The Analyst's Reveries


Book Description

While the use of the analyst’s own reveries in work with patients has increased in recent times, there has been little critical inquiry into its value, and the problems it may lead to. The Analyst's Reveries finds increasing veneration for the analyst’s use of their reveries, while revealing important differences amongst post-Bionians in how reverie is defined and used clinically. Fred Busch ponders if it has been fully recognized that some post-Bionions suggest a new, radical paradigm for what is curative in psychoanalysis. After searching for the roots of the analyst’s use of reverie in Bion’s work and questioning whether in this regard Bion was a Bionian, Busch carefully examines the work of some post-Bionians and finds both convincing ways to think about the usefulness and limitations of the analyst’s use of reverie. He explores questions including: From what part of the mind does a reverie emerge? How does its provenance inform its transformative possibilities? Do we over-generalize in conceptualizing what is unrepresented, with the corresponding problem of false positives? Do dreams equal understanding and what about the generalizability of the co-created reverie? Busch concludes that it is primarily through the analyst’s own associations that the reverie’s potential is revealed, which further helps the analyst distinguish it from many other possibilities, including the analyst’s countertransference. He believes in the importance of converting reveries into verbal interpretations, a controversial point amongst post-Bionians. Busch ends with the difficult task of classifying the analyst’s reveries based on their degree of representation. The Analyst's Reveries will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.




Reverie and Interpretation


Book Description

In his fifth book Thomas Ogden, widely regarded as the most profound and original psychoanalytic writer of this decade, explores the frontier of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking: the experience of the analyst and patient in the dynamic interplay of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. A Jason Aronson Book




Relational Psychoanalysis, Volume 5


Book Description

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, Relational Psychoanalysis continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, Volume 5 carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at the progress in therapeutic process. Included here are chapters on transference and countertransference, engagement, dissociation and self-states, analytic impasses, privacy and disclosure, enactments, improvisation, development, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Lewis Aron, Anthony Bass, Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Steven Cooper, Jody Messler Davies, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dianne Elise, Glen Gabbard, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Steven Knoblauch, Thomas Ogden, Spyros Orfanos, Stuart Pizer, Philip Ringstrom, Jill Salberg, Stephen Seligman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Paul Wachtel.




The Analyst's Experience of the Depressive Position


Book Description

In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper explores a subject matter previously applied more exclusively to patients, but rarely to psychoanalysts. Cooper probes the analyst’s experience of the depressive position in the analytic situation. These experiences include the pleasures and warmth of helping patients to bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences of limitation, incompleteness, repetition and disappointment as a vital part of clinical work. He describes a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is always trying to find and re-find a position from which he can help patients to work with these experiences. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position includes an exploration of the analyst’s participation and resistance to helping patients hold some of the most unsettling parts of their experience. Cooper draws some analogies between elements of theory about aesthetic experience in terms of how we bear new and old experience. He provides an examination of the patient as an artist of sorts and the analyst as a form of psychic boundary artist. Just as the creative act of art involves the capacity to transform pain and ruin into the depressive position, so does the co-creation of how we understand the patient’s mind through the mind of the analyst. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position explores a rich, provocative and long overdue topic relevant to psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamically oriented psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of both psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.




A Disturbance in the Field


Book Description

"This outstanding volume of essays presents an extraordinary synthesis of classical and contemporary concepts and methods of psychoanalysis, with immediate relevance to clinical practice. The author's encyclopedic knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature brings the reader into the exciting center of current clinical psychoanalysis. The extensive clinical illustrations, with detailed evaluation of his participation in the analytic work and particular attention to its imperfections, form the heart of this book. These clinical discussions, more than anything else, highlight the power of the modern focus on countertransference and the analyst's contributions to the psychoanalytic dialogue."ùAnton O. Kris, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School --Book Jacket




From Reverie to Interpretation


Book Description

Bion's identification of reverie as a psychoanalytic concept has drawn attention to a dimension of the analyst's experience with tremendous potential to enrich our interpretive understanding. The courage of these authors in revealing their own process of reverie as transformed into the action of psychoanalysis will inspire and foster further investigation of this fruitful yet heretofore infrequently explored area of psychoanalytic discovery.




