Mentalizing Power And Powerlessness

In this book, the author discusses with a view to psychotherapeutic practice how power and the exercise of power can be used in a constructive sense. Spontaneously, people tend to associate the topic of power negatively. They mostly talk about their own powerlessness and the power of "those up there", and very rarely about their own striving for power. It is undisputed that power and the exercise of power, as well as dealing with powerlessness, play an important role in psychotherapy. Nevertheless, the constructive and destructive aspects of power are still too little reflected. Here, there is a mentalization deficit on the part of both psychotherapists and patients. In this book questions are asked and suggestions for practice are developed. Written for psychological psychotherapists, child and adolescent psychotherapists, family therapists, counselors, psychiatrists, physicians, students, and psychotherapists in training.

Sometimes relationships do not run as smoothly as we would like. Attunement to others can be difficult, and conversely, from time to time we feel misunderstood ourselves by the ones we love. This can lead to misunderstanding, frustration, and friction. If we mentalize more and better, i.e. give more attention to our own feelings, thoughts, desires, and intentions as well as to those of others, our interactions will be more pleasant and feel safer. This applies to every relationship - those with our children and pupils, and those with our partners and colleagues. We all know a student, neighbour, client, or adolescent who feels alone and misunderstood. Maybe we see but hesitate to really connect and mean something to them. Or we think it that there is nothing we can do. This book shows how everyone can make a difference. Making someone feel important, mentalizing about someone, and connecting with someone who may not have felt contact for a long time does make a difference. The Power of Mentalizing explains in an accessible way what mentalizing means and how it can help make a difference in our own lives as well as in the lives of others. The authors of this book draw on the rich developmental psychology literature on attachment, mentalizing, and epistemic trust. They use several examples to explain what it takes to really connect. In addition, they challenge the reader to self-reflect and to become a slightly better version of themselves.

Discover how to gain (and keep) power in any situation with this “remarkably insightful read on what power is, how it’s gained, and how it can be used for good” (Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again). Power is one of the most misunderstood—and therefore vilified—concepts in our society. Many assume power is predetermined by personality or wealth, or that it’s gained by strong-arming others. You might even write it off as “dirty” and want nothing to do with it. But by staying away from power, you give it up to someone else who may not have your best interest in mind. We must understand and use our power to have impact, and pioneering researchers Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro provide the playbook for doing so in Power, for All. Battilana and Casciaro offer a “necessary” (Tarana Burke, creator of the #MeToo movement and bestselling author of Unbound) and “invaluable” (David Gergen, CNN political analyst) vision of power: the ability to influence someone else’s behavior. This influence is derived from having access to valued resources, and once you understand what those are, you can take action to improve life for yourself and others. With proven strategies of agitating, innovating, and orchestrating change, Power, for All shows how those with less power can challenge established structures to make them more balanced. The authors teach you how to power-map your workplace to find who can create real change at work, plan for and cause sustaining shifts, and understand the two basic needs all human beings share—safety and self-esteem—and the resources people seek to satisfy those needs: money and status, but also autonomy, achievement, affiliation, and mortality. They explore how these dynamics play out through vivid storytelling: as Donatella Versace successfully leads her brother’s company after his death—despite having a title, but little influence; what social movements can learn from youth climate activists and how they can go farther; and how a manager can gain the trust of skeptical employees and improve the workplace. Power, for All demystifies the essential mechanisms for acquiring and using power for all people.

Mentalization-based child therapy, previously known as developmental therapy, is the latest branch on the psychoanalytic tree of knowledge. It comprises a number of techniques that address deficiencies in specific areas of psychological development. It aims to treat children whose development has come to a standstill. A combination of data from psychoanalysis, infant research, attachment research, and neurobiology was of decisive significance in reaching this point. It is becoming clear that neurobiological processes can be understood very well on the basis of psychoanalytic frameworks. These new insights into peoples mental functioning also serve to foster collaboration, resulting in an integration of the more relationship-oriented and the more competence oriented treatments. This book aims to fill a growing need in mental health care for children and young people to recieve an integrated treatment.

Mentalizing in Child Therapy focuses on open-ended psychotherapy for children with complex mental health issues and attachment problems. It offers examples of personalized and integrated treatment that is "firm in structure yet flexible in its focus" (Peter Fonagy, foreword to first edition). The book is based on the systematic observation of the treatment of complex problems in children (4-12 years) using a mentalizing therapeutic stance and a range of techniques to enhance mentalizing abilities and trust in other people, incorporating aspects of the more relationship-oriented and competence-oriented treatments. In this updated edition, the authors have elaborated on the topic of attention regulation, having included Siegel’s concept of the ‘window of tolerance’. They’ve also written more on the mentalizing abilities of the therapist, the importance of providing structure at the beginning of the treatment, and the value of communication for developing epistemic trust. Featuring guidelines for clinical practitioners, this book is important for the clinical training of child psychotherapists, as well as for professional child psychiatrists, child psychologists and other therapists working with four to 12-year-old children experiencing significant developmental problems with mentalizing.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read at Oxford Clinical Psychology Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The theory of mentalizing and epistemic trust introduced by Peter Fonagy and colleagues at the Anna Freud Centre has been an important perspective on mental health and illness. Mentalizing and Epistemic Trust is the first comprehensive account and evaluation of this perspective. The book explores twenty primary concepts that organize the contributions of Fonagy and colleagues: adaptation, aggression, the alien self, culture, disorganized attachment, epistemic trust, hypermentalizing, reflective function, the P factor, pretend mode, the primary unconscious, psychic equivalence, mental illness, mentalizing, mentalization-based therapy, non-mentalizing, the self, sexuality, the social environment, and teleological mode. The biographical and social context of the development of these ideas is examined. The book also specifies the current strengths and limitations of the theory of mentalizing and epistemic trust, with attention to the implications for both clinicians and researchers. This book will be of interest to historians of the human sciences, developmental psychologists, and clinicians interested in taking a broader perspective on psychological theory and concepts.

For some years now, psychoanalysts have been trying to understand the implications of neuroscientific findings for psychoanalytic theory and practice. In On Psychoanalysis, Disillusion, and Death: Dead certainties Antonie Ladan looks at how findings from neuroscience and memory research can inform our understanding of some of the most important psychoanalytic concepts, such as transference and unconscious fantasy. Central to the book are the 'dead certainties' that, to a great extent, determine how we lead our lives. Antonie Ladan argues that these certainties are too self-evident to be seen, as invisible as the air we breathe. He shows how in our associations with others, we are in large measure 'guided' by 'dead certain' relational patterns of which we are not conscious, but that remain implicit. Using clinical examples, Ladan illustrates how a specific form of observation, where the analysand and the analyst pay careful attention to their relationship over an extended period of time, makes it possible to gradually recognise these automatic expectations and behaviours in relational situations. On Psychoanalysis, Disillusion, and Death explores how the psychoanalyst can bring the implicit patterns, within which analysands find themselves trapped, to their attention enabling them to look at the world from a 'disillusioning' perspective in order to accept life and the prospect of death for what they are. This book will be of interest to psychotherapists, analytical psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists and students.

“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.