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Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy: Foundations of Theory and Practice (The Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis)
by David E. Scharff Jill Savege ScharffIn this time of vulnerable marriages and partnerships, many couples seek help for their relationships. Psychoanalytic couple therapy is a growing application of psychoanalysis for which training is not usually offered in most psychoanalytic and analytic psychotherapy programs. This book is both an advanced text for therapists and a primer for new students of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Its twenty-eight chapters cover the major ideas underlying the application of psychoanalysis to couple therapy, many clinical illustrations of cases and problems in various dimensions of the work. The international group of authors comes from the International Psychotherapy Institute based in Washington, DC, and the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) in London. The result is a richly international perspective that nonetheless has theoretical and clinical coherence because of the shared vision of the authors.
Psychoanalytic Credo: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts (Relational Perspectives Book Series)
by Jill SalbergDeveloping a psychoanalytic credo, a set of beliefs that inform how you listen and approach the analytic enterprise with patients, is in many ways the scaffolding of psychoanalytic training. Drawing upon Mannie Ghent’s original Credo essay, 27 psychoanalysts were asked to write their credo and/or their psychoanalytic journey. This book represents a multi-theoretical and multi-generational grouping, trained at different institutes, during different eras (grouped by decades 1960-2000) and across cultures. They are drawn from analysts identified with Relational, Object Relations, Contemporary Freudians and Kleinian/Bionian perspectives as well as those who don’t easily fit categorization. This book serves to provide companionship to analysts in training, as part of reading lists in institutes as well as analysts post-training and yet still evolving in their psychoanalytic journey.
Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms in Cognitive Multi-Agent Systems
by Friedrich GelbardHuman cognitive processes and defense mechanisms, as described in psychoanalysis, bring about new notions and paradigms for artificial intelligence systems. One key reason is that the human cognitive processes and defense mechanisms in question can accomplish conflict detection functionalities, filter functionalities, and other system stabilizing tasks within artificial intelligence systems. Yet artificial cognitive architectures lack the capability to analyze complex situations as well as the universal competencies needed to orientate themselves in complex environments in various domains. Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms in Cognitive Multi-Agent Systems addresses this dilemma by exploring how to describe, model, and implement psychoanalytic defense mechanisms in the course of a project that provides a functional model of the human mind. With discussions focusing on the development of a mathematical description for the implementation of conflict detection, the activation and selection of defense mechanisms, and the processing of defense mechanisms, Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms in Cognitive Multi-Agent Systems describes the decisive points for the application of defense mechanisms in artificial intelligence. Formulae that treat defense mechanisms as transformations are also provided. Interdisciplinary cooperation between the scientific fields of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence is highlighted as the foundation of new research findings throughout the book. Innovative and exciting, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduates in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process
by Nancy McwilliamsPresents a psychoanalytic personality theory and its implications for beginning practitioners. Explains the major clinically important character types and suggest how an appreciation of individual personality structure should influence the therapist's style of intervention. Covers conceptual issues such as developmental levels of personality organization, primary and secondary defensive processes, types of character organization, borderline syndromes, and dissociative disorders.
Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Second Edition: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process
by Nancy McwilliamsThis acclaimed clinical guide and widely adopted text has filled a key need in the field since its original publication. Nancy McWilliams makes psychoanalytic personality theory and its implications for practice accessible to practitioners of all levels of experience. She explains major character types and demonstrates specific ways that understanding the patient's individual personality structure can influence the therapist's focus and style of intervention. Guidelines are provided for developing a systematic yet flexible diagnostic formulation and using it to inform treatment. Highly readable, the book features a wealth of illustrative clinical examples. New to This Edition Reflects the ongoing development of the author's approach over nearly two decades. Incorporates important advances in attachment theory, neuroscience, and the study of trauma. Coverage of the contemporary relational movement in psychoanalysis. *A number of the case examples are entirely new.
