You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What is psychoanalysis? Whereas there was once a time when proponents of "mainstream psychoanalysis" could point to the preeminence of Freud's drive theory and the version of the human condition associated with it–man as seeking pleasure in an erotically tinged universe–contemporary psychoanalysis is a fractured and contentious discipline in which competing theories share little more than the basic concepts of unconscious mental processes, repression, and transference. Taking the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions engendered by psychoanalysis over the past several decades as an encouraging point of departure rather than as evidence of the dissolution of the "psychoanalytic tra...
Mentoring intersects with memoir in this volume, as 31 psychotherapists share the origins of their professional ambitions and, mixing authority with levity, describe their professional odysseys. The psychotherapists include Martin A. Schulman, Jeffrey Seinfeld and Martha Stark.
Ever since Freud put religion on the couch in "The Future of an Illusion," there has been an uneasy peace, with occasional skirmishes, between these two great disciplines of subjectivity. As prime meaning givers, God and the unconscious have vied for supremacy in our thinking about ourselves, especially our thinking about our human nature, our moral stature, and our destiny. Freud, in his bold manner, found projection, fear, and denial to be the wellspring of religion's domination over man. In analogous fashion, those giving primacy to the soul over the unconscious have long dismissed psychoanalysis as mechanistic, reductionistic, and hence inadequate to the examination of spirituality. Soul...
The body, of both the patient and the analyst, is increasingly a focus of attention in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially from a relational perspective. There is a renewed regard for the understanding of embodied experience and sexuality as essential to human vitality. However, most of the existing literature has been written by analysts with no formal training in body-centered work. In this book William Cornell draws on his experience as a body-centered psychotherapist to offer an informed blend of the two traditions, to allow psychoanalysts a deep understanding, in psychoanalytic language, of how to work with the body as an ally. The primary focus of Somatic Experi...
Relational Treatment of Trauma: Stories of loss and hope is the culmination of over 35 years of psychotherapy with children and adults, many of whom have suffered the effects of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. It addresses a gap in the literature on the treatment of trauma and chronic loss that are ubiquitous parts of life in foster care. While "trauma-informed care" has received considerable attention recently, there is little that focuses on the consequences of repeated, unexpected, and unexplained or unexplainable losses of caregivers. Relational Treatment of Trauma explores the ways in which those experiences arise in the therapeutic relationship and shows how to help clients build...
Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self articulates in new ways the essential features and most recent extensions of Paul Wachtel's powerfully integrative theory of cyclical psychodynamics. Wachtel is widely regarded as the leading advocate for integrative thinking in personality theory and the theory and practice of psychotherapy. He is a contributor to cutting edge thought in the realm of relational psychoanalysis and to highlighting the ways in which the relational point of view provides especially fertile ground for integrating psychoanalytic insights with the ideas and methods of other theoretical and therapeutic orientations. In this book, Wachtel extends his integration of psy...
The "Director" controls Ms. B’s life. He flatters her, beguiles her, derides her. His instructions pervade each aspect of her life, including her analytic sessions, during which he suggests promiscuous and dangerous things for Ms. B to say and do, when he suspects that her isolated state is being changed by the therapy. The "Director" is a diabolical foreign body installed in the mind who purports to protect but who keeps Ms. B feeling profoundly ill and alone. The story of Ms. B’s analysis is one of many vivid illustrations presented in this collection of papers by Paul Williams, who shares his lifetime of experience working with severely disturbed patients. As the title suggests, the u...
Can contemporary psychoanalysis tell us anything about sexuality that is new and clinically meaningful? It most certainly can, answers Muriel Dimen in Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, a compelling attempt to revivify Freud's core interest, in "sexual impulses in the ordinary sense of the term." But there is nothing ordinary about Dimen's project. Drawing on contemporary relational theory, feminism, and postmodernism, she takes a sustained, sometimes irreverent, look at assumptions about psychosexuality. For Dimen, the shift from dualism to multiplicity that has reshaped a range of disciplines can also be brought to bear on our thinking about sexuality. She urges us to return to the open-mindednes...
In Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration, Kenneth Frank argues that the gulf between analysis and what he terms "action-oriented" or cognitive-behavioral techniques is anachronistic and has unnecessarily limited the repertoire of analytically oriented clinicians. In point of fact, action-oriented and even cognitive-behavioral techniques may be employed in ways that are consistent with the analytic goal of promoting profound personality change, and so may be profitably incorporated into analytic treatments. Anchoring his discussion in a contemporary two-person model of psychoanalysis, Frank clarifies and extends the shift toward analyst participation that has deve...
In times of stress, trauma and crisis—whether on a personal or global scale—it can be all too easy for us to externalize a larger-than-life figure who can assuage our suffering, a Hero who comes to the fore even as we recede into the background. In taking on our collective burden, however, such an omnipotent Hero can actually undermine us, representing as it does the very same characteristics we fail to note in one another. By granting the Hero to power to set things right, we seem to deny it to ourselves, leaving us temporarily lightened but ultimately helpless. In response, Sue Grand deconstructs the myth of the Heroic and argues for the "ordinary hero," a more realistic figure with th...