Richard Sembera

Metapsychology for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017) was originally supposed to be called "Mind, World, and Self" because that's what it's really about, but the publisher preferred a more descriptive title, so we went with that.

In a nutshell, the book is an attempt to replace the traditional drive–defence model of Freudian tradition with an information processing model of the mind. Whereas Freud understood human beings as essentially pleasure seeking beings motivated by the need for drive discharge, I argue in my book that the most basic human need is the need for clear thinking, and that physical drives ultimately only have significance for the mind insofar as they tend towards the one central and fundamental aim of self-knowledge.

Some distinguishing features of the book include its in-depth theory of trauma, its careful distinction between overwhelming experiences and traumatic experiences, and its conception of trauma as playing a central role in normal mental functioning.

Rephrasing Heidegger (University of Ottawa Press, 2008) was my first major academic publication. In this book I showed that there is indeed method to the madness that is Heidegger's Being and Time, and succeeded in paraphrasing its main lines of argument to make them intelligible to the general reader.

The book was fairly successful and managed to get 5 star reviews both on the Amazon and Chapters websites. It is currently out of print, but is still more or less readily available through used book sites.

On the other hand, why would you do that when you could get a paper copy of the revised and expanded edition at a reasonable price?