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In recent years, various tributaries of psychoanalytic and developmental theory have flowed into our dawning understanding of the role of early sensory and affective experiences in the construction of our personal worlds. In Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience, Marilyn Charles shows how such primary experiences coalesce into patterns, those essential units of meaning that capture the unique subjectivity of each individual. Frequently "known" by their prosody or affective melody, patterns come to have profound meanings that we utilize in constructing basic notions of self and other. Through pattern, Charles holds, we approach elusive meanings through dimensions of shape, contour, and affe...
An important task facing all clinicians, and especially challenging for younger, less experienced clinicians, is to come to know oneself sufficiently to be able to register the patient's experience in useful and progressively deeper ways. In an effort to aid younger clinicians in the daily struggle to "know thyself," Marilyn Charles turns to key ideas that have facilitated her own clinical work with difficult patients. Concepts such as "container" and "contained," transitional space, projective identification, and transference/countertransference are introduced not as academic ideas, but as aspects of the therapeutic environment that elicit greater creativity and vitality on the therapist's part. In Charles's skillful hands, the basic ideas of Klein, Winnicott, and Bion become newly comprehensible without losing depth and richness; they come to life in the fulcrum of daily clinical encounter.
Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan by Marilyn Charles takes concepts from the psychoanalytic literature and translates them into user-friendly language. Charles focuses on clinical work with more severely disturbed patients, for whom trauma has impeded their psychosocial development, in order to show mental health professionals how they might use different concepts in their own work.
This book provides a clear introduction to the main contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical perspectives. Psychoanalysis is often thought of as an obscure and outdated method, and yet those familiar with it recognize the profound value of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Part of the obscurity may come from psychoanalytic language itself, which is often impenetrable. The complexity of the subject matter has lent itself to a confusion of tongues and yet, at base, psychoanalysis remains an earnest attempt to make sense of and ease human distress. Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis seeks to make this rich wealth of information more accessible to clinicians and trainees. Psychoanalyt...
Psychoanalysis offers many concepts that are extremely useful clinically but not always accessible in the original. In Psychoanalysis and Literature:The Stories We Live, Marilyn Charles pairs case vignettes with examples from literature to highlight the essential human struggles that play out in the consulting room. This pairing depathologizes those struggles and offers a conceptual framework that can help the clinician facilitate these journeys of discovery. Describing first how literature affords an opportunity for vicarious engagement with struggles endemic to the human condition, she then focuses on trauma, dreams, and ‘cultural collisions’turning more explicitly to the developmental challenges of identity, relatedness, aging, and generativity. Psychoanalysis and Literature is accessible, relevant, and timely.
Perspectives on Creativity: Volume 2 extends the work of the first volume and examines creativity from multiple viewpoints. The volume contains contributions from writers, therapists, artists, and scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology and French. The first section addresses the nature of creativity and highlights the role of self-discipline in the creative process. The second section asks what we can learn from studying artists and presents qualitative, phenomenological, quantitative, and archival research on both individuals and groups of artists. The third section discusses the use of creativity within the therapeutic setting, as well as the particular therapeutic needs of creative individuals. The final section of the book presents research exploring creative cognition and its relationship to mood and perception. What makes this book unique is the interdisciplinary consideration of the topic of creativity, the inclusion of works ranging from case studies to theoretical essays, making it appealing to individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds.
One of the challenges in psychoanalytic work is to find ways to enliven the space when working with individuals whose thinking is highly constrained and who have little capacity for play. This incapacity often signals a split between valued and devalued aspects of self. In cases such as these, self-protection becomes paramount and may profoundly impede growth, as whatever is not known is perceived as dangerous, rather than being a challenge that invites further development. For the therapist who must create aliveness within the consulting room, we are caught by the very real threat that this aliveness poses to the defensive structures on which the patient's equilibrium rests. Movement thus can be quite precarious. In this volume, Marilyn Charles considers how notions of "play" and "myth", as brought into the literature by Winnicott and Bion, can help to provide an interim space in which impossible realities can be constructed at a safe enough reserve that we can more actively consider them and thereby create possibilities, rather than foreclosing on them.
The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education presents various theories of play and demonstrates how it serves communicative, developmental, and relational functions, highlighting the importance and development of the capacity to play in terms useful to early childhood educators. The book explicitly links trauma, development, and interventions in the early childhood classroom specifically for teachers of young children, offering accessible information that can help teachers better understand the meanings of children’s expressive acts. Contributors from education, psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology explore techniques of play, how cultural influences affect how children play, the effect of trauma on play, factors that interfere with the ability to play, and how to apply these ideas in the classroom. They also discuss the relevance of ideas about playfulness for teachers and other professionals. The Imprtance of Play in Early Childhood Education will be of great interest to teachers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists as well as play therapists and developmental psychologists.
"Missing Pieces" is a story about a 33- year old woman named Charlene Wilson from Macon Georgia. Charlene now lives in Atlanta and is an up and coming Attorney with a prestigious Law Firm. Charlene is a beautiful, brilliant, self made woman and has had to make some tough life altering decisions in the past. None of those other decisions can hold a candle to the decisions that she has to make once she meets and falls in love with Jonathan Walker, a 35- year old Recording Label Executive that she meets at a local Atlanta hotspot. When Charlene and her best friend, Sharon, went to the club one night she was not looking for a man, but she found the love of her life, Jonathan Walker. Sharon had b...
“This book is a revelation. . . . Casillo’s Marilyn made me feel a level of identification and understanding that was devastating and thrilling.” —Mary Gaitskill, national bestselling author of Bad Behavior and The Mare Marilyn Monroe: her beauty still captivates, her love life still fascinates, and her story still dominates popular culture. Now, drawing on years of research and dozens of new interviews, this biography cuts through decades of lies and secrets and introduces you to the Marilyn Monroe you always wanted to know: a living, breathing, complex woman, bewitching and maddening, brilliant yet flawed. Explored through the lens of new interviews and meticulous research, Marilyn...