There was a time was psychoanalysis was the thing. Americans coming back from World War II, who’d gone through all kinds of violence and trauma, they could come home and talk with an analyst, and there was evidence that those sessions really helped with their struggles. What we would now call PTSD. That lasted until the mid-sixties.
At this point most therapy is not psychoanalytic. But psychoanalysis has never just been about the individual patient. Even Freud used his theories to try to understand society. His practices may have fallen out of fashion, but his thinking stayed alive in the academy, and now there’s a new magazine, called Parapraxis, that wants to remind us how psychoanalysis can help us think now.
So I decided to bring in the magazine’s founding editor, Hannah Zeavin, to make the case for psychoanalysis and social analysis. She taught at Indiana University last year, and she came into the studio a few weeks after the magazine’s release. We talked about how growing up in a family of psychoanalysts shaped her relationship to her own feelings, how psychoanalysis can helped us think about social problems, gender panics, whiteness in psychoanalysis, and the space she’s created for thinking together. I should say, Hannah’s been busy. Her first book is called The Distance Cure. It’s about the interwoven histories of communication technology and therapy. She’s got another book in the works, called Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family, and she’s written for The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, and more.
