Irreverence and Psychoanalysis
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : December 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 246
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98706
- ISBN 13 : 9781041193937
- ISBN 10 : 1041193939
Also by Jean Petrucelli
Also by Sarah Schoen
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This book explores the role of psychoanalysis as an irreverent discipline—questioning received wisdoms, challenging internal and external constraints, and unearthing links between the outlandish and the transformative.
Psychoanalysis is a field exquisitely suited to embracing complication and contradiction. Irreverence can be complex, as it risks disrespect for what others value or cherish. Yet a willingness to challenge the sacred can expose ideologies and hypocrisies that protect existing power structures both outside and inside the psychoanalytic field. The chapters in this volume span this territory, engaging tensions between tradition and change, and raising profound questions about what the future holds. From the political to the personal, the psychic to the social, the mind to the body, the voices in this volume—which include some of the most influential thinkers in contemporary psychoanalysis—speak to what is often left silenced or unquestioned.
This is essential reading for all psychoanalysts, as well as for readers across other disciplines, dilettantisms, and curiosities interested in probing the unruly forces that give psychoanalysis its particular power.
Reviews and Endorsements
'Irreverence and Psychoanalysis is a volume with the bravery to say what psychoanalysis has always known but often forgotten: truth flourishes in unsettlement, creativity is bound up with transgression, and our deepest work relies on the freedom to question what we hold sacred. This book is remarkably vital, bold but not reckless, thoughtful but not timid, and unafraid to venture into the fraught spaces where the political, the personal, and the clinical intersect. Throughout its pages, the authors show how irreverence may be a form of ethical seriousness, a protest against hypocrisy, and an enlivening source of renewal in a world that feels increasingly fragile. It is delightful to encounter a volume that makes one think harder while also allowing us to breathe easier. This one does just that, inviting us to consider irreverence but also to practice it as a mode of more complete encounter with each other and with the field of psychoanalysis itself.'
Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, CEDS-C, Professor of Psychology at Golden Gate University, Personal and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), and Training Analyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP).
'Irreverence may not win you many friends, but it remains essential to a creative and engaging life in psychoanalysis. An irreverent approach is not the same as disrespect. One can value established methods, while also questioning their relevance—a dialectic that acknowledges history and precedent. Today’s psychoanalysis too often splits itself into distinct sects, each claiming its own version of ultimate truth. Yet true irreverence resists this pull toward doctrinal certainty. Instead, it has the potential to invite us into mystery. Analysts are drawn to the experience of awe: the vastness of a star-filled sky, the hush of a cathedral, the paradoxes of quantum physics, the unfathomable nature of consciousness. These encounters with wonder may, paradoxically, carry greater therapeutic potential than the reverent pursuit of conventionally packaged theory.
Drs. Petrucelli and Schoen —two senior analysts and prolific authors— gather a set of stimulating and provocative essays that explore how irreverence engages psychoanalysis’ promise. I am delighted to endorse this work, which closely reflects my own perspective. It is a book that can expand one's outlook and make the analytic enterprise more exciting, more engaging, and ultimately more clinically effective.'
Edgar A. Levenson, MD, Fellow Emeritus, Training, Supervising Analyst, Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute; Winner of the 2006 Mary S. Sigourney Award, Author of over 110 publications, including The Fallacy of Understanding/The Ambiguity of Change and The Purloined Self.
'What a delightful moment for subversion! Petrucelli and Schoen, editors of this wonderful text, invite us to venture beyond the safe and toward the quicksand that surrounds our psychoanalytic field, our country, and the world today. Feast on its riches and treat it like the Italian slow food movement, savor, rather than devour it. And go back for another tasting menu tomorrow.'
Joyce Slochower, PhD, ABPP, Faculty NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Author of Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken.