A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique


Book Description

This collection of selected papers explores psychoanalytic technique, exemplifying Fred Busch’s singular contribution to this subject, alongside the breadth and depth of his work. Covering key topics such as what is unique about psychoanalysis, interpretation, psychic truth, the role of memory and the importance of the analyst's reveries, this book brings together the author's most important work on this subject for the first time. Taken as a whole, Busch’s work has provided an updated Freudian model for a curative process through psychoanalysis, along with the techniques to accomplish this. Meticulous in providing the theoretical underpinnings for their conclusions, these essays depict how Busch, as a humanist, has continuously championed what in retrospect seems basic to psychoanalytic technique but which has not always been at the forefront of our thinking: the patient’s capacity to hear, understand and emotionally feel interventions. Presenting a deep appreciation for Freudian theory, this book also integrates the work of analysts from Europe and Latin America, which has been prevalent in his recent work. Comprehensive and clear, these works focus on clinical issues, providing numerous examples of work with patients whilst also presenting concise explanations of the theoretical background. In giving new meaning to basic principles of technique and in reviving older methods with a new focus, A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists.




On Freud's ''Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning''


Book Description

This book is a collection of papers by leading contemporary psychoanalysts who comment on the continuing important relevance of Freud's (1911) paper, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. The contributors gathered here represent current European, Latin American, and North American perspectives that elaborate the continuing value of Two Principles for present-day psychoanalytic thinking. Each author examines Freud's paper through a personal lens that is coloured by the psychoanalytic culture from which he or she comes. In each instance, the writers' chapters demonstrate the heuristic value of Two Principles for twenty-first century psychoanalytic theory and technique. A common thread that runs through all the chapters is the view that this brief paper by Freud, which he humbly introduced by stating, "The deficiencies of this short paper, which is preparatory rather than expository ...", is a masterpiece that contains within it the seeds of much of his later writing. The distinction he draws between the pleasure principle and the reality principle are profound and raise questions that still preoccupy analysis today.




Body Words and the Analyst’s Use of Self


Book Description

In this book, it becomes impossible to stand apart from the analytic field as abstract concepts, such as dissociation, intersubjectivity, and unconscious communication, as well as newly coined ones, like "Relational (K)not" and "Body Words," come alive through a vivid unfolding of analytic process. You are invited into the mind of the analyst as she draws from reverie, memory, and affect to inspire offerings that enliven the moment, moving the analytic pair forward in affective freedom and self-definition. Body Words identify the subjective linkages we make to describe experiencing within and between self and other that leads us to know whether we or our patient are delivering the message in a manner that feels real. Each chapter illustrates how Pizer arrived at this important concept and others in a way that is full of rich, experience-near clinical moments that posed significant challenges. Body Words and the Analyst's Use of Self is a rare window that allows readers—new and seasoned clinicians of various theoretical persuasions—to become intimate witnesses to the analyst's subjectivity and the creativity of the analytic partnership.




Bion and Intuition in the Clinical Setting


Book Description

Bion and Intuition in the Clinical Setting focuses on Bion’s investigation of the intuitive approach to clinical data and lays out how Bion’s method encouraged constant effort by the analysts to relinquish its reliance on sensory and conceptual-verbal faculties to make room for intuition. Based on the work of the biannual Bion conference, this book includes contributions from the most eminent voices on Bion’s work. Spanning topics such as the primordial mind, intuitive comprehension and desire, the contributors in this volume illustrate how they incorporate the concept of intuition in their own clinical developments. Each chapter examines different elements of how Bion’s research approaches the difficulties faced by analysts in the approach and discrimination of primitive emotional levels in the patient-analyst communication. This book will be of key interest to analysts and analytic therapists of all schools and is an essential resource for those that follow the work of Bion.