Psychoanalytic Collisions

Psychoanalytic Collisions Second Edition wrestles with a theme that confronts every psychotherapist: the gap between illusions and realities about the professional self. Joyce Slochower closely examines situations in which the therapist’s professional and personal wishes collide with the actuality of everyday clinical work. The book unpacks the dynamics of these collisions on both beginning and seasoned therapists, offering ways of sustaining a professional ideal while also exploring the mixed impact of that ideal on clinical work. In examining how illusions and ideals affect the therapeutic encounter for both better and worse, Psychoanalytic Collisions invites the reader into the consulting room. This Second Edition has been substantially revised. It includes updated clinical and theoretical material as well as a new chapter about mutual idealizations that coalesce between patient and analyst. Slochower argues that psychoanalytic collisions can be productively engaged, even if they often cannot be fully resolved.The very act of engagement—whether by establishing new grounds for collaboration in the wake of real-world catastrophe, wrestling with clinical impasses that arise from the divergent expectations of analyst and patient, or owning up to and addressing the analyst’s "secret delinquencies"—reveals how therapeutic hopefulness can coexist with an acceptance of the analyst’s all-too-human fallibility. Psychoanalytic Collisions shows how idealization is intrinsic both to forging an analytic identity and practicing across a lifetime. Slochower’s work challenges readers to confront their own vulnerabilities and limits while also embracing a professional ideal that is at once human and inspiring. The book is an essential resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, pastoral counselors, and readers interested in the practice of psychotherapy today.

Psychoanalytic Collisions Second Edition wrestles with a theme that confronts every psychotherapist: the gap between illusions and realities about the professional self. Joyce Slochower closely examines situations in which the therapist’s professional and personal wishes collide with the actuality of everyday clinical work. The book unpacks the dynamics of these collisions on both beginning and seasoned therapists, offering ways of sustaining a professional ideal while also exploring the mixed impact of that ideal on clinical work. In examining how illusions and ideals affect the therapeutic encounter for both better and worse, Psychoanalytic Collisions invites the reader into the consulting room. This Second Edition has been substantially revised. It includes updated clinical and theoretical material as well as a new chapter about mutual idealizations that coalesce between patient and analyst. Slochower argues that psychoanalytic collisions can be productively engaged, even if they often cannot be fully resolved.The very act of engagement—whether by establishing new grounds for collaboration in the wake of real-world catastrophe, wrestling with clinical impasses that arise from the divergent expectations of analyst and patient, or owning up to and addressing the analyst’s "secret delinquencies"—reveals how therapeutic hopefulness can coexist with an acceptance of the analyst’s all-too-human fallibility. Psychoanalytic Collisions shows how idealization is intrinsic both to forging an analytic identity and practicing across a lifetime. Slochower’s work challenges readers to confront their own vulnerabilities and limits while also embracing a professional ideal that is at once human and inspiring. The book is an essential resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, pastoral counselors, and readers interested in the practice of psychotherapy today.

Developing psychoanalytic credos, 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 credos 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.

This book provides a clear introduction to the main contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical perspectives. Psychoanalysis is often thought of as an obscure and outdated method, and yet those familiar with it recognize the profound value of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Part of the obscurity may come from psychoanalytic language itself, which is often impenetrable. The complexity of the subject matter has lent itself to a confusion of tongues and yet, at base, psychoanalysis remains an earnest attempt to make sense of and ease human distress. Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis seeks to make this rich wealth of information more accessible to clinicians and trainees. Psychoanalytic clinicians from various schools here describe the key ideas that underlie their particular perspective, helping the reader to see how they apply those ideas in their clinical work. Inviting the contributors to speak about their actual practice, rather than merely providing an overview, this book helps the reader to see common threads that run across perspectives, but also to recognize ways in which the different lenses from each of the perspectives inform interventions Through brief vignettes, the reader is offered an experience-near sense of what it might be like to apply those ideas in their own work. The contributors also note the limits or weaknesses of their particular theory, inviting the reader to consider the broader spectrum of these diverse offerings so that the benefits of each might be more visible. Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis offers readers the richness and diversity of psychoanalytic theory and technique, so that the advantages of each particular lens might be visible and accessible as a further tool in their clinical work. This novel, comparative work will be an essential text for any psychoanalyst or psychoanalytically inclined therapist in training, as well as clinicians and those who teach psychoanalytic theory and technique.

What do therapists not talk about? What do we ignore/miss/sidestep? What factors—personal, social, political—inform our areas of blindness? This book names and explores what psychoanalytic theory often skips over or simplifies—how, when, and why we fail to uphold the professional ideal. Turning a critical eye on her own theory, Slochower reflects on how it, she, and the field have evolved and what remains unspoken. In so doing, she pushes us to do the same. With its sharp focus on both theory and clinical work, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

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.

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, Relational Psychoanalysis continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, Volume 5 carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at the progress in therapeutic process. Included here are chapters on transference and countertransference, engagement, dissociation and self-states, analytic impasses, privacy and disclosure, enactments, improvisation, development, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Lewis Aron, Anthony Bass, Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Steven Cooper, Jody Messler Davies, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dianne Elise, Glen Gabbard, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Steven Knoblauch, Thomas Ogden, Spyros Orfanos, Stuart Pizer, Philip Ringstrom, Jill Salberg, Stephen Seligman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Paul Wachtel.

There are moments of connection between analysts and patients during any therapeutic encounter upon which the therapy can turn. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis explores how analysts and therapists can experience these moments of meeting, shows how this interaction can become an enlivening and creative process, and seeks to recognise how it can change both the analyst and patient in profound and fundamental ways. The theory and practice of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has reached an exciting new moment of generous and generative interaction. As psychoanalysts become more intersubjective and relational in their work, it becomes increasingly critical that they develop approaches that have the capacity to harness and understand powerful moments of meeting, capable of propelling change through the therapeutic relationship. Often these are surprising human moments in which both client and clinician are moved and transformed. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis offers a window into the ways in which some of today’s practitioners think about, encourage, and work with these moments of meeting in their practices. Each chapter of the book offers theoretical material, case examples, and a discussion of various therapists’ reflections on and experiences with these moments of meeting. With contributions from relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and Jungian analysts, and covering essential topics such as shame, impasse, mindfulness, and group work, this book offers new theoretical thinking and practical clinical guidance on how best to work with moments of meeting in any relationally oriented therapeutic practice. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, workers in other mental health fields, graduate students, and anyone interested in change processes.