In Pursuit Of Psychic Change

This book is a celebration of Betty Joseph's work, and the work of a group of analysts who have joined her to think about particular kinds of difficulties encountered in the analytic situation, and to think about technical issues.

Dr. Robert Waska’s new book describes how the modern Kleinian approach makes it possible to potentially establish analytic contact within even the most chaotic clinical situations and create a therapeutic experience that can be significant and meaningful. In doing so, there can be a healing process and the birth of new object relational experiences and interpersonal exchanges.

This book offers a practitioner's guide to evidence-based practice in working with psychotic patients in an outpatient setting by clinicians and scholars who are internationally recognized for their work in treating severe psychopathology. Topics cover conceptual, technical, and practical considerations in the parameters of working with adult and adolescent populations that exhibit thought disorder, delusions, hallucinations, borderline organizations, trauma, and schizoid phenomena. Different theoretical models are presented from psychoanalytic traditions that introduce the student and practitioner to eclectic ways of conceptualizing and treating these challenging clinical groups. Concrete approaches to establishing a proper treatment environment, working alliance, symptom management, managing countertransference, and facilitating a therapeutic framework are provided. Various psychodynamic techniques are demonstrated by master clinicians through the extensive use of clinical case material culled from outpatient settings that illustrate how psychoanalytic perspectives enrich our understanding of the psychotic spectrum and lead to therapeutic efficacy.

Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond brings together Jungian analysts and psychoanalysts from across the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Carl Jung’s concept of participation mystique is used as a starting point for an in depth exploration of ‘shared realities’ in the analytic setting and beyond. The clinical, narrative, and theoretical discussions move through such related areas as: projective identification, negative coniunctio, reverie, intersubjectivity, the interactive field, phenomenology, neuroscience, the transferential chimera, shamanism, shared reality of place, borderland consciousness, and mystical participation. This unique collection of essays bridges theoretical orientations and includes some of the most original analytic writers of our time. An essential read for psychoanalysts, Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, and analytic candidates.

Modern Kleinian Therapy is a model of effective psychoanalytic work that offers relief to deep internal conflicts by establishing and maintaining analytic contact, and beginning to unravel, modify, and heal turbulent and torn minds. This book defines Modern Kleinian Therapy as a modality for treating severely affected patients in a fairly traditional psychoanalytic manner, even when the environment or frequency of sessions are compromised. Chapter by chapter the book provides detailed clinical material to illustrate the complex dynamics that unfold when working with more closed off patients, and each case report shows the often limited clinical situations that the contemporary analyst must contend with. The book's detailed material serves to emphasize the nature of psychoanalytic work with individuals and couples, who otherwise rarely find their way to healthy attachment or reciprocal whole object relational harmony. Included in the book: * Technical and theoretical methods of Modern Kleinian Therapy * Psychoanalytic treatments to modify internal object relational conflicts * The Modern Kleinian Therapy approach to couple's treatment * The value of analytic contact. A Practical Casebook of Time-Limited Psychoanalytic Work: A Modern Kleinian Approach introduces new aspects of Kleinian work and offers a contemporary view on Kleinian techniques and concepts. It will be valuable reading for psychotherapists, mental health workers, and psychoanalytic therapists.

The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought provides a comprehensive and wholly accessible exposition of Kleinian ideas. Offering a thorough update of R.D. Hinshelwood’s highly acclaimed original, this book draws on the many developments in the field of Kleinian theory and practice since its publication. The book first addresses twelve major themes of Kleinian psychoanalytic thinking in scholarly essays organised both historically and thematically. Themes discussed include: unconscious phantasy, child analysisthe paranoid schizoid and depressive positions, the oedipus complex projective identification, symbol formation. Following this, entries are listed alphabetically, allowing the reader to find out about a particular theme - from Karl Abraham to Whole Object - and to delve as lightly or as deeply as needed. As such this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists as well as all those with an interest in Kleinian thought.

Most contemporary psychoanalysts and psychotherapists see each patient once or twice a week at most. As many patients have reached a marked state of distress before seeking treatment, this gives the analyst a difficult task to accomplish in what is a limited amount of time. A Casebook of Psychotherapy Practice with Challenging Patients: A modern Kleinian approach sets out a model for working with quite significantly disturbed, distressed, or resistant patients in a very limited time, which Robert Waska has termed "Modern Kleinian Therapy." Each chapter provides a vivid look into the moment-to-moment workings of a contemporary Kleinian focus on understanding projective identification, enactment, and acting out as well as the careful and thoughtful interpretive work necessary in these complex clinical situations. Individual psychotherapeutic work is represented throughout the book alongside instructive reports of psychoanalytic work with disturbed couples, and the more challenging patient is illustrated with several comprehensive reviews of films that follow such hard-to-reach individuals. A Casebook of Psychotherapy Practice with Challenging Patients: A modern Kleinian approach is filled with a combination of contemporary theory building, a wealth of clinical vignettes, and practical advice. It is a hands-on guide for psychoanalysts and therapists who need to get to grips with complex psychoanalytic concepts in a short time and shows the therapeutic power the Modern Kleinian Therapy approach can have and how it can enable them to work most effectively with difficult patients. Robert Waska LPCC, MFT, PhD is an analytic member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and conducts a full-time private psychoanalytic practice for individuals and couples in San Francisco and Marin County, California. He is the author of thirteen published textbooks on Kleinian psychoanalytic theory and technique, is a contributing author for three psychology texts, and has published over a hundred articles in professional journals.

How do psychoanalysts explain human morality? Guilt and Its Vicissitudes: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Morality focuses on the way Melanie Klein and successive generations of her followers pursued and deepened Freud's project of explaining man's moral sense as a wholly natural phenomenon. With the introduction of the superego, Freud laid claim to the study of moral development as part of the psychoanalytic enterprise. At the same time he reconceptualized guilt: he thought of it not only as conscious, but as unconscious as well, and it was the unconscious sense of guilt that became a particular concern of the discipline he was founding. As Klein saw it, his work merely pointed the way. Judith M. Hughes argues that Klein and contemporary Kleinians went on to provide a more consistent and comprehensive psychological account of moral development. Hughes shows how Klein and her followers came to appreciate that moral and cognitive questions are complexly interwoven and makes clear how this complexity prompted them to extend the range of their theory. Hughes demonstrates both a detailed knowledge of the major figures in post-war British psychoanalysis, and a keen sensitivity to the way clinical experience informed theory-building. She writes with vigor and grace, not only about Freud and Klein, but also about such key thinkers as Riviere, Isaacs, Heimann, Segal, Bion and Joseph. Guilt and Its Vicissitudes speaks to those concerned with the clinical application of psychoanalytic theory and to those interested in the contribution psychoanalysis makes to understanding questions of human morality.