Psychoanalytic Diaries of the COVID-19 Pandemic
by Pietro Roberto Goisis Angelo Antonio MoroniThis intimate book explores the experiences of two psychoanalysts during the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents Angelo Antonio Moroni’s psychoanalytic diary and Pietro Roberto Goisis’s clinical diary, two highly personal perspectives that explore the interplay of the personal and the psychoanalytic during a time of collective trauma. Angelo’s account, written from his ‘camp tent’, examines how fundamental, time-tested procedures are suddenly questioned. Roberto’s diary is the story of his own experience as a COVID patient, the mutually therapeutic caring relationships he encounters and his efforts to keep his analytical expertise alive and well. The two accounts share painful and graphic experiences of the trauma of the pandemic, and how the authors were forced to reconsider the issues of analytical ‘asymmetry’ and ‘neutrality’. Psychoanalytic Diaries of the COVID-19 Pandemic will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to readers with an interest in clinical and personal accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition
by Nancy ChodorowIn The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, Nancy J. Chodorow brings together her two professional identities, psychoanalyst and sociologist, as she also brings together and moves beyond two traditions within American psychoanalysis, naming for the first time an American independent tradition. The book's chapters move inward, toward fine-tuned discussions of the theory and epistemology of the American independent tradition, which Chodorow locates originally in the writings of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, and outward toward what Chodorow sees as a missing but necessary connection between psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the social world. Chodorow suggests that Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson, self-defined ego psychologists, each brings in the intersubjective, attending to the fine-tuned interactions of mother and child, analyst and patient, and individual and social surround. She calls them intersubjective ego psychologists—for Chodorow, the basic theory and clinical epistemology of the American independent tradition. Chodorow describes intrinsic contradictions in psychoanalytic theory and practice that these authors and later American independents address, and she points to similarities between the American and British independent traditions. The American independent tradition, especially through the writings of Erikson, points the analyst and the scholar to individuality and society. Moving back in time, Chodorow suggests that from his earliest writings to his last works, Freud was interested in society and culture, both as these are lived by individuals and as psychoanalysis can help us to understand the fundamental processes that create them. Chodorow advocates for a return to these sociocultural interests for psychoanalysts. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality and advocates for a field of individuology in the university.
Psychoanalytic Ecology: The Talking Cure for Environmental Illness and Health (Routledge Focus on Environment and Sustainability)
by Rod GiblettPsychoanalytic Ecology applies Freudian concepts, beginning with the uncanny, to environmental issues, such as wetlands and their loss, to alligators and crocodiles as inhabitants of wetlands, and to the urban underside. It also applies other Freudian concepts, such as sublimation, symptom, mourning and melancholia, to environmental issues and concerns. Mourning and melancholia can be experienced in relation to wetlands and to their loss. The city is a symptom of the will to fill or drain wetlands. This book engages in a talking cure of psychogeopathology (environmental psychopathology; mental land illness; environ-mental illness) manifested also in industries, such as mining and pastoralism, that practice greed and gluttony. Psychoanalytic Ecology promotes gratitude for generosity as a way of nurturing environ-mental health to prevent the manifestation of these psychogeopathological symptoms in the first place. Melanie Klein’s work on anal sadism is applied to mining and Karl Abraham’s work on oral sadism to pastoralism. Finally, Margaret Mahler’s and Jessica Benjamin’s work on psycho-symbiosis is drawn on to nurture bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregional home habitats of the living earth in the symbiocene, the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene. Psychoanalytic Ecology demonstrates the power of psychoanalytic concepts and the pertinence of the work of several psychoanalytic thinkers for analysing a range of environmental issues and concerns. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, psychoanalysis and the environmental humanities.
Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads: Reformation, change and the future of psychoanalytic training (The New Library of Psychoanalysis)
by Otto Friedmann KernbergTraining 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. The first part of this volume is focused primarily on the analysis of the nature of these problems and their effects on the personal analysis and supervision of candidates; on theoretical and clinical seminars; on selection, progression, and graduation; on educational principles and requirements, developments of theory and technique and, in particular, limitation versus expansion of the realm of interests and applications of psychoanalysis. The second part of this volume deals with proposals of solutions to the problems encountered, and major suggestions for innovation in psychoanalytic education. The author’s work in this area has been hugely influential. Kernberg has made a substantive difference in the development of psychoanalytic institutes and education, and continues to do so. Psychoanalytic Education at the Crossroads will be essential reading to anyone involved in psychoanalytic education, whether as a psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, trainee, trainer, or supervisor.
