Book Review: The Body Speaks: Body Image Delusions and Hypochondria By David Rosenfeld. Karnac, 2014.Reviewed by Nathan Szajnberg, MD

Courage comes to mind when reading these case histories. Courage in the sense of the

word’s origin, coeur, of the heart.  “Pierre”, a six foot four psychotic twenty-year old with a violent history, enters for a first session and stands near Dr. Rosenfeld.  He becomes increasingly agitated.  Shortly thereafter, as Pierre left angrily, he punched the door, broke the lock.  Rosenfeld ran down the stairs to help him.  Pierre is in and out of hospital. We listen to Rosenfeld persistence and perceptiveness to return this fellow to sanity.  And we learn the theoretical framework that Rosenfeld found helpful to work with such patients psychoanalytically. Continue reading The Body Speaks: Body Image Delusions and Hypochondria By David Rosenfeld

100 Years of Solitude? (Not): Review of 100 Years of the IPA, Edited by Peter Loewenberg and Nellie L. Thompson (Karnac/IPA books, 2011) By Nathan Szajnberg, MD

This book’s a must-have, gotta-read, for your bookshelf at least for psychoanalysts or historians of ideas or New Yorker readers and fans of Janet Malcolm.
Loewenberg and Thompson are two scholarly historians and psychoanalysts. After four years of recruiting, writing, editing with 56 contributors from 41 countries and societies, this book could have been a hodge-podge. It isn’t; Loewenberg and Thompson pull it off. Their angle is to grab by the horns Derrida’s derisive bull — that there is practically no “homo psychoanalyticus” in Africa, Asia or the South Seas — and rassle it to the ground by studying the history of psychoanalytic geography, the variations with culture (or consistencies across cultures). And, in this book, they answer Derrida Continue reading 100 Years of the IPA, Edited by Peter Loewenberg and Nellie L. Thompson

Click Here to Read:  Review of The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lifton, Reviewed by by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Commentary Magazine on December 2, 1986.