Psychoanalysis on the Move


Book Description

Psychoanalysis on the Move: The Work of Joseph Sandler 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.




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.




Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness


Book Description

Edgar A. Levenson is a key figure in the development of interpersonal psychoanalysis whose ideas remain influential. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness builds on his previously published work in his key areas of expertise such as interpersonal psychoanalysis, transference and countertransference, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and sets his ideas into contemporary context. Combining a selection of Levenson’s own writings with extensive discussion and analysis of his work by Stern and Slomowitz, it provides an invaluable guide to how his most recent, mature ideas may be understood and applied by contemporary psychoanalysts in their own practice. This book explores how the rational algorithm of psychoanalytic engagement and the mysterious flows of consciousness interact; this has traditionally been thought of as dialectical, an unresolvable duality in psychoanalytic practice. Analysts move back and forth between the two perspectives, rather like a gestalt leap, finding themselves listening either to the "interpersonal" or to the "intrapsychic" in what feels like a self-state leap. But the interpersonal is not in dialectical opposition to the intrapsychic; rather a manifestation of it, a subset. The chapters pick up from the themes explored in The Purloined Self, shifting the emphasis from the interpersonal field to the exploration of the enigma of the flow of consciousness that underlies the therapeutic process. This is not the Freudian Unconscious nor the consciousness of awareness, but the mysterious Jamesian matrix of being. Any effort at influence provokes resistance and refusal by the patient. Permitted a "working space," the patient ultimately cures herself. How that happens is a mystery wrapped up in the greater mystery of unconscious process, which in turn is wrapped into the greatest philosophical and neurological enigma of all—the nature of consciousness. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness will be highly engaging and readable; Levenson’s witty essayist style and original perspective will make it greatly appealing and accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as practitioners in these fields.




Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life


Book Description

Is psychoanalysis a narrative of self-knowledge, or a movement of lived time and the body? Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life examines the relationship between therapy and the time of life, presenting an original and thought-provoking re-reading of psychoanalysis in relation to questions of lived time. Jan Campbell investigates the early work of Freud, Janet, Breuer and Ferenczi, linking their ideas to the philosophy of Bergson. The link between psychoanalysis and the question of time connects these early debates with current issues that are central to our global society. Questions considered include: • is the unconscious based on representation or affect? • is the Oedipal Complex hysterical? • how is therapy related to the time of our life? • what is the role of hypnosis, in relation to psychoanalytic theory and transference? • Freud conceptualised the unconscious as timeless space, but what would it mean to think of the unconscious as the very essence of psychic bodily time? This book draws on the fields of traditional psychoanalysis, philosophy, neuroscience, and trauma studies providing a valuable new perspective on familiar concepts such as identity and consciousness. It will be of interest to students across the humanities and social sciences, and practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.




Introduction to Psychoanalysis


Book Description

The need for a concise, comprehensive guide to the main principles and practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has become pressing as the psychoanalytic movement has expanded and diversified. An introductory text suitable for a wide range of courses, this lively, widely referenced account presents the core features of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice in an easily assimilated, but thought-provoking manner. Illustrated throughout with clinical examples, it provides an up-to-date source of reference for a wider range of mental health professionals as well as those training in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy or counselling.




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.




What is Effective in Psychoanalytic Therapy


Book Description

This book begins with Strachey's statement of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis representing the classical psychoanalytical technique that prevailed in the 1930s. Then Meissner takes up the shifts in thinking that have subsequently evolved. Today we hold a more relational concept of the therapeutic action based on a developmentally rooted, parent-child model. This places greater emphasis on the vicissitudes of relational involvements than on specific interpretive techniques. Emphasis is given to collaborative efforts between patient and analyist as central to the working of the analytic process. Factors such as empathy, interpretation and positive and negative transference to the therapeutic alliance are explored.




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.