Psychoanalytic Practice Today

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.

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.

Psychoanalytic Practice Today offers the reader a good understanding of the school of thought inspired by the late work of Wilfred R. Bion. The contributors share a belief in the curative power of the analytic encounter and in the capacity of the human mind to develop from the encounter with a mind capable of reverie, dreaming and thinking. The multitude of vignettes presented emphasise the necessity of the emotional involvement of the analyst with his or her patients for improvement to take place. The book is divided in two parts: ‘Psychopathology’ and ‘Emotions and Feelings’. The first part adapts a more classic description of psychiatric disorders by diagnostic criteria, from neuroses to psychoses and including depression and borderline states. The second part of the book takes a closer look at specific clinical manifestations of basic emotions such as anger, surprise, sadness and more complex ones such as jealousy, abandonment and betrayal. The common thread is represented by the central place of dreaming in the psychoanalytic field as a tool to understand these clinical manifestations, and to allow for their psychic representation as an emotional experience. The contributions together offer a varied introduction to current ideas that are growing increasingly interesting to English speaking readers, with a sufficient character of originality, irreverence and creativity that bears witness to the maturity of Italian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Practice Today will offer new ideas to the practicing psychoanalyst and psychodynamic psychotherapist.

Psychoanalysis of the Psychoses brings together a distinguished international set of contributors, offering a range of views and approaches, to explore the latest thinking in the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis and related disorders. Drawing on findings from neuroscience, theory and clinical material from many schools of psychoanalytic thought, this book offers a comprehensive guide to understanding how psychosis is conceptualised from a psychoanalytic perspective. It looks at how to work with psychotic patients, typical problems in treating psychosis and the role of pharmacology. It demonstrates the relational dimension, capable of strengthening the patient’s observing Ego and facilitating the integration of the different areas of the personality. This process can identify and work through the main psychological stress factors involved in psychotic disturbances, transforming chaotic thoughts into springboards for important insights, and offering patients the precious chance to construct for the first time a creative relationship with their own existence. Psychoanalysis of the Psychoses will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as psychiatrists wishing to draw upon psychoanalytic ideas in their work.

A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On the Body examines the importance of the body in everyday psychoanalytic practice and beyond. Written by world leading clinicians and international scholars, this important book aims to relocate the psychoanalytic body in the modern, more challenging world. Bringing together perspectives from across the range of psychoanalytic schools of thought, it covers essential analytic topics such as family and parenting, sex and gender, illness and psychosomatics, and concepts of the body in infancy. Though in Freud’s writing the intertwining of body and psyche is fundamental, psychoanalytic thought has sometimes downplayed or ignored this idea. This book returns the body to its rightful place in psychoanalysis, and brings the body into the contemporary world of technology and change, offering fresh insight into the sick body, the sexual body, the speaking body, the body of the changing family in which the traditional gendered labels no longer fit seamlessly, gender dynamics and much more. A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World gives renewed and increased emphasis to an essential tenant of psychoanalysis. With contributions from some of the most important modern psychoanalysts, this book will prove an essential work for both psychotherapists and academics.

Besides presenting a concise history of psychoanalysis, its conflicts and developments, the authors set out a theory about its aims which raises important points for the clinician interested in researching his or her practice.

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.

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.