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 understand the social dimensions of our lives.

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 this past 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, about gender panics, whiteness in psychoanalysis, and the space she’s created for thinking together. Hannah’s not only the founding editor of Parapraxis. She's also a scholar, writer, and teacher. Her first book is called The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy. It’s about the interwoven histories of communication technology and therapy. She has 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. She'll be an Assistant Profesoor of the History of Science in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley starting this fall.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Violet Baron, Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, Avi Forrest, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is John Bailey.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music