When music is played in a new key, the melody does not change, but the notes that make up the composition do: change in the context of continuity, continuity that perseveres through change. Psychoanalysis in a New Key publishes books that share the aims psychoanalysts have always had, but that approach them differently. The books in the series are not expected to advance any particular theoretical agenda, although to this date most have been written by analysts from the Interpersonal and Relational orientations.
The most important contribution of a psychoanalytic book is the communication of something that nudges the reader’s grasp of clinical theory and practice in an unexpected direction. Psychoanalysis in a New Key creates a deliberate focus on innovative and unsettling clinical thinking. Because that kind of thinking is encouraged by exploration of the sometimes surprising contributions to psychoanalysis of ideas and findings from other fields, Psychoanalysis in a New Key particularly encourages interdisciplinary studies. Books in the series have married psychoanalysis with dissociation, trauma theory, sociology, and criminology. The series is open to the consideration of studies examining the relationship between psychoanalysis and any other field – for instance, biology, literary and art criticism, philosophy, systems theory, anthropology, and political theory.
But innovation also takes place within the boundaries of psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalysis in a New Key therefore also presents work that reformulates thought and practice without leaving the precincts of the field. Books in the series focus, for example, on the significance of personal values in psychoanalytic practice, on the complex interrelationship between the analyst’s clinical work and personal life, on the consequences for the clinical situation when patient and analyst are from different cultures, and on the need for psychoanalysts to accept the degree to which they knowingly satisfy their own wishes during treatment hours, often to the patient’s detriment.
By Steven Stern
August 18, 2025
This book focuses on the recognition and psychoanalytic treatment of a debilitating form of early relational trauma poignantly described by Steven Stern as airless world syndrome. A patient can be said to be living in an airless world when one or both parents have failed to recognize, or worse, ...
Edited
By Gianni Francesetti, Michela Gecele, Paolo Migone
June 16, 2025
This book is the outcome of a fruitful dialogue between relational psychoanalysis, neo-Bionian psychoanalysis, and Gestalt therapy on a contemporary growing edge of clinical practice: field theory. What is happening in contemporary clinical practice that seems to be pushing theories towards a field...
By Max Cavitch
April 23, 2025
This book charts the past and present vicissitudes of psychoanalysis’s relation to education and emphasizes on the necessity of its increased presence in university settings. Why can fewer and fewer people afford either time-intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy or a three- to four-year college ...
By Dodi Goldman
December 19, 2024
Acclaimed Winnicott scholar Dodi Goldman offers an intriguing account of the psyche’s work of imaginative elaboration. Why does the world feel one way when we are imaginatively alive to it and quite another when we are not? How does one both imagine and see things as they are? What happens ...
By Peter Shabad
December 09, 2024
This book examines how humans can overcome feelings of shame through self‑acceptance and regain their innate passion and freedom to grow. Peter Shabad examines in detail how self-shaming and passivity are intertwined with the fatalism of self-pity, envy, resentment, and ultimately, regret for not "...
By Janet Rivkin Zuckerman, Ph.D.
November 28, 2024
This book addresses the fraught relationship between women and aggression, one troubled by age-old patriarchal forces that disparage women’s ambition, assertion, and voice. Told from a psychoanalytic perspective, the book details the sociocultural forces that infect a woman’s intrapsychic dynamics ...
By Donnel B. Stern
September 05, 2024
This book is Donnel B. Stern’s latest contribution to the kind of understanding of the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic process offered by field theory. Stern anchors his understanding of therapeutic action in the freedom of both patient and analyst to create a meaningful experience with ...
By Joyce Slochower
June 10, 2024
What do therapists not talk about? What do we ignore/miss/sidestep? What factors—personal, social, political—inform our areas of blindness? This book names and explores what psychoanalytic theory often skips over or simplifies—how, when, and why we fail to uphold the professional ideal. Turning a ...
By Dana Amir
June 06, 2024
This book focuses on different forms of turning-to versus turning-away from speech across a range of experiences in clinical treatment and general life. The chapters of this volume deal with the entrapment involved in exile from mother tongue, the parasitic language that uses the other's language ...
By Barbara Pizer
April 11, 2024
In this book, it becomes impossible to stand apart from the analytic field as abstract concepts, such as dissociation, intersubjectivity, and unconscious communication, as well as newly coined ones, like "Relational (K)not" and "Body Words," come alive through a vivid unfolding of analytic process....
By Danielle Knafo, Michael Selzer
November 22, 2023
As a clear and user-friendly guide for clinicians who work with patients affected by psychosis, this book challenges the false notion that psychosis is untreatable through talk therapy. The authors contend that since psychotic symptoms are features of survival adaptation, they naturally serve as a ...
By Ann D'Ercole
January 23, 2023
Ann D’Ercole tells the story of Clara M. Thompson, drawing extensively on unpublished archival interviews and correspondence, to provide a full and complex picture of an early American pioneer of psychoanalysis. The book begins by exploring Thompson’s youth, which was steeped in evangelical ...