The Interpersonal Unconscious


Book Description

This book presents the unconscious mind as the product of interpersonal interaction—in its formation and in its growth and development across the life cycle. Many clinical examples illustrate the theory of the interpersonal unconscious and its application to individual psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, couple and family therapy, and child therapy, and to teaching mental health professionals nationally and internationally.




The Neuropsychology of the Unconscious: Integrating Brain and Mind in Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)


Book Description

A scientific take on the still-central therapeutic concept of “the unconscious.” More than one hundred years after Freud began publishing some of his seminal theories, the concept of the unconscious still occupies a central position in many theoretical frameworks and clinical approaches. When trying to understand clients’ internal and interpersonal struggles it is almost inconceivable not to look for unconscious motivation, conflicts, and relational patterns. Clinicians also consider it a breakthrough to recognize how our own unconscious patterns have interacted with those of our clients. Although clinicians use concepts such as the unconscious and dissociation, in actuality many do not take into account the newly emerging neuropsychological attributes of nonconscious processes. As a result, assumptions and lack of clarity overtake information that can become central in our clinical work. This revolutionary book presents a new model of the unconscious, one that is continuing to emerge from the integration of neuropsychological research with clinical experience. Drawing from clinical observations of specific therapeutic cases, affect theory, research into cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychological findings, the book presents an expanded picture of nonconscious processes. The model moves from a focus on dissociated affects, behaviors, memories, and the fantasies that are unconsciously created, to viewing unconscious as giving expression to whole patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving, patterns that are so integrated and entrenched as to make them our personality traits. Topics covered include: the centrality of subcortical regions, automaticity, repetition, and biased memory systems; role of the amygdala and its sensitivity to fears in shaping and coloring unconscious self-systems; self-narratives; therapeutic enactments; therapeutic resistance; defensive systems and narcissism; therapeutic approaches designed to utilize some of the new understandings regarding unconscious processes and their interaction with higher level conscious ones embedded in the prefrontal cortex.




The Development of the Unconscious Mind (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)


Book Description

An exploration of how the unconscious is formed and functions by one of our most renowned experts on emotion and the brain. This book traces the evolution of the concept of the unconscious from an intangible, metapsychological abstraction to a psychoneurobiological function of a tangible brain. An integration of current findings in the neurobiological and developmental sciences offers a deeper understanding of the dynamic mechanisms of the unconscious. The relevance of this reformulation to clinical work is a central theme of Schore's other new book, Right Brain Psychotherapy.




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.




The Unconscious


Book Description

This book explores the unconscious in psychoanalysisusing cross-disciplinary input from the cultural, social and linguistic perspectives. This book is the first contemporary collection applying the various perspectives from within the psychoanalytic discipline. It covers the unconscious from three main perspectives: the metaphysical, including links with quantum mechanics and Jung's thought; the socio-relational, drawing on ideas from politics, inter-generational trauma and the interpersonal; and the linguistic, drawing on notions of the social construct of language and hermeneutics. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, theorists have wrestled with the ubiquitousness and diverse nature of the unconscious. This collection is an account of the contemporary psychoanalytic struggle to understand and work with this quintessential, defining, and foundational object of psychoanalysis. This book is primarily of interest to practicing clinicians and trainees. It is also of significant interest to any academic professionals and students who adapt psychoanalytic thought in their studies in the humanities, including literature, philosophy, and the social sciences.




The Social Unconscious


Book Description

The social unconscious and its manifestations in group analysis are the focus of this important new book of Earl Hopper's selected papers. Drawing on sociology, psychoanalysis and group analysis, he argues that groups and their participants are constrained unconsciously by social, cultural and political facts and forces.




