Christopher Christian, PhD, ABPP
Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
New Haven, Connecticut
Dr. Christian, Ph.D., is board certified in Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology and in Psychoanalysis, and is licensed in New York and Connecticut. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology. He earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Certificate in Psychoanalysis from the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), where he is a past Dean and a Training and Supervising Analyst. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry; Faculty at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society; and Professor in the Contemporary Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy program at Ramon Llull University (Barcelona). His most recent book, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, co-authored with Patricia Gherovici, won the distinguished 2020 Gradiva Award and the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize. He is co-editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky, and co-editor of The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action with Michael J. Diamond. His forthcoming book, Psychoanalytic Studies on Somatization and Body Dysmorphia: Half Body Man, is slated for publication by Routledge.
He is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and co-chair of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group.
In The Half-Body Man, Christian takes up one of psychoanalysis’s oldest and most enduring questions: what happens when suffering cannot quite become thought. Moving deftly between Freud, psychosomatic theory, neuroscience, and a remarkable clinical case, Christian shows how bodily symptoms are neither simply “in the mind” nor reducible to the body itself, but emerge in the fraught territory between sensation, perception, and meaning. This is a humane and deeply compelling book about the mysteries of embodiment and the strange ways a life can come to be lived through a symptom. —Jamieson Webster, Psychoanalyst and author of On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis.
Due out in 2027
Some books change the way you listen to patients. This is one of them. With honesty, clinical patience, and remarkable theoretical range, Christian follows one man's bodily suffering across a decade of treatment. Drawing on empirically grounded research into how humans process experience through symbolic and non-symbolic registers, he shows that somatization arises precisely where these two registers fail to connect — and in doing so illuminates something we rarely name clearly: how much of what the body endures, the mind has not yet learned to hold.
—Vittorio Lingiardi, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Sapienza University of Rome, Recipient of the Sigourney Award, 2023.
This remarkable book brings a century and a half of clinical wisdom and theoretical understanding to bear upon the suffering of a single soul. Ultimately, for all its modernity, however, Dr Christian’s careful and sensitive treatment of this anguished young man demonstrates that psychoanalysis remains a ‘cure by love’. —Mark Solms, Chair of Neuropsychology, University of Cape Town, and General Editor of The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
The Half-Body Man grabbed my full attention. It features a beautifully rendered case study that demonstrates the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis — but it offers considerably more. Christian is a trustworthy guide and scholar who escorts us through the history of psychoanalytic thinking about the body, the paradigm of psychosomatics, and the mind/body relation in its many forms. The book covers remarkable ground, from multiple code theory to ataque de nervios, from cognitive science to theories of culture. What makes it exceptional is that Christian never loses sight of his primary focus: how he actually helped his patient. —Elliot Jurist, Professor of Psychology, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of Minding Emotions.
Astutely exploring how the body joins the conversation, The Half-Body Man redraws the map of our embodied lives. Through rich clinical examples — from one riveting case of a patient convinced that his left side is incomplete to the culture-bound somatization of ataque de nervios — Christian illuminates with precision how soma and psyche are not opposites but co-conspirators. —Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author of The Puerto Rican Syndrome, Recipient of the Sigourney Award, 2020
Since its origins, psychoanalysis has been faced with two crucial questions: are its theories universal or culturally determined? Should treatment be made available to all, and if so, at what cost? These questions continue to haunt contemporary psychoanalytic practice. Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious presents a diverse array of responses to and provocative reformulations of these century-old concerns, as for instance whether there is a cultural specificity to Cuban scopophilic perversions, or how one offers treatment to impoverished, working-class urban Americans? How does contemporary fiction, art, and music help us understand these questions? Patricia Gherovici’s and Chris Christian’s edited volume should be required reading for all analytic trainees and students of psychology. -- Rubén Gallo, PhD, author of Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis and member of the board, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna
Working in and against a U.S. medical industrial complex that seeks to commodify every aspect of health—including mental health—this sui generis collection underscores how psychoanalysis is not only possible in the barrio but indeed indispensable to it. This book achieves something truly remarkable: the integration of critical race studies with psychoanalysis. It illustrates how a retooled psychoanalytic practice can be oriented toward progressive social transformations of race, gender, class, and capitalism for Latinidad.
-- David L. Eng, PhD, co-author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans
Bringing together outstanding contributions from some of the leading figures in the field, the editors have produced a superb volume that is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of psychoanalysis. -- Jeremy D. Safran, Ph.D., Chair & Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research
Christian, Eagle and Wolitzky have done an extraordinary service to the field by collecting essays from different psychoanalytic orientations-- Contemporary Freudian, Object Relations, Self Psychology, Relational, Lacanian and Attachment-- written by some of the most original thinkers in the field. Treatment issues are central, but the book also covers neurobiological and developmental issues as well. For psychoanalysts who long for dialogue across psychoanalytic orientations, this book is exemplary, and deserves a wide audience. --Elliot Jurist, PhD, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, Graduate Center and the City College of New York, the City University of New York, and Editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology
This inspired collection of essays written by faculty members of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS) reviews core issues of psychoanalysis through new lenses while having the energy and passion of discussions behind it. Of immediate use to many in the field while offering a major contribution to psychoanalytic studies, the book clearly celebrates this distinctive psychoanalytical society while bringing the renewing visions of West Coast psychoanalysis to the world of psychoanalysis at large. --Christopher Bollas, Ph.D., author, The Evocative Object World and The Infinite Question.
Europeans are used to thinking about North American psychoanalysis as an archipelago of groups rather isolated from one another. In this innovative and very interesting text, we see influential Californian psychoanalysts accomplishing a great choral work to integrate the different theoretical-clinical trends with convincing and deeply harmonious results. --Stefano Bolognini, M.D., author, Secret Passages: The Theory and Technique of Interpsychic Relations and President.
Diamond and Christian's timely and well organized volume brings together a collection of thoughtful and engaging reflections on the nature of therapeutic change that take into account intrapsychic and intersubjective factors, insight and relationship, and the uniquencess of the individual dyad. This book will deepen our study of these healing processes. --Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
The papers in this volume provide one of the best available overviews of contemporary thinking about therapeutic action. This book will engage and inform anybody who is interested in the current state of clinical theory in psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy by challenging us to think about what we do, why we do it, and what effect we are having on our patients. --Jay Greenberg, Ph.D., author, Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory, and Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (with Stephen Mitchell), and editor.