The Psychoanalytic Encounter and the Misuse of Theory
by Lee GrossmanIn clear, accessible language, Lee Grossman addresses the disjuncture between analytic literature and clinical work in an effort to render analytic theorizing more representative of clinical experience. Pointing out the ways in which analytic literature can fail to capture the intensity of feeling and the stumbling, lurching, working in the dark that captures much of clinical engagement, Grossman shows how incomprehensibility is sometimes mistaken for wisdom. As an alternative, Grossman shows how attention to what he calls the syntax of thought can naturally define three different broad categories of life experience: the omnipotence of the neurotic, the wishful, short-sighted thinking of the perverse, and the concrete, disordered thinking of the psychotic. Using rich clinical material, interspersed with detailed exposition and artful satire, Grossman departs from conventional theoretical writing to provide new ways of conceptualising analytic therapy. Addressing analytic therapy as an encounter between two people, both governed by forces about which they know very little, this book provides essential insights for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other clinical practitioners both in training and in practice.
Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy: Inspired By Thought Field Therapy, Eft, Tat, And Seemorg Matrix
by Phil MollonPeople like to talk. We know that talking to an attentive and thoughtful listener can be helpful in clarifying conscious and unconscious feelings, thoughts, and motivations. But is talk enough? The complex physiology of anxiety and traumatic stress reactions is often stubbornly persistent, despite therapeutic exploration in both conscious and unconscious areas of the mind. In the case of severe trauma, talking can stir up the emotions and associated bodily disturbance without providing any resolution - sometimes leaving clients feeling worse. The developing field of energy psychology offers an entirely new perspective and gamut of techniques for locating where these traumatic patterns are encoded. They are not in the mind - but in the energy system at the interface of psyche and soma. By addressing these realms concurrently, a powerful therapeutic synergy emerges that allows rapid and deep shifts in the patterns of distress that drive the psychosomatic system.
Psychoanalytic Essays on Power and Vulnerability
by Halina Brunning"This paper is based on research into European economics and politics on the basis of ten months travelling in ten countries, as well as on four workshops run in Europe. Two hypotheses will be explored: It is possible to discern psychodynamic evidence that unresolved humiliation trauma is being re-evoked and recycled by attempts to find solutions and cures through the tyranny of austerity measures. But the question will be asked whether these are “chosen trauma” (Volkan, 2010) which may be at the heart of the foundation matrix (Foulkes, 1973) of the European Community. The exploration of political and economic leadership in the crisis in the European Union builds on the notion of society as a large group proliferating crises of identity. From a systemic perspective it is possible to analyse the nation states of Europe protesting with regressive nationalism, refusing collaboration by engaging in economic warfare while at the same time attempting rescue packages. The protest could be seen as defensive denial of their humbling at the hands of the over-ambitious aspects of the European single currency project and the demise of the potency of the nation state. The concluding section reflects on these issues and tries to distinguish the recycling of humiliation trauma from defence against the experience of being humbled."
A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Dante's The Divine Comedy
by David Dean BrockmanDavid 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. This fascinating study of Dante’s The Divine Comedy will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, as well as those still in training. Academics and students of psychology, spirituality, religion, and literature may also be interested in Brockman’s in-depth study of Dante’s work.
A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Social Trauma: The Inner Worlds of Outer Realities
by Cristina Călărășanu Ulrich Schultz-Venrath Hansjorg MessnerA Psychoanalytic Exploration of Social Trauma presents a thorough introduction to social trauma from a range of perspectives, exploring several key themes, specific causes and symptoms and clinical interventions. With chapters from a diverse range of authors, the book considers social trauma as it relates to stories and history, group identity, the consulting room, migration, and post-traumatic conditions. These topics are explored via a range of frames, including individual therapy, group analysis, social dream matrix, large groups, case studies, narrative recollections, and cinematographic expression. The book also considers the implications of new technology in causing and treating social trauma. A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Social Trauma will be of great interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and in training, psychoanalysts, and psychoanalytically informed professionals working with trauma.
