Psychoanalysis on the Move


Book Description

Peter Fonagy Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award! Joseph Sandler has been an important influence in psychoanalysis throughout the world during the latter part of the twentieth century, contributing to changing views on both psychoanalytic theory and technique. He has also been a bridging force in psychoanalysis, helping to close the gap between American ego psychologists, and British Kleinian and object relations theorists. Psychoanalysis on the Move provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of Sandler's contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. The contributors trace the development of the main themes and achievements of Sandler's work, in particular his focus on combining psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Timely and important, Psychoanalysis on the Move should make interesting reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those who wish to know more about one of the most creative figures in psychoanalysis of the past few decades.




Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis explores the idea of ‘the frame’ at a time when this concept is undergoing both systematic revival and widespread transformation. It has always been tempting to see the frame as a relatively static, finite and definable feature of psychoanalytic work. At its most basic, the frame establishes agreed upon conditions of undertaking psychoanalytic work. But as this book shows, the frame has taken on a protean quality. It is sometimes a source of stability and sometimes a site of ethical regulation or discipline. It can be a place of imaginative mobility, and in certain analytic hands, a device for psychic work on projections and disavowals. Beginning with a seminal essay on the frame by José Bleger, this book includes commentary on that work and proceeds to explorations of the frame across different psychoanalytic theories. The frame is perhaps one of the spots in psychoanalysis where psyche and world come into contact, a place where the psychoanalytic project is both protected and challenged. Inevitably, extra-transferential forces intrude onto the psychoanalytic frame, rendering it flexible and fluid. Psychoanalysts and analysands, supervisors and candidates are relying increasingly on virtual communication, a development that has effected significant revisions of the classical psychoanalytic frame. This book presents a dialogue among distinct and different voices. It re-examines the state and status of the frame, searching for its limits and sifting through its unexpected contents whilst expanding upon the meaning, purview and state of the frame. Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in how best to understand the frame and to use it most effectively in their clinical practice.




Moving Images


Book Description

The experience of watching films – entertaining, moving, instructive, frightening or exciting as they may be – can be enriched by the opportunity to reflect upon them from unconventional perspectives.Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film: Moving Images offers its readers in an accessible language one such viewpoint, informed by Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic insights and therapeutic experience. Using a psychoanalytic interpretative approach, some twenty-five important feature films are discussed as the artistic vehicles of new, unsuspected meanings. The first chapter looks at films which represent psychoanalytic work itself, having therapists and their patients as their main characters. The remaining five chapters cover movies on themes of central concern to analytic theorists and clinicians, such as childhood and adolescent development, and varieties of intimate relationships among adults. The latter include romantic love and its disturbing association to death fantasies; eroticism and prostitution; and voyeuristic desire – a significant phenomenon in this context given its parallels with the activity of watching films. Andrea Sabbadini's psychoanalytic approach, which explores the part played by unconscious factors in shaping the personality and behaviour of film characters, is used to interpret their internal world and the emotional conflicts engendered by the vicissitudes they live through. The book is completed by a filmography and biographical notes on film directors. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film presents the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis as a complex one. These two most different of cultural phenomena are shown to share a wish on the part of their practitioners to uncover profound truths about the human condition, and to provide a language with which to describe them. Going beyond futile ‘psycho-historical’ attempts to analyse filmmakers through their products, or a superficial application of psychoanalytic concepts to film, Sabbadini shows how both cinema and psychoanalysis can benefit from a meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue between them. The book will be of special interest to practicing psychoanalysts and students, scholars and historians of film studies.




Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis


Book Description

There are moments of connection between analysts and patients during any therapeutic encounter upon which the therapy can turn. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis explores how analysts and therapists can experience these moments of meeting, shows how this interaction can become an enlivening and creative process, and seeks to recognise how it can change both the analyst and patient in profound and fundamental ways. The theory and practice of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has reached an exciting new moment of generous and generative interaction. As psychoanalysts become more intersubjective and relational in their work, it becomes increasingly critical that they develop approaches that have the capacity to harness and understand powerful moments of meeting, capable of propelling change through the therapeutic relationship. Often these are surprising human moments in which both client and clinician are moved and transformed. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis offers a window into the ways in which some of today’s practitioners think about, encourage, and work with these moments of meeting in their practices. Each chapter of the book offers theoretical material, case examples, and a discussion of various therapists’ reflections on and experiences with these moments of meeting. With contributions from relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and Jungian analysts, and covering essential topics such as shame, impasse, mindfulness, and group work, this book offers new theoretical thinking and practical clinical guidance on how best to work with moments of meeting in any relationally oriented therapeutic practice. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, workers in other mental health fields, graduate students, and anyone interested in change processes.




Change Through Time in Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Change Through Time in Psychoanalysis presents a new stage of the work done through the IPA Committee on Clinical Observation between 2014 and 2020—the advances in our method, the Three Level Model (3-LM), and our clinical thinking. In this new volume, ideas on observational research, clinical narratives based on 3-LM group discussions, and adaptations of the model for training candidates show more experience, more depth, more answers, and, of course, new questions. Contributors from three regions of the IPA have written extended case studies of 10 psychoanalyses, rich in verbatim session material, focusing on the main dimensions of the patient’s psychic functioning, specific changes in the analytic process, and related interventional strategies. The reader will find, in the method and in the clinical narratives, new and clarifying points of view in the observation of transformations in patients in psychoanalysis and of the analysts’ techniques, useful both in professional development and in teaching candidates.




