Comparative Integrative Psychoanalysis

Finalist for the 2007 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship! This exceptionally practical and insightful new text explores the emerging field of comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. It provides an invaluable framework for approaching the currently fractious state of the psychoanalytic discipline, divided as it is into diverse schools of thought, presenting many conceptual challenges. Moving beyond the usual borders of psychoanalysis, Willock usefully draws on insights from neighboring disciplines to shed additional light on the core issue. Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis is divided into two sections for organizational clarity. Part I is an intriguing investigation into the nature of thought and its intrinsic problems. It convincingly builds a case for the need, after a century of disciplinary development, to move beyond delineated schools, and proposes a method for achieving this goal. The succeeding section elaborates this desideratum in detail, exploring its implications with respect to theory, organizations, practice, and pedagogy. This second portion of the volume is most applicable to everyday concerns with improving work in the field, be it in the consulting room, classroom, or in and between various psychoanalytic organizations.

Explores the field of comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. This book provides an invaluable framework for approaching the fractious state of the psychoanalytic discipline, divided as it is into diverse schools of thought, presenting many conceptual challenges. It draws on insights from neighboring disciplines to shed light on the issue.

Watching people protest, one hypothesis is that underlying these actions for specific justifiable causes is a sense of wishing to belong, of wishing not to be alone. Recent knowledge from patients and empirical research shows the importance of belonging to groups to both psychological and physical well-being. The problems of many students, minority group members, immigrants, terrorists, and lonely people are linked to an insufficient sense of belonging. Whereas psychoanalytic theory has focused on the need for a secure attachment to a primary caretaker, it has failed to note the importance of a sense of belonging to the family group, a friendship group, a community, a religious group, a nation-state, etc. This book demonstrates the difficulties faced by those who immigrate, those who never feel a sense of their true selves as belonging in a family or a cohesive professional group, and the difficulties of psychoanalysts themselves in knowing where they belong in patients’ lives. The problems of breaking up marital and professional relationships as well as our relationship with the Earth are also discussed. Freudian theory rejected the idea of a sense of "oneness" with humanity as being infantile. Recent developments regarding the similarities between meditational practices and psychoanalysis have questioned Freud’s idea. This book shows the importance of an interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis focusing on real relationships and not simply one that examines inner conflicts. It will be useful to psychologists, other mental health practitioners, social scientists, and anyone with normal struggles in life.

Every day, clinicians encounter challenges to empathy and communication while struggling to assist patients with diverse life histories, character, sexuality, gender, psychopathology, cultural, religious, political, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Most writing pertaining to ideas of similarity, discrepancy, and ‘the Other’ has highlighted differences. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide offers a different focus, emphasising points of contact, connection, and how divisions between people can be transcended. In-depth case material, astutely elucidated by diverse theoretical approaches, furnishes stimulating ideas and valuable suggestions for facilitating a meeting of minds and psychological growth in patients who might otherwise be difficult or impossible to engage. Exploring how psychoanalysts can navigate obstacles to understanding and communicating with suffering individuals, topics covered include: internal experience of likeness and difference in the patient; in the analyst; and how analysts can find echoes of themselves in patients. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists will appreciate the importance and value of this wide-ranging, groundbreaking exploration of these insufficiently addressed dimensions of human experience.

Despite the persistence of the theoretical model of the cathartic theory in psychoanalysis, it is not what we practice clinically. Freud's Other Theory of Psychoanalysis deals with eliciting that other unarticulated theory from the Freudian text to replace the catharsis theory...

The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma is an invaluable and cutting edge resource providing the current theory, practice, and research on trauma and dissociation within psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz bring together experts in the field of dissociation and psychoanalysis, providing a comprehensive and forward-looking overview of the current thinking on trauma and dissociation. 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. The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, trauma therapists, and students.

Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Integration traces the history of efforts to integrate psychoanalysis with other psychotherapeutic modalities, beginning with the early analysts, including Ferenczi and Rank, and continuing on to the present day. It explores the potential for integration made possible by contemporary developments in theory and technique that are fundamental to a relational psychoanalytic approach. Editors Jill Bresler and Karen Starr bring together an array of valuable theoretical and clinical contributions by relationally oriented psychoanalysts who identify their work as integrative. The book is organized in four segments: theoretical frameworks of psychotherapy integration; integrating multiple models of psychotherapy into a psychoanalytically informed treatment; working with specific populations; the future of integration, exploring the issues involved in educating clinicians in integrative practice. The contributions in this volume demonstrate that integrating techniques from a variety of psychotherapies outside of psychoanalysis can enrich and enhance psychoanalytic practice. It will be an invaluable resource for all practicing psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in training, particularly those with an interest in relational psychoanalysis and psychotherapy integration.

Is there a baby in the relational consulting room? How and when can/should we try to hold our patients? What happens to the analyst's subjectivity when she tries to hold? In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (second Edition), Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the holding environment. Revisiting the clinical impact and theoretical underpinnings of holding, Slochower explores its function in those moments when "ordinary" interpretive or interactive work cannot be tolerated. Slochower expands the holding construct beyond the needs of dependent patients by examining its therapeutic function across the clinical spectrum. Emphasizing holding’s coconstructed nature, Slochower explores the contribution of both patient and analyst the holding moment. This second Edition introduces new theoretical and clinical material, including four additional chapters. Two of these address holding’s impact on the patient’s capacity to access, articulate and process affect states; the third moves outside the consulting room to explore how holding functions in acts of memorial ritual across the lifespan. A final chapter presents Slochower’s latest ideas about holding’s clinical function in buffering shame states. Integrating Winnicott's seminal contributions with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic perspectives, Joyce Slochower addresses the therapeutic limitations of both interpretive and interactive clinical work. There are times, she argues, when patients cannot tolerate explicit evidence of the analyst's separate presence and instead need a holding experience. Slochower conceptualizes holding within a relational frame that includes both deliberate and enacted elements. In her view, the analyst does not hold alone; patient and analyst each participate in the establishment of a co-constructed holding space. Slochower pays particular attention to the analyst's experience during moments of holding, offering rich clinical vignettes that illustrate the complex struggle that holding entails. She also addresses the therapeutic limits of holding and invites the reader to consider the analyst’s contribution to these failures. Slochower locates the holding process within a broader clinical framework that involves the transition toward collaboration—a move away from holding and into an explicitly intersubjective therapeutic frame. Holding and Psychoanalysis offers a sophisticated integration of Winnicottian and relational thought that privileges the dynamic impact of holding moments on both patient and analyst. Thoroughly grounded in case examples, the book offers compelling clinical solutions to common therapeutic knots. Clearly written and carefully explicated, it will be an important addition to the libraries of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.