The Analyst S Torment

"Dhwani Shah moves the focus from using psychoanalytic theory and technique to explore the patient's mind from a safe distance. Instead, he concentrates on the analyst's feelings, subjective experiences, and histories, and how these impact on the intersubjective space between analyst and patient. His eight chapters each highlight a particular emotional state or problematic feeling and explore their impact on the analytic work, which requires emotional honesty and open reflection. This authenticity is vital for every unique encounter within the shared space of both the analyst and patient. The analyst must strive to be responsive, yet disciplined, and this requires the work of mentalization. An ability to ""go there"" with patients offers the best chance at helping them. The analyst's uncomfortable and disowned emotional states of mind are inevitably entangled with the therapeutic process and this has the potential to derail or facilitate progress. The chapters deal with uncomfortable themes for the analyst to face: arrogance, racism, dread and its close relation erotic dread, dissociation, shame, hopelessness, and jealousy. These bring up common ways in which analysts stop listening and struggle in the face of uncertainty and intensity; the difficulties in facing unbearable experiences with patients, such as suicidality; disruptions to being with patients in an affective and embodied way; and thwarted fantasies of being the ""hero"". With all of these difficult topics, Shah describes painful and tormenting experiences in a clinically meaningful way that allow growth. In this exceptional debut work, Shah demonstrates that what analysts feel, in their affects, bodies, and reveries with patients, is vital in helping them to understand and metabolise the patients' emotional experiences. This is a must-read for all practising clinicians."

Integrating diverse psychoanalytic traditions with his own theoretical and clinical insights, Salman Akhtar provides answers to these and other important questions in this realm. He weaves the existing conceptual schisms and technical diversity into an integrated theory and technique. In a truly original contribution, he delineates certain ubiquitous human fantasies (e.g., "someday" and "if only" fantasies of optimism and nostalgia, and fantasies of powerful psychic tethers that bind us to others) and shows how their pathological variants underlie the suffering of these patients.

Mitchell Wilson explores the fundamental role that lack and desire play in psychoanalytic interpretation by using a comparative method that engages different psychoanalytic traditions: Lacanian, Bionian, Kleinian, Contemporary Freudian. Investigating crucial questions Wilson asks: What is the nature of the psychoanalytic process? How are desire and counter-transference linked? What is the relationship between desire, analytic action, and psychoanalytic ethics?

Torment Me, But Don't Abandon Me: Psychoanalysis of the Severe Neuroses in a New Key offers analysts and psychodynamic therapists an innovative way of understanding the theoretical intersection of masochism, perversion, shame, guilt, narcissism substance abuse. This constellation of psychopathology frequently is seen in clinical practice and often proves to be a difficult personality organization to treat. While Dr. Wurmser relies on elements of classical analysis to construct his theoretical framework (including a theoretical and clinical analysis of super ego analysis), he incorporates contemporary relational and intersubjective perspectives understanding that the analyst's involvement of the 'self' is critical for the successful treatment of the serious neuroses.

Documents US Government attempts to justify torture techniques and coercive interrogation practices in ongoing hostilities.

This important new book introduces and discusses the underpinning of psychodynamic psychotherapy for torture survivors in a clinical setting and incorporates concepts from analytical psychology and other theoretical bases in order to provide readers with a deeper understanding of this complex trauma. Using the concepts of analytical psychology, relational psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, and relying on the theoretical basis of her book Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights (Routledge, 2017), Luci focuses on three key clinical cases and illustrates the therapeutic paths that the therapeutic dyad explore and experiences in order to get out of the patient’s inner prison created or aggravated by the experience of torture. The book discusses the role of the therapist when working with torture survivors, the requirement of a slow and cautious approach when dealing with such trauma, and the importance of a careful and respectful consideration of issues of identity, politics, and culture. Featuring a useful guide, this book will be of great interest to mental health professionals, psychotherapists and students practicing in services that provide assistance to torture and war trauma survivors.

Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights contributes to the development of that field of study called ‘psycho-social’ that is presently more and more committed to providing understanding of social phenomena, making use of the explicative perspective of psychoanalysis. The book seeks to develop a concise and integrated framework of understanding of torture as a socio-political phenomenon based on psychoanalytic thinking, through which different dimensions of the subject of study become more comprehensible. Monica Luci argues that torture performs a covert emotional function in society. In order to identify what this function might be, a profile of ‘torturous societies’ and the main psychological dynamics of social actors involved – torturers, victims, and bystanders – are drawn from literature. Accordingly, a wide-ranging description of the phenomenology of torture is provided, detecting an inclusive and recurring pattern of key elements. Relying on psychoanalytic concepts derived from different theoretical traditions, including British object relations theories, American relational psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, the study provides an advanced line of conceptual research, shaping a model, whose aim is tograsp the deep meaning of key intrapsychic, interpersonal and group dynamics involved in torture. Once a sufficiently coherent understanding has been reached, Luci proposes using it as a groundwork tool in the human rights field to re-think the best strategies of prevention and recovery from post-torture psychological and social suffering. The book initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and human rights, showing that the proposed psychoanalytic understanding is a viable conceptualisation for expanding thinking of crucial issues regarding torture, which might be relevant to human rights and legal doctrine, such as the responsibility of perpetrators, the reparation of victims and the question of ‘truth’. Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights is the first book to build a psychoanalytic theory of torture from which psychological, social and legal reflections, as well as practical aspects of treatment, can be mutually derived and understood. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and Jungians, as well as scholars of politics, social work and justice, and human rights and postgraduate students studying across these fields.

The first systematic analysis of the effectiveness of torture prevention.