Love And Hate In The Analytic Setting

Passionate feelings of love and hate are stirred in psychotherapy. Paradoxically, these passions may either undermine the therapist catastrophically or serve as the crucible in which profound understanding is forged. Transferences and countertransferences of love and hate occur on a spectrum that includes unobjectionable negative and positive feelings, relatively benign forms of love and hate, and more malignant, intractable versions of love and hate that present formidable challenges to the therapist. Each of these variations is explored in different chapters of this book. Gender configurations, gender fluidity, adolescent transferences, the link between love and lust, and passive forms of hating are among the topics discussed. Most of all, the author, noted psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard, depicts what it is like to be in the eye of the hurricane when passions are aroused. He provides a practical yet theoretically sophisticated guide to the management of love and hate as they are experienced by both patient and therapist.

Love and hate seem to be the dominant emotions that make the world go round and are a central theme in psychotherapy. Love and Hate seeks to answer some important questions about these all consuming passions. Many patients seeking psychotherapy feel unlovable or full of rage and hate. What is it that interferes with the capacity to experience love? This book explores the origins of love and hate from infancy and how they develop through the life cycle. It brings together contemporary views about clinical practice on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about love and hate in the transference and countertransference and explores how different schools of thought deal with the subject. David Mann, together with an impressive array of international contributors represent a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Kleinian, Jungian, Independent Group, and Lacanian, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists. With emphasis on clinical illustration throughout, the writers show how different psychoanalytic schools think about and clinically work with the experience and passions of love and hate. It will be invaluable to practitioners and students of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and counselling.

This book is a unique and superb gateway to current psychoanalytic thinking. Thirty of America's foremost psychoanalysts -- leaders in defining the current pluralistic state of the profession -- have each presented what they consider to be their most significant contribution to the field. No mere anthology, these are the key writings that underlie current discussions of psychoanalytic theory and technique. The chapters cover contemporary ideas of intersubjectivity, object relations theory, self psychology, relational psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, clinical technique, changing concepts of unconscious, empirical research, infant observation, gender and sexuality, and more. While the differences in point of view are profound, there is also a striking coherence on some core issues. Each of the contributions features an introduction by the volume editor and a note by the author explaining the rationale for its selection. The brilliant introduction by Peter Fonagy provides an overview and places each author in the context of contemporary psychoanalysis. A list of the authors may convey the astonishing breadth of this volume:Brenner, Bromberg, Busch, Chodorow, Cooper, Emde, Friedman, Gabbard, Goldberg, Greenberg, Grossman, Hoffman, Jacobs, Kantrowitz, Kernberg, Levenson, Luborsky, Michels, Ogden, Ornstein, Person, Pine, Renik, Schafer, Schwaber, Shapiro, Smith, Stern, Stolorow, Wallerstein This is a "best of the best" volume -- cutting-edge writing, highly accessible and studded with vivid clinical illustrations. Anyone wishing to acquire a comprehensive, authoritative, readily accessible -- even entertaining -- guide to American psychoanalytic thinking will find their goal fulfilled in this monumental collection.

This book introduces the clinical concept of analytic contact. This is a term that describes the therapeutic method of investigation that makes up psychoanalytic treatment. The field has been in debate for decades regarding what constitutes psychoanalysis. This usually centers on theoretical ideals regarding analyzability, goals, or procedure and external criteria such as frequency or use of couch. Instead, the concept of analytic contact looks at what takes place with a patient in the clinical situation. Each chapter in this book follows a wide spectrum of cases and clinical situations where hard to reach patients are provided the best opportunity for health and healing through the establishment of analytic contact. This case material closely tracks each patient's phantasies, and transference mechanisms which work to either increase, oppose, embrace, or neutralize, analytic contact. In addition, the fundamental internal conflicts all patients struggle with between love, hate, and knowledge are represented by extensive case reports.

