#1 Tea with Winnicott
Donald Winnicott is currently the most popular author in contemporary psychoanalysis. His writings are cited in bibliographies even more frequently than those of Sigmund Freud. And yet how many mental health professionals have actually managed to read and digest the nearly twenty published volumes of Winnicott’s books, chapters, essays, reviews, and letters?
Book preview: Tea with Winnicott
#2 Karl Abraham: Life and Work, a Biography
Abraham was the first psychoanalyst in Germany, where he brought about a great flourishing of psychoanalysis. His clinical-theoretical contributions quickly became classics that have powerfully influenced the development of psychoanalytic theory. He was the first to develop a psychoanalytic theory of depression, several years before the publication of Freud’s 'Mourning and Melancholia'. Abraham was both supervisor and analyst to Melanie Klein, on whose theoretical work he had a profound influence.
Book preview: Karl Abraham: Life and Work, a Biography
#3 Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves
Beltsiou brings together a diverse group of contributors, including Ghislaine Boulanger, Eva Hoffman and Dori Laub, to discuss their own identity as immigrants and how it informs their work. They explore the complexity and the contradictions of the immigration process - the tension between loss and hope, future and past, the idealization and denigration of the other/stranger, and what it takes to tolerate the existential dialectic between separateness and belonging.
Book preview: Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves
#4 Racist States of Mind: Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern
In a racist state of mind grief and mourning for such losses are replaced by manic omnipotent states which aim to triumph over feelings of powerlessness through an inflated sense of self that claims superiority over others who are made to become the bearers of inadequacy or inferiority. The compensatory excitements of hatred, cruelty, and violence can lead to a collapse of a triangular mental space that damages the capacity for curiosity and concern for others. The tragic consequences of this psychic assault is a rupture at the very core of identity and the self which aims to thwart the desires and emotional freedom of others.
#5 The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working with Trauma
The volume contains articles on the history of concepts of trauma and dissociation, the linkage of complex trauma and dissociative problems in living, different modalities of treatment and theoretical approaches based on a new understanding of this linkage, as well as reviews of important new research. Overarching all of these is a clear explanation of how pathological dissociation is caused by trauma, and how this affects psychological organization -- concepts which have often been largely misunderstood.
#6 The Logics of Madness: On Infantile and Delusional Transference
In this book, Salomon Resnik describes his psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients and the logic that underlies their often-delusional constructions. He explores how the concept of psychosis has evolved over time and shows how the delusional world, with its proto-symbolic equations, may amount to a philosophy of life. Clinical examples taken from his own clinical work, both in individual psychoanalysis and in group therapy with schizophrenic patients, illustrate his theses.
#7 Treating People with Psychosis in Institutions: A Psychoanalytic Perspective
This book brings together the histories of a number of psychoanalytically-informed hospitals, and provides a synthesis of the theoretical underpinnings in the institutional practice of each. Of particular interest is how psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-trained staff working in institutions apply their theoretical understanding, and in what ways the psychoanalytic technique has been modified or adapted to the treatment of individual patients with psychosis and to the workings of an institution in general.
#8 What are Perversions?: Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis
This book explores what we mean when we use the term “perversion.” Are we dealing with a sexological classification, a mental disturbance, an ethical deviation, a hedonistic style, or an historical-cultural artifact?
The book retraces some of the fundamental stages in the field of psychoanalytic thought—from Freud to Masud Khan, Stoller, and Lacan—and proposes an original approach: that “paraphilias” today are taken as an ethical failure of the sexual relationship with the other. The perversions signal a specific relationship with the other, who is treated not simply as a sexual object, but someone whose subjectivity is ably exploited precisely in order to get a perverse pleasure.
Book preview: What are Perversions?: Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis
#9 Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta: The Therapy Process from Inside Out and Outside In
This book looks at the therapy process from both the inside out and the outside in. Over many years of sitting with patients and supervisees, Dr John Espy found that the themes represented here kept emerging in one form or another: Are we winsome or loathsome? Are we self-knowing or self-concealing? Psychoanalysis is a psychic pilgrimage that reveals the depths of both our capacity to love and our depravity. Life is not clean and is fraught with temptations to undermine those behaviours which are in our own best interests, the greatest perhaps being those deceptions about what we reveal of who we really are.
#10 Mentalizing in Arts Therapies
This book describes the use of therapeutic art, music, and dance interventions against a background of mentalization, thus forging a link between arts therapies and mentalization-based treatment.
Book preview: Mentalizing in Arts Therapies
#11 From the Couch to the Circle: Group-Analytic Psychotherapy in Practice
This book provides a manual of practice for therapists’ use that includes detailed descriptions of groups at work; accounts of therapists’ own experience and the issues they face in themselves and in their groups. The book is devoted to the Group-Analytic model but the other principally psychodynamic models of group therapy - the Tavistock, Interpersonal, Psychodynamic, Modern Analytic and Structural/Systemic models - are brought into a comparative discussion and drawn upon to create an integrated and coherent approach.