Living Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Living Psychoanalysis: From Theory to Experience represents a decade of work from one of today's leading psychoanalysts. Michael Parsons brings to life clinical psychoanalysis and its theoretical foundations, offering new developments in analytic theory and vivid examples of work in the consulting room. The book also explores connections between psychoanalysis, art and literature, showing how psychoanalytic insights can enrich our lives far beyond the clinical situation. Living Psychoanalysis comprises four main sections: Life and Death – asks what it means to be fully and creatively alive, and introduces the concept of avant-coup Sexuality, Narcissism and the Oedipus complex – develops fresh ways of understanding these key concepts How analysts listen – explores links between psychoanalytic listening and the way artists look at the world, and introduces the concept of the internal analytic setting The Independent tradition in British psychoanalysis – considers the theoretical foundations of Independent clinical technique, and discusses from various perspectives the role of training in developing the identity of analysts and analytic therapists With fresh theoretical concepts and a focus on specific aspects of clinical practice, Living Psychoanalysis: From Theory to Experience will be a valuable resource for analysts, therapists and professionals who wish to extend their vision of psychoanalysis. It will also be of great interest to general readers concerned to deepen their understanding of the links between culture and the mind.




An Experience-based Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice


Book Description

An Experience-based Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice looks at each individual as a motivated doer doing, seeking, feeling, and intending, and relates development, sense of self, and identity to changes that are brought about in analytic psychotherapy. Based on conceptualizing experience as it is lived from infancy throughout life, this book identifies three major pathways to development and applies Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage’s experience-based vision to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Using detailed clinical narratives and vignettes, as well as organizational studies, the book takes up the distinction between a person’s responding to a failure in achieving a goal with disappointment and seeking an alternative path, or with disillusion and a collapse in motivation. From the variety of topics covered, the reader will get a broad overview of an experience-based analytic conception of motivation begun with Lichtenberg’s seven motivational systems. This title will be of great interest to established psychoanalysts, as well as those training in psychoanalysis and clinical counselling psychology programs.




Psychoanalysis on the Verge of Language


Book Description

This book examines the importance of language and writing in psychoanalytic theory and practice, offering an understanding of how language works can give a deeper insight into the psyche both in clinical practice and everyday life. Bringing together psychoanalytic insights that hinge on the language of "difficult cases", this collection also includes contributions dedicated to meta-study of psychoanalytic writing. The first chapter shows how music includes tonal regions that deploy existing rules and syntax, alongside atonal ones dominated by caesuras, pauses, and tensions. The second chapter discusses the malignant ambiguity of revealing and concealing typical of incestuous situations, pinpointing how the ambiguous language of incest "deceives by means of the truth,". The third chapter brings in Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando in order to illustrate two types of gender crossing. Distinctions defined by the linguist Roman Jakobson help in the fourth chapter to offer an integrative description of obsessive-compulsive phenomenon as an interaction between metaphoric and metonymic dimensions, as well as with a third, psychotic dimension. The fifth chapter focuses on what is called the "screen confessions" typical of the perpetrator’s language. George Orwell’s "newspeak" is used here to decipher the specific means by which the perpetrator turns his or her "inner witness" into a blind one. The final chapter uses Roland Barthes’ concepts of "studium" and "punctum" to discuss the limits of psychoanalytic writing. As a whole, this book sets the psychoanalytic importance of language in a wider understanding of how language helps to shape and even create internal as well as the external world. Drawing on insights from psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as from linguistics and cultural theory, this book will be invaluable for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and bibliotherapists, as well as anyone interested in how language forms our reality.




Silence and Silencing in Psychoanalysis


Book Description

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in recent decades of silence and silencing in psychoanalysis from clinical and research perspectives, as well as in philosophy, theology, linguistics, and musicology. The book approaches silence and silencing on three levels. First, it provides context for psychoanalytic approaches to silence through chapters about silence in phenomenology, theology, linguistics, musicology, and contemporary Western society. Its central part is devoted to the position of silence in psychoanalysis: its types and possible meanings (a form of resistance, in countertransference, the foundation for listening and further growth), based on both the work of the pioneers of psychoanalysis and on clinical case presentations. Finally, the book includes reports of conversation analytic research of silence in psychotherapeutic sessions and everyday communication. Not only are original techniques reported here for the first time, but research and clinical approaches fit together in significant ways. This book will be of interest to all psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists, as well as applied researchers, program designers and evaluators, educators, leaders, and students. It will also provide valuable insight to anyone interested in the social practices of silence and silencing, and the roles these play in everyday social interactions.




Contemporary Psychoanalysis in America


Book Description

This book is a unique and superb gateway to current psychoanalytic thinking. Thirty of America's foremost psychoanalysts -- leaders in defining the current pluralistic state of the profession -- have each presented what they consider to be their most significant contribution to the field. No mere anthology, these are the key writings that underlie current discussions of psychoanalytic theory and technique. The chapters cover contemporary ideas of intersubjectivity, object relations theory, self psychology, relational psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, clinical technique, changing concepts of unconscious, empirical research, infant observation, gender and sexuality, and more. While the differences in point of view are profound, there is also a striking coherence on some core issues. Each of the contributions features an introduction by the volume editor and a note by the author explaining the rationale for its selection. The brilliant introduction by Peter Fonagy provides an overview and places each author in the context of contemporary psychoanalysis. A list of the authors may convey the astonishing breadth of this volume:Brenner, Bromberg, Busch, Chodorow, Cooper, Emde, Friedman, Gabbard, Goldberg, Greenberg, Grossman, Hoffman, Jacobs, Kantrowitz, Kernberg, Levenson, Luborsky, Michels, Ogden, Ornstein, Person, Pine, Renik, Schafer, Schwaber, Shapiro, Smith, Stern, Stolorow, Wallerstein This is a "best of the best" volume -- cutting-edge writing, highly accessible and studded with vivid clinical illustrations. Anyone wishing to acquire a comprehensive, authoritative, readily accessible -- even entertaining -- guide to American psychoanalytic thinking will find their goal fulfilled in this monumental collection.