Psychoanalysts Talk


Book Description

Hunter presents an analytic session she conducted with a borderline patient to 11 leading psychoanalysts for their comments, then continues on to delve into the individual histories of each of these clinicians, exploring the relationship between the clinical practice and theoretical foundations of p




Money Talks


Book Description

Sometimes referred to as "the last taboo," money has remained something of a secret within psychoanalysis. Ironically, while it is an ingredient in almost every encounter between analyst and patient, the analyst's personal feelings about money are rarely discussed openly or in any great depth. So what is it about money that relegates it to the background, both on the couch and off? In Money Talks, Brenda Berger, Stephanie Newman, and their excellent cast of contributors address this and other questions surrounding the tender topic of money, how we talk about it, and how it talks to us. Its multiple meanings are explored in the contexts of patients and analysts and the ways in which they relate, in the training and practice of the analysts themselves, as well as the psychological and cultural consequences of having too much or too little in both flush and tight economic times. Throughout, a clinical sensibility is brought to bear on money's softly spoken place in therapy and life. Money Talks paves the way for an open discourse into the psychology of money and its pervasive influence on the psyche of both patient and analyst.




Talking about Evil


Book Description

How can we talk about evil? How can we make sense of its presence all around us? How can we come to terms with the sad fact that our involvement in doing or enabling evil is an interminable aspect of our lives in the world? This book is an attempt to engage these questions in a new way. Written from within the complicated reality of Israel, the contributors to this book forge a collective effort to think about evil from multiple perspectives. A necessary effort, since psychoanalysis has been slow to account for the existence of evil, while philosophy and the social sciences have tended to neglect its psychological aspects. The essays collected here join to form a wide canvas on which a portrait of evil gradually emerges, from the Bible, through the enlightenment to the Holocaust; from Kant, through Freud, Klein, Bromberg and Stein to Arendt, Agamben and Bauman; using literature, history, cinema, social theory and psychoanalysis. Talking about Evil opens up a much needed space for thinking, in itself an antidote to evil. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars and students of philosophy, social theory and the humanities.




Can the Monster Speak?


Book Description

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a "mentally ill person" suffering from "gender dysphoria," Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's "Report to an Academy," in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. Speaking from his own "mutant" cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era--an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.




The Analyst’s Vulnerability


Book Description

This book closely examines the analyst’s early experiences and character traits, demonstrating the impact they have on theory building and technique. Arguing that choice of theory and interventions are unconsciously shaped by clinicians’ early experiences, this book argues for greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and open dialogue as a corrective. Linking the analyst’s early childhood experiences to ongoing vulnerabilities reflected in theory and practice, this book favors an approach that focuses on feedback and confrontation, as well as empathic understanding and acceptance. Essential to this task, and a thesis that runs through the book, are analysts’ motivations for doing treatment and the gratifications they naturally seek. Maroda asserts that an enduring blind spot arises from clinicians’ ongoing need to deny what they are personally seeking from the analytic process, including the need to rescue and be rescued. She equally seeks to remove the guilt and shame associated with these motivations, encouraging clinicians to embrace both their own humanity and their patients’, rather than seeking to transcend them. Providing a new perspective on how analysts work, this book explores the topics of enactment, mirror neurons, and therapeutic action through the lens of the analyst’s early experiences and resulting personality structure. Maroda confronts the analyst’s tendencies to favor harmony over conflict, passivity over active interventions, and viewing the patient as an infant rather than an adult. Exploring heretofore unexamined issues of the psychology of the analyst or therapist offers the opportunity to generate new theoretical and technical perspectives. As such, this book will be invaluable to experienced psychodynamic therapists and students and trainees alike, as well as teachers of theory and practice.




Affect in Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Drawing on the writings of Freud, Fairbairn, Klein, Sullivan, and Winnicott, Spezzano offers a radical redefinition of the analytic process as the intersubjective elaboration and regulation of affect. The plight of analytic patients, he holds, is imprisonment within crude fantasy elaborations of developmentally significant feeling states. Analytic treatment fosters the patient's capacity to keep alive in consciousness, and hence reflect on, these previously warded-off affective states; it thereby provides a second chance to achieve competence in using feeling states to understand the self within its relational landscape.




Psychoanalytic Conversations


Book Description

In this stunning addition to what has of late become a distinct genre of psychoanalytic literature, Peter Rudnytsky presents 10 substantive and provocative interviews with leading analysts, with theorists from allied fields, and with influential Freud critics. In conversations that Rudnytsky succeeds in making psychoanalytic both in form and in content, he guides his interlocutors to unforeseen reflections on the events and forces that shaped their lives, and on the personal and intellectual grounds of their beliefs and practices. Rudnytsky, a ranking academic scholar of psychoanalysis and the humanities, approaches his subjects with not only a highly attuned third ear but also a remarkable grasp of theoretical, historical, and clinical issues. When his interviewees turn from autobiographical narratives to matters of theory and clinical practice, Rudnytsky is clear about his own intellectual allegiance to the Independent tradition of object relations theory and his admiration for John Bowlby and attachment theory. His willingness to set forth his own point of view and occasionally to press a line of questioning infuses his exchanges with an energy, even passion, heretofore unknown in the analytic interview literature. Rudnytsky consistently emerges as a partner, even an analytic partner, in dialogues that meld discovery with self-discovery. To be sure, Psychoanalytic Conversations will find many clinical and scholarly readers among those who relish a good engrossing read. But it will have special appeal to students of analysis who share Rudnytsky's belief that if psychoanalysis is to remain vital in the new century, "it can only be by expanding its horizons and learning from those who have taken it to task."




The Talking Cure


Book Description

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Finding Culture in Talk


Book Description

This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.




Mindbrain, Psychoanalytic Institutions, and Psychoanalysts


Book Description

In this book, the author criticises the isolationism of traditional psychoanalytic associations, compared to those of other branches of psychology, and their suspicion of neuroscience. Today, affective neuroscience is investigating the unconscious affects, which psychoanalysis has always done with different methods and a different language. The author points out how Freud's energy-drive theory, although contradicted by scientific progress, has continued to characterise, a religiousness underpinning the spirit of psychoanalytic institutions: the icon of Freud. This spirit is accompanied by confusion between different psychoanalytic theories which are often incompatible with one another. The author blames the poor social image that psychoanalysis has earned in the past few years on this confusion of theories and haughty withdrawal into a single presumed orthodoxy. A former President of the IPA, Otto Kernberg, has even predicted the suicide of psychoanalytic institutions. The author has addressed this chaos of theories throughout his life, integrating work on psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive science, attachment theory and now neuroscience.