The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Group Psychotherapy and Group Process


Book Description

Might it be possible that neuroscience, in particular interpersonal neurobiology, can illuminate the unique ways that group processes collaborate with and enhance the brain's natural developmental and repairing processes? This book brings together the work of twelve contemporary group therapists and practitioners who are exploring this possibility through applying the principles of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) to a variety of approaches to group therapy and experiential learning groups. IPNB's focus on how human beings shape one another's brains throughout the life span makes it a natural fit for those of us who are involved in bringing people together so that, through their interactions, they may better understand and transform their own deeper mind and relational patterns. Group is a unique context that can trigger, amplify, contain, and provide resonance for a broad range of human experiences, creating robust conditions for changing the brain.




Toward a Social Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Pierre Bourdieu, and Marie Langer are among those activists, clinicians, and academics who have called for a social psychoanalysis. For over thirty years, Lynne Layton has heeded this call and produced a body of work that examines unconscious process as it operates both in the social world and in the clinic. In this volume of Layton’s most important papers, she expands on earlier theorists’ ideas of social character by exploring how dominant ideologies and culturally mandated, hierarchical identity prescriptions are lived in individual and relational conflict. Through clinical and cultural examples, Layton describes how enactments of what she calls ‘normative unconscious processes’ reinforce cultural inequalities of race, sex, gender, and class both inside and outside the clinic, and at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Clinicians, academics, and activists alike will find here a deeper understanding of the power of unconscious process, and are called on to envision and enact a progressive future in which vulnerability and interdependency are honored and systemic inequalities dismantled.




The Unconscious


Book Description

In The Unconscious: A Contemporary Introduction, Joseph Newirth presents a critical and comparative analysis of the unconscious and its evolution from a positivist to a postmodern frame of reference. This book presents five theories, each of which offers different and important conceptualizations of the unconscious, and each of which contains a rich palate of ideas through which to approach clinical work. These psychoanalytic theories are thought of as spokes on a wheel emanating from the center of Freud’s concept of the unconscious. In addition to presenting Freud’s development of the unconscious, Newirth includes discussions of interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis; developmental approaches to the unconscious, including Kohut, Winnicott, and Fonagy; Kleinian approaches to the unconscious; and linguistic theories of the unconscious including Matte Blanco and Lacan. The last chapter illustrates the use of contemporary psychoanalytic concepts in the clinical work with a contemporary patient. The book encourages a comparative view of psychoanalytic theory and technique and aims to move to a more useful, generalizable concept of the unconscious for the contemporary patient. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, and anyone interested in the evolution and application of the unconscious as a concept.




The Unconscious Life of Organizations


Book Description

This book offers a contemporary psychodynamic view of organizational life. Michael Diamond stresses the unconscious dimensions of hierarchic and other work relationships in organizations. From these relationships, he argues, come not only organizational cultures but also organizational identities. The book transcends the common technical rational approach to organizational behavior by isolating and then analyzing the nonrational side of organizational experience. Diamond illustrates how different characteristics of organizational life emerge from the dynamics of shared and projected emotions between leaders and followers, managers and subordinates, and among workers. The author suggests that these complementary unconscious feelings anchor the definition of organizational membership in interpersonal relationships at work. The result is, what he calls, the emotionally grounded structure of organizations--the organizational identity. What distinguishes this book from other psychodynamic approaches to organizations are the following: (1) an up-to-date synthesis of object relations, self psychology, and interpersonal psychoanalysis based primarily but not exclusively on the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut and Harry Stack Sullivan; (2) a discussion of psychoanalytic organization theory and the application of psychodynamic concepts in organizational behavior; (3) a psychodynamic critique of organizational culture, the structure of values and rituals at work, and the introduction of the structure of organizational emotions, what the author calls organizational identity; (4) a psychoanalytic explanation and typology of regressive behavior in work groups; (5) a discussion and illustration of the role of language and communication in organizational consulting; and (6) a variety of case studies drawn from over ten years of organizational research and consulting. Finally, this book offers the organizational theorist and consultant a variety of psychodynamic tools to apply in understanding and positively changing organizations. This book will be of interest to organizational development consultants, human resource professionals, organizational theorists and researchers, organizational psychologists and psychodynamically oriented social and behavioral scientists, and psychologically informed managers and executives.