Review of Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, by Nuar Alsadir,  Graywolf Press, 2022,  279 pp., $17.00 (ISBN 9781644450932).

I have been struck for some time now, at least since the beginning of the pandemic, if not before, by a growing interest in fairly sophisticated discussions of mental health in the media, often with an emphasis on psychoanalysis—a topic that, not so long ago, only appeared in nonprofessional publications and general bookstores because Frederick Crews had just published another iteration of his attack on Freud. But in the last few years, there have been articles in such publications as Harper's, The Baffler, n + 1, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, and others addressing sophisticated questions related to mental health in general and psychoanalysis in particular, as well as a new collection of articles from the New Yorker by the journalist Rachel Aviv of her reporting on the problematics of psychological medicine, Strangers to Ourselves. And now, with Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, by poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, we have a book specifically about psychoanalysis that Time magazine has announced as one of the 100 must-read books of 2022 (https://time.com/collection/must-read-books-2022/6228432/animal-joy/). The times, I have to say, they are a-changin’.

What strikes me here is growing awareness of the problematic of “mental health” as something that can be grasped through reproducible empirical research, almost certainly related to the ways in which all our ideas about normality have proven questionable, especially in light of such catastrophic events as the obvious worsening of climate change across the world, extreme economic inequality at a time when neoliberalism was supposed to have made life better for everybody—to have ended history, in fact—while a viral pandemic has devastated everyone, and ongoing wars, with the threat o