A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On The Body
by Vaia Tsolas Christine Anzieu-PremmereurA Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On the Body examines the importance of the body in everyday psychoanalytic practice and beyond. Written by world leading clinicians and international scholars, this important book aims to relocate the psychoanalytic body in the modern, more challenging world. Bringing together perspectives from across the range of psychoanalytic schools of thought, it covers essential analytic topics such as family and parenting, sex and gender, illness and psychosomatics, and concepts of the body in infancy. Though in Freud’s writing the intertwining of body and psyche is fundamental, psychoanalytic thought has sometimes downplayed or ignored this idea. This book returns the body to its rightful place in psychoanalysis, and brings the body into the contemporary world of technology and change, offering fresh insight into the sick body, the sexual body, the speaking body, the body of the changing family in which the traditional gendered labels no longer fit seamlessly, gender dynamics and much more. A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World gives renewed and increased emphasis to an essential tenant of psychoanalysis. With contributions from some of the most important modern psychoanalysts, this book will prove an essential work for both psychotherapists and academics.
A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Contemporary Search for Pleasure: The Turning of the Screw
by Vaia Tsolas Christine Anzieu-PremmereurThis interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the malaise of the contemporary individual by returning the economic point of view of Freudian thinking, the concept of satisfaction, libido, and pleasure–unpleasure principle to their rightful place as the motivating forces of human existence. For Freud, pleasure stands apart from other human experiences, side by side with unpleasure, always a bonus in the search for satisfaction of the pleasure principle and beyond. Along with libido, emotional fulfillment, and the capacities for sublimation and play, pleasure has not been given enough attention in the psychoanalytic literature. The editors of this book address this lack and highlight the importance of examining today’s social and individual malaise through these specific lenses of inquiry. It is particularly timely and important today to address this lack, and thereby examine the impact of the social phenomena of the pandemic, the crises of ideals and virtuality on the subject who feels in a state of constant emergency, overwhelmed, addicted, and delibidinalized. With contributions from across psychoanalysis, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts in training and in practice who want to understand how the modern world has shaped our understanding of pleasure.
A Psychoanalytic Exploration On Sameness and Otherness: Beyond Babel?
by Anne-Marie SchlösserIn dialogue with the most famous myth for the origin of different languages – The Tower of Babel – A Psychoanalytic Exploration on Sameness and Otherness: Beyond Babel? provides a series of timely reflections on the themes of sameness and otherness from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. How are we dealing with communication and its difficulties, the confusion of tongues and loss of common ground within a European context today? Can we move beyond Babel? Confusion and feared loss of shared values and identity are a major part of the daily work of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Bringing together an international range psychoanalytic practitioners and researchers, the book is divided into six parts and covers an array of resonant topics, including: language and translation; cultural identity; families and children; the cyber world; the psychotherapeutic process; and migration. Whereas the quest for unity, which underpins the myth of Babel, leads to mystification, simplification, and the exclusion of people or things, multilingual communities necessitate mutual understanding through dialogue. This book examines those factors that further or threaten communication, aiming not to reduce, but to gain complexity. It suggests that diversification enriches communication and that, by relating to others, we can create something new. As opposed to cultural and linguistic homogeneity, Babel is not only a metaphor for mangled communication, alienation, and distraction, it is also about the acceptance or rejection of differences between self and other. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists and researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Psychoanalytic Field Theory: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis)