#12 Applications of Group Analysis for the Twenty-First Century
The Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) celebrates forty years from its foundation with the publication of these two volumes. The first volume aims to publicise the foundations of group analysis (with the earliest papers of Foulkes) as well as the most influential theoretical contributions by pillars of modern group analysis, such as Pines, Brown, and Hopper. The reader will be able to see the development of Group Analysis, form an opinion about the trajectory that it follows, and judge which way the tradition of openness and creative integration of diverse theoretical contributions will lead in the twenty-first century.
#13 The Snake in the Clinic: Psychotherapy's Role in Medicine and Healing
The chosen emblem of Western scientific medicine is the rod and serpent of the Greek god Asklepios. Its symbolism represents the importance of raising to consciousness those dark chthonic energies that are essential to 'deep' and lasting health. The Snake in the Clinic offers a critical re-evaluation of the role of psychotherapy in medicine. It questions the value of quantifiable evidence-based practice; pointing out that the primary aim of this approach is to reduce symptoms rather than to 'heal' or 'make whole'. Instead the author proposes that illness is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.
#14 The Work of Psychoanalysis: Sexuality, Time and the Psychoanalytic Mind
Psychoanalysts working in clinical situations are constantly confronted with the struggle between conservative forces and those which enable something new to develop. Continuity and change, stasis and transformation, are the major themes discussed in The Work of Psychoanalysis, and address the fundamental question: How does and how can change take place?
#15 Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads: Reformation, Change and the Future of Psychoanalytic Training
Training in psychoanalysis is a long and demanding process. However, the quality of education available is hugely variable across the world. The structure of psychoanalytic education, centered on the hierarchical "training analysis" system, reflected a concerted effort to maintain a stable and high quality educational process. However, throughout time this system has become a major source of institutional contradictions that affect the training of candidates, the scientific developments within psychoanalysis, and the nexus of psychoanalytic theory and practice with the surrounding scientific, social and cultural world. Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads examines the ways in which group processes, the hierarchal culture in institutes, the influence of individual personalities, the lack of research and the faults in supervision can all stifle creativity and hinder candidates’ progress. In this compelling work, Otto Kernberg sets out clear suggestions for how these issues can be addressed, and how he sees the future of psychoanalytic education across all psychoanalytic settings and schools of thought.
Book preview: Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads: Reformation, Change and the Future of Psychoanalytic Training
#16 From Reverie to Interpretation: Transforming Thought into the Action of Psychoanalysis
The chapters in this book originated in papers presented at the 2014 International Evolving British Object Relations (EBOR) Conference titled 'From Reverie to Interpretation: Transforming thought into the action of psychoanalysis'. Sponsored by the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NPSI) in Seattle since 2004, many distinguished psychoanalysts have presented at EBOR, including Ronald Britton, James Grotstein, Alessandra Lemma, Robert Oelsner, John Steiner, and Meltzer scholar and artist Meg Harris Williams. The EBOR conferences have functioned as incubators for newly emerging topics in British object relations theory. This book marks the first time that it has been possible to publish the collected papers from one of these valuable conferences, making the work and thought of its contributors available to the wider psychoanalytic community.
This collection of papers focuses on the dialectic between reverie and psychoanalytic interpretation. The clinical concepts of reverie and interpretation are investigated at the theoretical level, giving particular emphasis to the links between them.
Bion’s identification of reverie as a psychoanalytic concept has drawn our attention to a dimension of the analyst’s experience with tremendous potential to enrich the interpretive toolbox. It is our hope that the courage of these authors in revealing their own process of reverie as transformed into the action of psychoanalysis will inspire and foster further investigation of this fruitful yet heretofore infrequently explored area of psychoanalytic discovery.
#17 The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan
Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology—as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Žižek—there remain remarkably few systematic accounts of the role of Marx in Lacan’s work.
A major, comprehensive study of the connection between their work, The Capitalist Unconscious resituates Marx in the broader context of Lacan’s teaching and insists on the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm dialectical and materialist thought. Lacan’s unorthodox reading of Marx refigured such crucial concepts as alienation, jouissance and the Freudian ‘labour theory of the unconscious’. Tracing these developments, Tomšič maintains that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought; his book shows how to follow this movement through to some of its most important conclusions.
A major, comprehensive study of the connection between their work, The Capitalist Unconscious resituates Marx in the broader context of Lacan’s teaching and insists on the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm dialectical and materialist thought. Lacan’s unorthodox reading of Marx refigured such crucial concepts as alienation, jouissance and the Freudian ‘labour theory of the unconscious’. Tracing these developments, Tomšič maintains that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought; his book shows how to follow this movement through to some of its most important conclusions.
# 18 The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze’s work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure."
Book preview: The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis
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