'From Freud’s era to the present, an irreverent aesthetic captures the best of what psychoanalysis has to offer—challenging orthodoxy, deconstructing norms, and questioning received wisdoms. In this important volume, Petrucelli and Schoen bring together a remarkable multiplicity of voices to deftly explore this territory, opening the space between tradition and innovation, past and present, the familiar and the strange. Prepare to be alternately destabilized, enticed, and provoked as these chapters transform what has often felt inevitable into a world of as yet to be imagined possibilities. A profound contribution to the field.'
Galit Atlas, PhD, Co-author of Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice, Faculty NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Jean Petrucelli and Sarah Schoen
Section I: Getting Into Good Trouble: Race, Sex, and Enthusiasms
01. Irreverence and Humor in Theory and Practice: A Resource to Help with Mystifications and Misconceptions
Stephen Seligman
02. Notes from the Erotic Field: Potholes, Confessions, Discoveries
Sarah Schoen
03. Irreverence: A Necessary Component of Psychoanalytic Identity and Practice in Our Authoritarian and Racist World
Dorothy Evans Holmes
04. Irreverence as Love from Close-In Rather Than Faraway: “Good Trouble” From John Lewis to Interpersonal and Relational Psychoanalysis
Anton Hart
Section II: Between Two Points: Stretching Beyond Outside In and Inside Out as Our Loyalties Are Challenged
05. Remaking Psyches in a World Being Remade
Susie Orbach
06. Ethical Irreverence, or an Analyst Outside of History
Orna Guralnik
07. All Born Screaming: Where Have All Our Appetites and Desires Gone?
Jean Petrucelli
Section III: Humans, Minds, and Brains: A Trialogue at the Edge of AI Possibility
08. Reverence and Irreverence
Amy Levy
09. Does Your Bot Give a Damn? A Brief Neuropsychoanalytic Perspective on Large Language Models
Fred Gioia
10. You’re Already an AI Revolutionary! But On Whose Side?
Todd Essig
11. Amy Levy’s Response
Amy Levy
12. Fred Gioia’s Response
Fred Gioia
13. Todd Essig’s Response
Todd Essig
Section IV: Approach with Irreverence: Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexuality
14. A 1970s Feminist Psychoanalyst’s Perspective on Gender, Sex, Sexualities
Ann D’Ercole
15. May You Live in Interesting Times: Some Irreverent Reflections on Psychoanalytic Grandiosity
Jack Drescher
16. Some Thoughts on Gender
Willa N. France
17. When Irreverent Defiance Is Needed: A Call to Action
Jack Pula
Section V: Don't talk to THOSE People! Does Irreverence Calm the Waters or Fuel the Flames of Toxic Polarization?
18. Them's Fightin' Words: Rhetoric and Polarization
Sue Kolod
19. Bullet in the Brain: Reverence, Irreverence, and the Pursuit of Dialogue
Tom Hennes
20. The Gaza Ordeal; Our Sadistic Moment
Susannah Heschel
Section VI: Irreverence and Orthodoxy In Psychoanalysis
21. On Irreverence
Adam Phillips
22. Slow Therapy: Psychoanalysis as Counterculture
Don Greif
23. Genocide and the Screen of Irreverence
Avgi Saketopoulou
24. Defiant Voices: Language, Irreverence, and Impeccable Speech
Velleda C. Ceccoli
About the Author(s)
Jean Petrucelli, PhD, is Director and Co-Founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions & Addictions Service at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, where she is also a member of the Teaching Faculty and Supervisor of Psychotherapy. Additionally, she is Co-Editor of Hungers and Compulsion: The Psychodynamic Treatment of Eating Disorders and Addictions. Dr Petrucelli is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan and lectures on the themes of eating disorders and addiction.
More titles by Jean Petrucelli
Sarah Schoen is a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, faculty and supervisor at the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Program at the William Alanson White Institute, and clinical professor of Psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She teaches and writes about the clinical implications of the relational turn, narcissistic states in patient and analyst, complex trauma, and the gendered meanings in transference-countertransference matrices. She is on the editorial board of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and is in private practice in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.
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