#1 Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality
Does psychoanalysis have anything to say about the emotional landscapes
of class? How can class-inclusive psychoanalytic projects, historic and
contemporary, inform theory and practice? Class and psychoanalysis are
unusual bedfellows, but this original book shows how much is to be
gained by exploring their relationship. Joanna Ryan provides a
comprehensively researched and challenging overview in which she holds
the tension between the radical and progressive potential of
psychoanalysis, in its unique understandings of the unconscious, with
its status as a mainly expensive and exclusive profession.
#2 The Fictions of Dreams: Dreams, Literature, and Writing
The Fictions of Dreams
explores the close connection between the narrative nature of dreams
and the narrative devices employed in literature and creative writing.
The book is unique in its confluential approach, linking the fictions of
dreams with literary fictions and case studies which illuminate the
centrality of dream analysis in therapeutic work.
Dreams and literature are closely related. The dream’s essence lies in
its narrative facility. Dreams are autobiographical fictions which tell
the story of the dreamer’s life history, her insertion in
transgenerational family themes, and her ethnic and cultural identity.
In that sense dreams are psycho-social depositories and makers, not
unlike what can be found in world literature: the recreation of
interiority and historicity of a given time period.
The interconnected worlds of dreaming and fiction writing tend to employ
the same narrative devices: the memorial mode (Patrick Modiano),
multi-temporality (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), poeisis (Kafka, Ted Hughes,
Colm Toibin), historical consciousness (Irene Némirowsky), and ‘infinite
connectivity’ (Patrick White).
The poetry of dreams and world literature also share the exposition of
human motivation, as can be seen in the complex interiority of dreams
and fictional characters. Both dreams and literature bring to the fore
that which is hidden but seeks expression, such as the conundrum of
fear, the propensity for destructiveness, the search for love, the
search for knowledge, the search for beauty, the ‘will to power’, and
the search for the spiritual.
The theories employed are psychoanalysis, literary criticism, quantum
physics, chaos theory, sleep research, the study of historical
consciousness, theories of the ancient dreamers (Artemidorus,
Aristotle), and theories of the social nature of dreaming. Case studies,
actual dream fictions, will be used to illuminate the dream theories
presented.
#3 Group Analysis in the Land of Milk and Honey
Group Analysis in the Land of Milk and Honey
is a collection of beautifully written clinical essays by group
analysts in Israel - a society which suffers from chronic war and
violence. Israeli group conductors share their experience and their
special skills concerning the reflection of terror and existential
anxiety in their group-analytic therapy groups.
The topics range from the influence of society on the individual, the
nature of the "group", combined individual and group therapy, groups
with mentally ill and elderly patients, and coping with aggressive
patients and the self-destructive processes that are ubiquitous in a
society threatened with extinction. These group analysts discuss
breaking of boundaries, "democracy in action", leadership, paternalism
and fanatic identifications. The special place of Shoah survivors and of
Arab and Jewish conflict make this book unique. The book conveys both
the trauma and the creativity of Israeli society.
#4 Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice
In this book, Lewis Kirshner explains and illustrates the concept of
intersubjectivity and its application to psychoanalysis. By drawing on
findings from neuroscience, infant research, cognitive psychology,
Lacanian theory, and philosophy, Kirshner argues that the analytic
relationship is best understood as a dialogic exchange of signs between
two subjects—a semiotic process. Both subjects bring to the interaction a
history and a set of unconscious desires, which inflect their
responses. In order to work most effectively with patients, analysts
must attend closely to the actual content of the exchange, rather than
focusing on imagined contents of the patient's mind. The current
situation revives a history that is shaped by the analyst's
participation.
#5 A Beholder's Share: Essays on Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Imagination
A Beholder's Share demonstrates how a sense of reality is evoked in the
unpredictable space between imagination and adaptation. The world calls
forth something in each of us—a beholder’s share—which in turn calls
forth something in the world. Though usually viewed as opposites,
imagination and reality make uneasy but necessary bedfellows.
Part I of
A Beholder’s Share
shows how fantasy generates novelty by creating versions of what is
already known, while imagination allows what seems familiar to be seen
afresh. Goldman’s essays offer unexpected takes on common clinical
encounters: clashes of belief, the search for generational dialogue, the
awkward discomfort of feeling like a fake, the problem of how and when
to end analysis, the strains of working with psychotic anxieties.
Part II, ‘Winnicott’s Living Legacy,’ illuminates Winnicott’s
preoccupation with difficulties inherent in contact with reality. These
chapters bring to life Winnicott’s personal struggle with an area of
experience his own two analyses failed to touch, the tangled
relationship with Masud Khan, his recognition of dissociation as "a
queer kind of truth," and how Romantic poets shaped Winnicott’s view of
what is felt as real.
