Psychoanalytic Practice

Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice fills the gaps in current clinical training and theory by highlighting the importance of the analyst’s unique voice, creativity, and embodied awareness in authentically being with and relating to patients. In this original and personal account, Henry Markman provides an integrated approach toward analytic work that focuses on engaged embodied dialogue between analyst and patient, where emotional states are shared in an open circuit of communication as the route to self-discovery and growth. The involvement of the analyst’s singular and spontaneous self is crucial. In integrated and illuminating chapters, Markman emphasizes the therapeutic importance of the analyst’s embodied presence and openness, improvisational accompaniment, and love within the analytic framework. Vivid clinical vignettes illustrate the emotional work of the analyst that is necessary to be openly engaged in a mutual yet asymmetric relationship. From over 30 years of clinical practice and teaching, Markman has synthesized a variety of contemporary theories in an approachable and alive way. This book will appeal to psychoanalytically oriented clinicians, ranging from those beginning training to the most seasoned practitioners.

Fritz Morgenthaler was a crucial figure in the return of psychoanalysis to post-Nazi Central Europe. An inspiring clinician and teacher to the New Left generation of 1968, he was the first European psychoanalyst since Freud to declare that homosexuality is not, indeed never, a pathology, and in Technik, developed revolutionary ideas for transforming clinical technique. On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice offers the first publication in English of this psychoanalytic, counterculture classic. Those who first picked up Technik encountered it at a historical moment when Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, popular New Left cultural critic Klaus Theweleit, and the texts of the Frankfurt School were already required reading. While not a political text in the same direct way, Morgenthaler’s Technik nonetheless shared many of their preoccupations and conclusions about human nature. It was read as technical guidance for psychoanalysts, but also as a manifesto dedicated to the problem of how it might be possible genuinely to live a postfascist, and nonfascist, existence. Morgenthaler was a protorelationalist who recombined the traditions of ego and self psychology as he retained a commitment to drive theory. Here Dagmar Herzog makes his work available to a new generation of analysts, providing essential source material, annotations, and groundbreaking analysis of the continued importance of the work for historians and therapeutic practitioners alike. On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice will interest practicing clinicians as well as intellectual historians and cultural studies scholars seeking to understand the return of psychoanalysis to post-Nazi Central Europe.

The Infantile in Psychoanalytic Practice Today demonstrates the concept of the Infantile, first proposed almost a quarter of a century ago, and the ways in which it has become an indispensable tool in contemporary psychoanalytic clinical practice. As a “concept of the third type”, the Infantile makes the “links-between-the-links” woven into the transference/countertransference functional and effective with patients of all ages, and is related to the double helix between infant neurosis and transference neurosis as revealed by Freud. The author proposes the Infantile as a key concept in the psychic organization of every human being, as the unconscious internal space that includes both the repressed elements of the past and the constantly renewed expressions of the drives. As a unique and dynamic configuration for each person, the book explores the way this relates to others, to the environment, and also to the individual’s own psychic contents and movements. This eagerly awaited English edition includes two new chapters, filling a gap in the psychoanalytic library. As a concept with international scope, these writings on the Infantile will be essential reading for psychoanalysts working today and all those interested in the history of psychoanalysis.

A basic issue for all those essaying to write comprehensive texts on the nature of psychoanalysis, whether oriented primarily to the exposition of the theory or of the technique of psychoanalysis, - within the American literature the books by Brenner and by Greenson come to mind as exemplars of the two categories - is that of the relationship of the theory to the technique and the practice. This issue is however not always brought into explicit focus in this literature and thereby its problematic nature as a fundamental and not yet satisfactorily re solved dilemma of our discipline is often glossed over, or even by passed completely, as if we could comfortably assume that Freud had, uniquely in the world's intellectual history, fully succeeded in creating a science and a discipline in which the theory (the understanding) and the therapy (i. e. , the cure) were inherently together and truly the same, but two sides of the same coin.

The Theory and Practice of Psychoanalytic Therapy: Listening for the Subtext outlines the core concepts that frame the reciprocal encounter between psychoanalytic therapist and patient, taking the reader into the psychoanalytic therapy room and giving detailed examples of how the interaction between patient and therapist takes place. The book argues that the therapist must capture both nonverbal affects and unsymbolized experiences, proposing a distinction between structuralized and actualized affects, and covering key topics such as transference, countertransference and enactment. It emphasizes the unconscious meaning in the here-and-now, as well as the need for affirmation to support more classical styles of intervention. The book integrates object relational and structural perspectives, in a theoretical position called relational oriented character analysis. It argues the patient’s ways-of-being constitute relational strategies carrying implicit messages – a "subtext" – and provides detailed examples of how to capture this underlying dialogue. Packed with detailed clinical examples and displaying a unique interplay between clinical observation and theory, this wide-ranging book will appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists in practice and in training.

First published in 1946, Psychoanalytic Therapy stands as a classic presentation of "brief therapy". The volume, which is based upon nearly six hundred cases, derives from a concerted effort at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis to define the principles that make possible a psychotherapy shorter and more efficient than traditional psychoanalysis and to develop specific techniques of treatment. While taking a psychoanalytic approach, the authors urge the therapist to plan carefully and sensibly to avoid letting every case drift into "interminable" psychoanalysis. They address not only psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, but also psychologists, general physicians, social workers, and "all whose work is closely concerned with human relationships."

The 2nd Edition of Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, the highly successful practice-oriented handbook designed to demystify psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is updated and revised to reflect the latest developments in the field. Updated edition of an extremely successful textbook in its field, featuring numerous updates to reflect the latest research and evidence base Demystifies the processes underpinning psychoanalytic psychotherapy, particularly the development of the analytic attitude guided by principles of clinical technique Provides step-by-step guidance in key areas such as how to conduct assessments, how to formulate cases in psychodynamic terms and how to approach endings The author is a leader in the field – she is General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series and a former editor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This book examines the ways in which we make use of the Group Relations model, set up in the experimental field of the Group Relations conferences, to understand and modify the functioning of working groups. It is based on a psychoanalytic knowledge of the psychosocial development of human beings.