Working With Difficult Patients: From Neurosis to Psychosis

Buy Working With Difficult Patients here. - Free delivery worldwide

In this book the author examines the series of connections that give rise to the intimate relationship between environment and individual in the construction of emotional suffering, emphasising both the undisputed pathogenic action of environmental stimuli and the active participation of whoever is obliged to suffer the negative situation. Franco De Masi shows that the way in which one tries to escape suffering is what often seriously jeopardises growth.

The aim of Working with Difficult Patients is to point out the intrinsic link between some forms of mental suffering and the distorted responses that the patient has received from his or her original environment. For this reason the author explores the concept of the emotional trauma in particular, since this trauma, which occurs in the primary relationship, often impels the child into relational withdrawal and towards constructing pathological structures that will accompany him or her for the rest of their life. The chapters are ordered according to a scale of increasing treatment difficulty, which is proportional to the potential pathogenicity of the underlying psychopathological structure. Consequently, the borderline state and the psychotic state are located at either end of an axis of progressive complexity and difficulty towards change.

The author endeavours to set out a panorama of the main psychopathological entities as he has encountered them and indeed still encounters them in his clinical activity, presenting the material according to a criterion that highlights the differences between the individual case histories. A number of chapters in the second part of the book attempt to clarify the various psychic processes that underlie some frequently encountered psychopathologies.

Genitality: In the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis by Wilhelm Reich

Buy Genitality: In the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis here.

"Coming to Freud from sexology and biology, I perhaps felt the lack of a fundamental theory of the biological basis of neurosis more acutely than did my colleagues who came from internal medicine or from materialistic philosophy. Thus, although when I first encountered Freud's teachings, his views of "actual neurosis" seemed completely unclear, I nevertheless felt it was the pivotal point from which the natural scientific study of sexual biology had to proceed."

Wilhelm Reich, M.D.
(from the Preface – 1944)

Reich first presented the major aspects of his clinical findings on the significance of genitality in the theory and therapy of neurosis in 1927. Published in German as Die Funktion des Orgasmus, Reich dedicated the book to Freud who found it "valuable, rich in clinical material as well as in ideas." In 1937 and again in 1944, Reich made extensive revisions for a second edition of this work in which his early thinking on the function of the orgasm was brought into line with his later biophysical discoveries.

Genitality is the first publication of Reich's second, revised edition. Its title was changed to avoid confusion with Reich's first American book, published in 1942, which he entitled The Function of the Orgasm.

Chapters in Genitality include: "Orgastic Potency," "The Neurotic Conflict," "Disturbances of the Orgasm," "Sexual Statis: The Energy Source of Neurosis," "Forms of Genital Impotence," "On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Genitality," "Sexual Stasis, Aggression, Destruction, and Sadism," "The Social Significance of Genital Strivings."