#6 Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter
Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter
considers psychoanalysis from a fresh perspective: the therapist’s
mortality—in at least two senses of the word. That the therapist can
die, and is also fallible, can be seen as necessary or even defining
components of the therapeutic process. At every moment, the analyst's
vulnerability and human limitations underlie the work, something rarely
openly acknowledged.
Freud’s central insights continue to guide the range of all talking
therapies, but they do so somewhat in the manner of a smudged ancestral
map. That blur, or degree of confusion, invites new ways of reading.
Ellen Pinsky reexamines fundamental principles underlying by-now-dusty
terms such as "neutrality," "abstinence," "working through," and the
peculiar expression "termination." Pinsky reconsiders—in some measure,
hopes to restore—the most essential, humane, and useful components of
the original psychoanalytic perspective, guided by the most productive
threads in the discipline's still-evolving theory. Freud's most
important contribution was arguably to discover (or invent) the
psychoanalytic situation itself. This book reflects on central questions
pertaining to that extraordinary discovery: What is the psychoanalytic
situation? How does it work (and fail to work)? Why does it work?
This book aims to articulate what is fundamental and what we can't do
without—the psychoanalytic essence—while neither idealizing Freud nor
devaluing his achievement. Historically, Freud has been misread,
distorted, maligned or, at times, even dismissed. Pinsky reappraises his
significance with respect to psychoanalytic writers who have extended,
and amended, his thinking. Of particular interest are those
psychoanalytic thinkers who, like Freud, are not only original thinkers
but also great writers—including D. W. Winnicott and Hans Loewald.
#7 Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights
Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights
contributes to the development of that field of study called
‘psycho-social’ that is presently more and more committed to providing
understanding of social phenomena, making use of the explicative
perspective of psychoanalysis. The book seeks to develop a concise and
integrated framework of understanding of torture as a socio-political
phenomenon based on psychoanalytic thinking, through which different
dimensions of the subject of study become more comprehensible.
#8 Metapsychology for Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Mind, World, and Self
Metapsychology for Contemporary Psychoanalysis
is a complete revision of the theoretical underpinnings of
psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. It seeks to replace the
traditional drive–defence model of Freudian tradition with an
information processing model of the mind. This book argues that the
central human need is for self-knowledge, and that drives are best
understood as means towards this end.
Richard Sembera begins with a close reading of Freud’s own
metapsychological writings, isolating the many unresolved difficulties
and inconsistencies which continue to burden psychoanalytical theory
today. By returning to the actual observable clinical phenomena in the
analytic situation, it is shown that an alternative interpretation is
possible that eliminates the theoretical difficulties in question. In
the analytic situation, Sembera argues that clinicians do not in fact
see individuals struggling against the expression of biological drives,
rather they observe individuals struggling to clarify their experience
of themselves in the presence of the analyst and put this experience
into words. When this process is formalized and expressed in theoretical
terms, it is found to consist of three distinct
aspects: objectification, imagination, and symbolization. This process
as a whole—ascent towards the other, relationship with the other,
disclosure of self in the light of the other—is termed the dialectical
structure of the self. It is conceptualized as the main accomplishment
of the core mental process, the process of contextualization.
This work is distinguished from other attempts at theoretical revision
by its fundamental commitment to coherence and clarity as well as its
determination to challenge accepted psychoanalytic dogma. It argues for
the complete irrelevance of biology and neuroscience to the
psychoanalytic enterprise and rejects the theory of drives in its
entirety. Instead it affirms the centrality of the traumatic response to
mental functioning, emphasises the social matrix in which drives are
embedded, re-examines the concepts of free will, accountability, and
responsibility, and concludes with an attempt to understand waking life
as a creative product analogous to the lucid dream.
Drawing on major psychoanalytic thinkers including Bollas and Benjamin,
and current philosophy of mind, this book provides readers with a clear,
updated model of metapsychology. Metapsychology for Contemporary
Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as
well as philosophy scholars and anyone with an interest in the
philosophy of psychoanalysis.
#9 Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide
Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide demonstrates that the concept of the unconscious is profoundly relevant for understanding the mind, psychic pain, and traumatic human suffering. Editors Paula L. Ellman and Nancy R. Goodman established this book to discover how symbolization takes place through the "finding of unconscious fantasy" in ways that mend the historic split between trauma and fantasy. Cases present the dramatic encounters between patient and therapist when confronting discovery of the unconscious in the presence of trauma and body pain, along with narrative.
Unconscious fantasy has a central role in both clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. This volume is a guide to the workings of the dyad and the therapeutic action of "finding" unconscious meanings. Staying close to the clinical engagement of analyst and patient shows the transformative nature of the "finding" process as the dyad works with all aspects of the unconscious mind. Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide uses the immediacy of clinical material to show how trauma becomes known in the "here and now" of enactment processes and accompanies the more symbolized narratives of transference and countertransference. This book features contributions from a rich variety of theoretical traditions illustrating working models including Klein, Arlow, and Bion and from leaders in the fields of narrative, trauma, and psychosomatics. Whether working with narrative, trauma or body pain, unconscious fantasy may seem out of reach. Attending to the analyst/ patient process of finding the derivatives of unconscious fantasy offers a potent roadmap for the way psychoanalytic engagement uncovers deep layers of the mind.
