Gloria Sibson Ayob, "The Concept of Emotional Disorder" (Oxford UP, 2025)
New Books in PsychoanalysisShow Notes
The Concept of Emotional Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2025) is a philosophical and academic exploration of how society determines whether emotions are considered normal human experiences or emotional disorders. The book examines the concern that some ordinary emotions may be “over pathologized,” meaning they are increasingly treated as medical or psychiatric problems rather than understandable human responses to life circumstances.
Drawing from philosophy, psychology, and mental health theory, Dr. Ayob explores how people evaluate emotions and how those evaluations shape our understanding of emotional disorder.
In the author’s framing, the concept of “emotional disorder” is not simple or straightforward. It is built upon many smaller judgments we make about emotions, including whether emotions are reasonable, excessive, disruptive, socially acceptable, or connected to a person’s lived experience.
Key Ideas:
The book examines how emotional disorders are conceptually defined.
Explores whether modern society sometimes medicalizes ordinary emotional experiences too quickly.
Lived experience, personal meaning, and context all influence how emotions are understood.
Encourages deeper reflection about the assumptions society makes when labeling emotions as healthy or pathological.
Emotional awareness and reasoning are connected.
Understanding our emotions can help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.
One of the strongest ideas from the discussion was that human beings process emotions through their own lived reality and personal experiences. What may feel distressing or emotionally overwhelming does not automatically mean it is a disorder. Sometimes emotional pain is part of being human, especially during difficult life experiences, loss, uncertainty, stress, or change.
The conversation also emphasized the importance of emotional self-awareness and reasoning. Being informed about our emotions may help us better understand our reactions rather than immediately viewing every difficult emotional experience through a strictly medical lens.
Angela Marie Hutchinson is the author of “Create Your Yes! When You Keep Hearing No,” named a Forbes No. 4 book to advance your career. She is a podcast host for New Books Network, where she leads conversations for the neuroscience and Christianity channels. Hutchinson is also a talent and intellectual property executive, former social media professor and BBC commentator. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
More from New Books in Psychoanalysis
“For Laplanche we are constantly and radically de-centered, always adrift so to speak in terms of a center.” - Dominque Scarfone
As the popular jazz standard tells us, “comes love, nothing can be done”, or can it? Galit Atlas begs to differ in her most recent book Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, which describes six kinds of emotional styles, as we might call them, made manifest when we are young. Atlas, whose work has endeavored to sexualize the Relational School, here turns an eye both keen and wistful, towards love.
Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expression within representational systems and is core to the being of any subject. In Part One, The Epistemology of the Body, Meehan O'Callaghan approaches a theory of the body as traumatic by framing it as a question, a gap in knowledge through the lens of psychoanalysis and theatre studies. Part Two, The Body of Drama, is devoted to a study of the body in the works of Beckett and Artaud from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Part Three, The Body Between Being and Non-Being, provides a deeper exploration of how the interrogation of the body opens onto a question of being and uses the insights gained from the dialectical encounter of psychoanalysis with the specific works of Beckett and Artaud to apply them to contemporary and scholarly issues of the body. Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives through Beckett and Artaud will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for academics and scholars of Lacanian studies, psychoanalytic studies, the body, disability studies, and literary and theatre studies.
This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.
A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from Rachel Aviv, the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker.