The Analyst S Reveries

While the use of the analyst’s own reveries in work with patients has increased in recent times, there has been little critical inquiry into its value, and the problems it may lead to. The Analyst's Reveries finds increasing veneration for the analyst’s use of their reveries, while revealing important differences amongst post-Bionians in how reverie is defined and used clinically. Fred Busch ponders if it has been fully recognized that some post-Bionions suggest a new, radical paradigm for what is curative in psychoanalysis. After searching for the roots of the analyst’s use of reverie in Bion’s work and questioning whether in this regard Bion was a Bionian, Busch carefully examines the work of some post-Bionians and finds both convincing ways to think about the usefulness and limitations of the analyst’s use of reverie. He explores questions including: From what part of the mind does a reverie emerge? How does its provenance inform its transformative possibilities? Do we over-generalize in conceptualizing what is unrepresented, with the corresponding problem of false positives? Do dreams equal understanding and what about the generalizability of the co-created reverie? Busch concludes that it is primarily through the analyst’s own associations that the reverie’s potential is revealed, which further helps the analyst distinguish it from many other possibilities, including the analyst’s countertransference. He believes in the importance of converting reveries into verbal interpretations, a controversial point amongst post-Bionians. Busch ends with the difficult task of classifying the analyst’s reveries based on their degree of representation. The Analyst's Reveries will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

This collection of selected papers explores psychoanalytic technique, exemplifying Fred Busch’s singular contribution to this subject, alongside the breadth and depth of his work. Covering key topics such as what is unique about psychoanalysis, interpretation, psychic truth, the role of memory and the importance of the analyst's reveries, this book brings together the author's most important work on this subject for the first time. Taken as a whole, Busch’s work has provided an updated Freudian model for a curative process through psychoanalysis, along with the techniques to accomplish this. Meticulous in providing the theoretical underpinnings for their conclusions, these essays depict how Busch, as a humanist, has continuously championed what in retrospect seems basic to psychoanalytic technique but which has not always been at the forefront of our thinking: the patient’s capacity to hear, understand and emotionally feel interventions. Presenting a deep appreciation for Freudian theory, this book also integrates the work of analysts from Europe and Latin America, which has been prevalent in his recent work. Comprehensive and clear, these works focus on clinical issues, providing numerous examples of work with patients whilst also presenting concise explanations of the theoretical background. In giving new meaning to basic principles of technique and in reviving older methods with a new focus, A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists.

Bion's identification of reverie as a psychoanalytic concept has drawn attention to a dimension of the analyst's experience with tremendous potential to enrich our interpretive understanding. The courage of these authors in revealing their own process of reverie as transformed into the action of psychoanalysis will inspire and foster further investigation of this fruitful yet heretofore infrequently explored area of psychoanalytic discovery.

In his fifth book Thomas Ogden, widely regarded as the most profound and original psychoanalytic writer of this decade, explores the frontier of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking: the experience of the analyst and patient in the dynamic interplay of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. A Jason Aronson Book

What is the truth of the unconscious? Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis explores the intersection of these two concepts within a Bionian framework. Giuseppe Civitarese maps out the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and focuses on the differences between the Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian and Lacanian schools of thought on this topic, as well as drawing on findings from neuroscience. The book explores topics including the inaccessibility of the unconscious, dreams, body issues, issues of personality, the influence of field theory and the clinical implications of this theorising. It contains innovative comparison between Freudian metapsychology and the Bionian theory on thinking, and novel use of Bion's hallucinosis as an important new technical tool. An internationally recognised author, Civitarese provides fresh ideas throughout on a challenging subject, supported with vivid clinical material. Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis will be of interest to anyone following the growing post-Bionian movement within contemporary psychoanalysis, enabling them to familiarize themselves with some of the most important current issues in psychoanalytic research. Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychotherapists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students studying in the field.

A reverie is a form of dreaming intended as a continuous process that takes place in sleep as well as in waking life. In analysis, the patient's communications can evoke images that will then be useful in the development of the analytic work. The salient feature of analytic listening is precisely this willingness to abandon oneself to reverie where previously unthought or unthinkable emotions are given the right to exist and circulate freely. In Reveries, Antonino Ferro, whose numerous clinical books have been translated into many languages,elaborates on the reveries and daydreams that accompany him out of the consulting room. The result is a collection of short or not so short musings with surreal or even grotesque tones, at times mocking and pointed aphorisms. Vibrant pages with a life of their own, punctuated by subtle literary references to the likes of Rousseau, Baudelaire, Kafka, and Poe.

In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper explores a subject matter previously applied more exclusively to patients, but rarely to psychoanalysts. Cooper probes the analyst’s experience of the depressive position in the analytic situation. These experiences include the pleasures and warmth of helping patients to bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences of limitation, incompleteness, repetition and disappointment as a vital part of clinical work. He describes a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is always trying to find and re-find a position from which he can help patients to work with these experiences. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position includes an exploration of the analyst’s participation and resistance to helping patients hold some of the most unsettling parts of their experience. Cooper draws some analogies between elements of theory about aesthetic experience in terms of how we bear new and old experience. He provides an examination of the patient as an artist of sorts and the analyst as a form of psychic boundary artist. Just as the creative act of art involves the capacity to transform pain and ruin into the depressive position, so does the co-creation of how we understand the patient’s mind through the mind of the analyst. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position explores a rich, provocative and long overdue topic relevant to psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamically oriented psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of both psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

In the last several decades, the analytic field has widened considerably in scope. The therapeutic task is now seen by an increasing number of analysts to require that patient and analyst work together to strengthen, or to create, psychic structure that was previously weak, missing, or functionally inoperative. This view, which may apply to all patients, but is especially relevant to the treatment of non-neurotic patients and states of mind, stands in stark contrast to the more traditional assumption that the therapeutic task involves the uncovering of the unconscious dimension of a present pathological compromise formation that holds a potentially healthy ego in thrall. The contrast which this book calls attention to is that which exists roughly between formulations of psychic structure and functioning that were once assumed to have been sufficiently well explained by the hypotheses of Freud's topographic theory and those that were not. The former are modeled on neurosis and dream interpretation, where conflicts between relatively well-defined (saturated) and psychically represented desires were assumed to operate under the aegis of the pleasure-unpleasure principle.