#10 Psychosis and Near Psychosis: Ego Function, Symbol Structure, Treatment, 3rd Edition
The goal of psychotherapy as formulated in this revision of a classic
text is to improve ego function of severely disturbed patients who are
often hospitalized. This book shows why and how. It describes the
psychotherapeutic techniques that aid patients to understand the meaning
of the psychotic symbols so that they can experience reality and their
emotions as separate entities. Medication effects and the neurobiology
of psychotic and near psychotic patients are explained and evaluated in
terms of specific ego dysfunction so that psychopharmacology may be
targeted. With the first edition originally a recipient of the
prestigious Heinz Hartmann Award, this valuable resource is a go-to
guide for clinicians who treat patients suffering from crippling mental
disorders.
#11 A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Dante's The Divine Comedy
David Dean Brockman connects spirituality with psychoanalysis throughout
this book as he looks at Dante’s early writings, his life story and his
"polysemous" classical poem The Divine Comedy. Dante wanted to create a
document that would educate the common man about his journey from
brokenness to growth and a solid integration of body, self, and soul.
This book draws the resemblance between Dante’s poem and the "journey"
that patients experience in psychoanalytic therapy. It will be the first
total treatment of Dante’s work in general, and The Divine Comedy in
particular, using the psychoanalytic method.
#12 Death and the City: On Loss, Mourning, and Melancholia at Work
Death and the City provides an in-depth portrait of an organisation in a
palliative state. It transports the analytic concepts of mourning and
melancholia and of the death drive into the workplace, and brings this
important, but under explored, stream of psychoanalytic thought to the
fore as a means of interrogating and further understanding
organisational life.
#13 A Web of Sorrow: Mistrust, Jealousy, Lovelessness, Shamelessness, Regret, Hopelessness
Bringing together the experiences of mistrust, jealousy, lack of love,
shamelessness, regret, and despair, this far-reaching book elucidates
human sorrow in striking sociocultural and clinical details.
#14 A Guide to the World of Dreams: An Integrative Approach to Dreamwork
In
A Guide to the World of Dreams,
Ole Vedfelt presents an in-depth look at dreams in psychotherapy,
counselling and self-help, and offers an overview of current clinical
knowledge and scientific research, including contemporary neuroscience.
This book describes essential aspects of Jungian, psychoanalytic,
existential, experiential and cognitive approaches to dreams and
dreaming, and explores dreams in sleep laboratories, neuroscience and
contemporary theories of dream cognition.
#15 The Linked Self in Psychoanalysis: The Pioneering Work of Enrique Pichon Riviere
Enrique Pichon Riviere was a pioneering psychoanalyst, writing in
Spanish in Argentina in the middle of the 20th century. He has never
been translated into English, so his ideas are only known indirectly
through the work of students and colleagues. His work has inspired not
only the succeeding generations of Latin American analysts, but also
spawned the fields of analytic family therapy and dynamic group work and
organizational consultation. This book presents Pichon-Riviere’s
groundbreaking work in English for the first time. The main papers
represent his theory of psychoanalysis including the link (el vinculo),
spiral process, the theory of unifying illness, the action of
interpretation, and the role and capacity of working in groups and in
the family group.
The book has three sections. In the first, Roberto Losso and Lea S. de
Setton narrate Pichon Rivière’s biography relating elements of his life
to his subsequent work. In the second part, the editors present several
original texts of Pichon Rivière that demonstrate his multiplicity of
interests, covering classic psychiatry, dynamic psychiatry,
psychoanalysis, as well as group psychotherapy, family and couple
psychotherapy, social psychology, and applied psychoanalysis. These
writings testify to Pichon Rivière as an original thinker, years ahead
of his time.
In the third part, several commentators discuss Pichon Rivière’s and
clinical practice. These include Roberto Losso’s contribution, a
panorama of Pichon’s ideas alongside his personal experience as Pichon’s
student. Rosa Jaitin describes the experience of teaching Pichon’s
ideas in Lyon, and in other French cities; René Kaës discusses meeting
Pichon, and offers his translated introduction to the French version of
the complete work of Pichon; Rosa Marcone interviews Ana P. de Quiroga,
Pichon’s life partner for many years and subsequently the director of
the School of Social Psychology that Pichon founded; Alberto Eiguer
narrates an experience with Pichon and his influence on Eiguer’s ideas
and writing; and Vicente Zito Lema gives his vision of Pichon’s work
from sociological and philosophical perspectives. Finally, David Scharff
summarizes Pichon’s major ideas and offers a comparison between these
concepts and object relations theory. The book also includes a glossary
by the editors of Pichon-Rivière’s major concepts and terms.
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