About this episode

Mari Ruti and Gail N. Newman discuss their book on the challenges of neoliberal individualism and the search for a meaningful life.

In their book The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism (Columbia UP, 2025) Mari Ruti and Gail N. Newman offer our beleaguered souls a breather. Together they tackle the question of what makes life worth living, and before you recoil at the sound of that question, which intentionally has a little neoliberal ring to it, emphasis mine, let me say that this book studies and challenges the neoliberal way of, if you will, “being” and does so beautifully. Lamenting how perfecting, polishing and pushing ourselves beyond the beyond has become de rigeur—(with our overfull email boxes, demands for more, more, more that keep piling in, and how we are doing it all proudly on our own, no side to fall into) Newman and Ruti plumb the works of Marion Milner and Donal Winnicott, two analytic thinkers, both members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, contemporaries in fact, in search of an escape hatch. It is important to note that Ruti was dying, knew she was dying, when she wrote this book, in which she fearlessly lays some blame for her demise at the feet of neoliberal modes of relating. At one point she describes the pressures of academia to attend to too much outside the realm of the…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guests: Mari Ruti, Gail N. Newman

Topics covered

• neoliberalism
• psychoanalysis
• individualism
• mental health
• academic pressure
• creative self

Keywords

• neoliberalism
• psychoanalysis
• mental health
• individualism
• creative self
• academic pressure
• Marion Milner
• Donal Winnicott

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Columbia UP

Books & works: The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism

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