by Giuseppe CivitareseWritten by one of the world’s renowned Bionian Field Theory scholars, this foundational volume provides a thorough introduction to all facets of psychoanalytic field theory, one of the most lively and original currents of thought in contemporary psychoanalysis, to offer new answers to age-old questions around how psychic change occurs. With clinical examples to illuminate key themes of therapeutic effectiveness, current controversies, and future developments, the book presents a radically intersubjective view of the analytic process that focuses on the plane of unconscious communication common to both analyst and patient, moving beyond the I/you division to access the shared substance of the psyche. It centers the unconscious not as a hellish region of the psyche but as an important function of the personality that gives meaning to emotional experience. Offering clear expositions of complex concepts and linking to more detailed sources of information, this book is important reading for all clinicians, trainees, and students interested in contemporary psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement (The History of Psychoanalysis Series)
by Ernst FalzederThis book presents a collection of fifteen essays on the early history of psychoanalysis, focusing on the network of psychoanalytic "filiations" ("who analysed whom") and the context of discovery of crucial concepts, such as Freud's technical recommendations, the therapeutic use of countertransference, the introduction of the anal phase, the birth of the object-relations-model as opposed to the drive-model in psychoanalysis, and the psychotherapeutic treatment of psychoses. Several chapters deal with key figures in that history, such as Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Eugen Bleuler, Otto Rank, and C.G. Jung, their respective relationship to Freud, and the consequences that their collaboration - as well as conflicts - with him had for the further development of psychoanalysis up to the present day. Other chapters give an overview of the publications of Freud's texts and of unpublished documents (the "unknown Freud"), the editorial policy of the publications of Freud's letters, and the question of Freud's negative attitude toward America.
Psychoanalytic Geographies
by Paul Kingsbury Steve PilePsychoanalytic Geographies is a unique, path-breaking volume and a core text for anyone seeking to grasp how psychoanalysis helps us understand fundamental geographical questions, and how geographical understandings can offer new ways of thinking psychoanalytically. Elaborating on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches that embrace geographical imaginations and a commitment toward spatial thinking, this book demonstrates the breadth, depth, and vitality of cutting edge work in psychoanalytic geographies and presents readers with as wide a set of options as possible for taking psychoanalysis forward in their own work. It covers a wide range of themes and perspectives in terms of theoretical approaches such as Freudian, Lacanian, Kristevan, and Irigarayian; conceptual issues such as space, power, identity, culture, political economy, colonialism, ethics, and aesthetics; disciplinary insights including Geography, English, Sexuality Studies, and History of Science; as well as empirical contexts such as the reception of psychoanalysis in early twentieth century England, psychoanalytic geographies of violence and creativity in a small Mexican city, visual cultures of second-generation Iranian artists living in Los Angeles, and the hysterical underpinnings of climate change scepticism.
Psychoanalytic Insights into Fundamentalism and Conviction: The Certainty Principle
by Lesley MurdinPsychoanalytic Insights into Fundamentalism and Conviction: The Certainty Principle examines the role of, and need for, certainty in mental life, addressing questions raised by fundamentalism and extremism and exploring its relation to human nature. Murdin proposes a new synthesis in which certainty itself can be a cause of suffering and part of a defensive manoeuvre, and considers how the need for certainty can be managed in a positive way, rather than creating fear and extreme emotional responses. Illustrated throughout with examples from psychotherapy practice, literature and international politics, this book considers how the quest for certainty dominates much of human thinking. Murdin examines personal relationships, including politics and religion, where assumptions are taken for granted but function to hide fears and doubts, and argues that fundamentalist elements can generate harm in anyone but can be mitigated with understanding and work in therapy. Psychoanalytic Insights into Fundamentalism and Conviction helps to identify the underlying convictions that are causing mental harm. It is essential reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and counsellors in practice and in training, and will be of interest to readers interested in fundamentalist states of mind.