Have you ever wondered what a therapist really thinks? Have you ever wondered if a therapist truly cares about her patients? Have you tried to imagine the unimaginable, the loss of the person most dear to you? Is it true that `tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? ` Love and loss are a ubiquitous part of life, bringing the greatest joys and the greatest heartaches. In one way or another all relationships end. People leave, move on, die. Loss is an ever-present part of life. In Love and Loss, Linda B. Sherby illustrates that in order to grow and thrive, we must learn to mourn, to move beyond the person we have lost while taking that person with us in our minds. Love, unlike loss, is not inevitable but, she argues, no satisfying life can be lived without deeply meaningful relationships. The focus of Love and Loss is how patients' and therapists' independent experiences of love and loss, as well as the love and loss that they experience in the treatment room, intermingle and interact. There are always two people in the consulting room, both of whom are involved in their own respective lives, as well as the mutually responsive relationship that exists between them. Love and loss in the life of one of the parties affects the other, whether that affect takes place on a conscious or unconscious level. Love and Loss is unique in two respects.The first is its focus on the analyst's current life situation and how that necessarily affects both the patient and the treatment. The second is Sherby's willingness to share the personal memoir of her own loss which she has interwoven with extensive clinical material to clearly illustrate the effect the analyst's current life circumstance has on the treatment. Writing as both a psychoanalyst and a widow, Linda B. Sherby makes it possible for the reader to gain an inside view of the emotional experience of being an analyst, making this book of interest to a wide audience. Professionals from psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and bereavement specialists through students in all the mental health fields to the public in general, will resonate and learn from this heartfelt and straightforward book.

This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry follows a design that has achieved increasing popularity in today's pluralistic world of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Providing a case presentation that incorporates detailed process noted along with a number of discussions of that case taken from divergent theoretical perspectives that appeals to the clinican operating in a postmodern setting. By proposing alternative ideas to the reader, the reader is afforded an opportunity to conceptualize from his or her own perspective the approach most conducive to good analytic work for the particular patient he or she has envisioned from reading the material presented. Or the reader may discover that alternative views suggested in the discussions may be integrated, establishing a more textured, more complex vision of the analytic pair at work together, a process facilitated through application of a systems sensibility. The abiding lesson - that there is no one good way to do our work but, on the other hand, that not all ways are equally good - is put forward persuasively in this format.

Nearly a century has passed since Freud's theories unleashed a revolution in our understanding of the human psyche. Yet, as Arnold Modell firmly points out, we still do not possess a theory that explains how psychoanalysis works. Other Times, Other Realities provides brilliant insight into this perplexing problem and lays the foundation for a comprehensive theory of psychoanalytic treatment. Modell's careful consideration of Freudian theory, the interpretations of contemporary ego psychology, and the contribution of object theory discloses the changing significance of the fundamental elements of the therapeutic process. In Other Times, Other Realities, readers will discover an illuminating synthesis of concepts underlying the various interpretations of the psychoanalytic process.

In Hate and Love in Psychoanalytic Institutions, Jurgen Reeder investigates the professional superego of the psychoanalyst. This superego designates a prescriptive and prohibiting role that the individual must play within the parameters of a certain occupational sphere. The prescriptive aspect works like a professional ideal, and in this respect the superego can be said to sustain a professional 'ethos' or spirit, commanding what the professional should know, and what his or her relations to clients and colleagues should resemble. It helps to bind the members of the analytical community together. The prohibiting aspect installs a vigilant inner eye. It offers necessary protection against detrimental aberrations, but it also evokes fantasies of critical or condemning colleagues who might have insight into what transpires within the walls of the analyst's own private practice--leading to a reluctance to communicate openly about the analytical experience. In this sense, the professional superego contributes to the 'paranoization' of collegial communication, a circumstance that has a hampering effect on spontaneity and creativity in both clinical and theoretical work. Jurgen Reeder's groundbreaking research, uncovering the dynamics of the professional superego in psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, can be applied to other professions as well, including social work, medicine, education, law, and the ministry.