is also an internationally recognized teacher of Authentic Movement, a contemplative body practice rooted in Jungian active imagination that she has taught across the United States and abroad for approximately forty years.

Her clinical writing explores the relationship of body, trauma, self, and our participation in the dream of the earth. Her articles have been published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Psychological Perspectives, and the Journal of Analytic Psychology. She has also contributed a chapter to The Body in Psychotherapy (North Atlantic Press) and a chapter to the anthology Authentic Movement: Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). She maintains memberships in the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP), the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT).

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2026) offers
a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan
(794–1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous
dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious
lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy.

Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the
very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries,
prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to
later forms like noh and kyōgen, these performances formed a dynamic
cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence
through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography,
Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in
Heian Japan.

Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance
and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights
into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present.
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In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Mikuláš Pešta to talk about his new book, Student Internationalism and the Global Cold War: The International Union of Students in Socialist Prague (Bloomsbury, 2026). During our discussion we touched upon how the International Union of Students ended up being headquartered in Prague, the organisation's various activities, and the life of the Secretariat, amongst other topics.

You can purchase the book from Bloomsbury here. The book is also available Open Access here.

The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We showcase the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions.

At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate.

Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews.
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Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and
peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled
with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his
grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has
embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its
value.

The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what
we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency,
masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food
commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or
enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields (University of Arizona Press, 2026) asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.

This
book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers
to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where
people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these
fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small
farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations
in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental
humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and
ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.

For
anyone who is curious about the food on their plate and the people who
helped to get it there, Feeding the World as if People Mattered will
offer a new way to find value in the food we grow and the people who
grow it.

Dr. Andrew Flachs researches food and
agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom
seeds, and our own microbiomes. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania,
he graduated from Oberlin College with dual Bachelor of Music and
Bachelor of Arts degrees in 2010. He earned his PhD from Washington
University in St. Louis in April 2016 and was a 2016-2017 Volkswagen
Exchange Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Heidelberg University
Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies. He is currently
an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University. His work
among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India
investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in
agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM
cotton fields. His research has been supported by public and private
institutions including the Department of Education, the National
Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the
Social Science Research Council, while his writing on agricultural
development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as
well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National
Geographic magazine. His work has been recognized by eight
international awards, including most recently as a finalist for the
Society for Economic Anthropology Kate Browne Creativity in Research
Award and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize.

Sandra
Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology
in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. She looks at rice farmers’ and
their way of life in Kuttanad, Kerala—which is dubbed as the state’s
rice granary. She can be reached out on X.  
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The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional
foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of
chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the
popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in
response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist
movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology.
Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory,
embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional
food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India.
Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish
to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert,
and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As
Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the
conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people
already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026),
then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks
largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage
revival.
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