Psychoanalytic Insights into Social, Political, and Organizational Dynamics: Understanding the Age of Trump
by Seth Allcorn Howard F SteinThis fascinating interdisciplinary work explores U.S. politics since 2015 and offers psychodynamic insights into the unconscious undercurrents of contemporary culture and politics in the United States. Allcorn and Stein expertly lead readers up the steep learning curve of understanding the Trump era by exploring seven key elements of recent political dynamics. Using the complementary psychodynamic models of object relations, Group Relations and Karen Horney’s tripartite theory, this book makes sense of the Age of Trump and its chaotic world of alternate facts, conspiracy theories, reality TV politics, hoax pandemics, and the sweeping chaos of life in the United States. This sense-making relies on two triangulations. The first represents the complex systemic political scene. The second uses three psychoanalytic theories to understand social, political, and organizational dynamics. This book is a key resource for helping readers know and understand ourselves, our fellow citizens, colleagues, family, friends and what Trump and his followers call "them" such as liberals and foreign immigrants, as well as both the larger polarized social and political context in the United States today. The book also provides concrete examples of how these discoveries can be operationalized both in organizations and at the level of national government and leadership. This book is an essential reading for students in organizational behavior including leadership and how governments operate, as well as behavioral health professionals consulting or offering therapy to organizations.
Psychoanalytic Intersections: Selected Writing of the Austen Riggs Center Erikson Institute Visiting Scholar Program
by Elise MillerPsychoanalytic Intersections examines the influence and legacy of the Austen Riggs Center, one of the oldest psychoanalytically oriented psychiatric hospitals in America, and home of the Erikson Institute for Education and Research. Former Erikson scholar Elise Miller brings together the work of a wide range of clinicians and scholars who have participated in the Erikson Institute’s Visiting Scholars Program. Representing a variety of disciplines, departments, and methodologies, the contributors exemplify the cutting edge of interdisciplinary work at the intersections of psychoanalysis and academia, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and hospital and private practice settings. For this unique collection, each contributor has selected a piece of their published work to be presented with a new afterword reflecting on how time spent in a clinical setting shaped their thinking and writing. These personal narratives also offer a unique opportunity to consider how this kind of scholarship was produced, and what it can teach us about the disciplinary crossings and migrations of applied psychoanalysis, especially as it continues to extend its insights and influences out into the world around us. Psychoanalytic Intersections will be of great interest to psychoanalytic clinicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists engaged in cross-disciplinary work, and to academics and scholars of interdisciplinary psychoanalytic studies.
Psychoanalytic Investigations in Philosophy: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Current Existential Challenges (Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
by Dorit LembergerThis pioneering volume explores and exemplifies the relevance of psychoanalysis to contemporary philosophical problems. The novelty of the book's viewpoint is the consideration of psychoanalysis as an existentialist mode of thinking that deals with current existential problems such as loneliness, uncertainty, struggling with personal tragedies and rehabilitation. Each chapter presents classic aspects of psychoanalytic theory based on Greek tragedies, as well as their similarities with interdisciplinary aspects in other areas of study like modern literature, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language. To deepen each subject, each chapter also applies an interdisciplinary methodology that illuminate previously hidden insights arising from the fusion of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Featuring contributions from well-known scholars like Professor Avi Sagi and Professor Dov Schwartz, as well as more up-and-coming writers, the book suggests possible implications of philosophical, hermeneutical, and literary theories to the perception of post-modern issues concerning agency and the subjective emotional world. Psychoanalytic Investigations in Philosophy is of great interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and hermeneutic philosophy, as well as teachers and academics who want to explore new teaching methods in various disciplines, and general-interest readers who wish to expand their horizons around concepts that can be applied to better understand themselves and the age in which we live.
Psychoanalytic Listening: Methods, Limits, and Innovations
by Salman Akhtar'Joseph Breuer's celebrated patient, Anna O., designated psychoanalysis to be a "talking cure". She was correct insofar as psychoanalysis does place verbal exchange at the center stage. However, the focus upon the patient's and therapist's speaking activities diverted attention from how the two parties listen to each other. Psychoanalysis is a listening and talking cure. Both elements are integral to clinical work. Listening with no talking can only go so far. Talking without listening can mislead and harm. And yet, the listening end of the equation has received short shrift in analytic literature. This book aims to rectify this problem by focusing upon analytic listening. Taking Freud's early description of how an analyst ought to listen as its starting point, the book traverses considerable historical, theoretical, and clinical territory. The ground covered ranges from diverse methods of listening through the informative potential of the countertransference to the outer limits of our customary attitude where psychoanalytic listening no longer helps and might even be contraindicated.'- Salmon Akhtar, from his Introduction