Club Freud

An evening with Parapraxis, a new lit mag for the new psychoanalysis crowd.

- LILA SHAPIRO

ON A RECENT RAINY NIGHT in Manhattan, more than a hundred people gathered at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery to celebrate the launch of Parapraxis, a new magazine about the century-old practice and theory of psychoanalysis. The party, co-hosted by the journal n+1, primarily consisted of writers, academics, and analysts, most of them young. You could identify some of the analysts by their clothes (fleeces, button-downs) and their jokes ("How many dollars per hour are they charging for this?"). Alex Colston, the 31-year-old deputy editor of Parapraxis, who is training to become a clinical psychologist, set a stack of glossy magazines on a scarred wooden table near the door. He wore a slip that was screen-printed with an image of Freud’s face—not the classic photograph of the white-haired sage with a cigar and the suggestion of a scowl but a portrait of the doctor as a young man, dark-haired and handsome. “It felt gimmicky,” Colston said, “but I can’t get enough of a pun.”

The magazine’s founding editor, Hannah Zeavin, 32, an author, professor, and historian of psychoanalysis, strolled over in a black lace dress and chunky black creepers to pose for a photograph with Colston. Her mother and stepfather, Lynne Zeavin and Donald Moss, both eminent Manhattan psychoanalysts, were in attendance. Moss joked that the editors looked like Freud and Dora, the latter being one of Freud’s most famous patients (a teenage girl whose treatment was an abject failure). The two met on Twitter around 2020 and found themselves talking for hours about psychoanalysis and what they see as its unmatched potential for helping people understand themselves and the world. They liked the idea of a publication where writers could imagine “a psychoanalysis for the 21st century,” as Zeavin put it.