The Psychoanalyst S Superegos Ego Ideals And Blind Spots

Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts enter an emotional relationship when they treat a patient; no matter how experienced they may be, their personalities inform but also limit their ability to recognise and give thought to what happens in the consulting room. The Psychoanalyst’s Superegos, Ego Ideals and Blind Spots investigates the nature of these constrictions on the clinician’s sensitivity. Vic Sedlak examines clinicians’ fear of a superego which threatens to become censorious of themselves or their patient and their need to aspire to standards demanded by their ego ideals. These dynamic forces are considered in relation to treatments which fail, to supervision and to recent innovations in psychoanalytic technique. The difficulty of giving thought to hostility is particularly stressed. Richly illustrated with clinical material, this book will enable practitioners to recognise the unconscious forces which militate against their clinical effectiveness.

A video of Don Carveth discussing the book and its subject matter can be accessed using the following web URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7tGq0uEtU Since the classical Freudian and ego psychology paradigms lost their position of dominance in the late 1950s, psychoanalysis became a multi-paradigm science with those working in the different frameworks increasingly engaging only with those in the same or related intellectual "silos." Beginning with Freud’s theory of human nature and civilization, Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice proceeds to review and critically evaluate a series of major post-Freudian contributions to psychoanalytic thought. In response to the defects, blind spots and biases in Freud’s work, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, Erich Fromm, Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Heinrich Racker, Ernest Becker amongst others offered useful correctives and innovations that are, nevertheless, themselves in need of remediation for their own forms of one-sidedness. Through Carveth’s comparative exploration, readers will acquire a sense of what is enduringly valuable in these diverse psychoanalytic contributions, as well as exposure to the dialectically deconstructive method of critique that Carveth sees as central to psychoanalytic thinking at its best. Carveth violates the taboo against speaking of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real unless one is a Lacanian, or the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions unless one is a Kleinian, or id, ego, superego, ego-ideal and conscience unless one is a Freudian ego psychologist, and so on. Out of dialogue and mutual critique, psychoanalysis can over time separate the wheat from the chaff, collect the wheat, and approach an ever-evolving synthesis. Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and, more broadly, to readers in philosophy, social science and critical social theory.

This book provides an intimate portrait of a clinician’s psychoanalytic approach to working in the public health sector with people suffering from acute and chronic emotional pain. Drawing on three central psychoanalytic concepts of countertransference, projective identification, and the destructive superego, Paul Terry weaves together a unique and distinctive psychoanalytically-based approach to psychotherapeutic work. He illustrates this approach in detailed, almost moment-by-moment case studies of his work with people suffering from depression, psychosis, dependency, loneliness, dementia, and terminal illness. He also shows how his approach helps him to understand social and political issues of war, the holocaust, entitlement, and sexual identity. For readers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic theory, the book concludes with an appendix in which there is a summary of some Kleinian psychoanalytic concepts and psychoanalytic studies of psychosis. This informative, compelling, and moving book will act as a valuable resource for students training in psychoanalysis and to work in public settings along with career psychologists and mental health professionals seeking to better understand their clients and experiences.

Couples as Parents: Explorations in Couple Therapy explores the complex task of parenting from the perspective of the couple relationship. A book for clinicians and parents alike, it describes problems that can occur during the transition to parenthood and the initial decision to have a child to raising young children and adolescents. The book offers a comprehensive exploration of the nature and patterns of intimate partner relationships and how they can be affected by such things as the loss of a baby, raising a child with autism or adoption. Chapters delve into issues unique to same-sex parents and those facing an empty nest. With moving clinical examples, it illustrates how a couple's sex life can be altered on becoming parents and describes how parents can best help their children as they separate. Couples as Parents explains how couple therapy has a unique stance with which to help parents and describes clinical vignettes that demonstrate how parents have been helped in the past. The book considers the historical context of couple relationships, utilises research and psychoanalytic ways of thinking to further understanding for psychotherapists and interested parents, as well as offering a variety of therapeutic approaches to the specific needs of parents, whether as a couple, separated or single.

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.

In this careful exposition of the concept of the ego ideal, the author explores the short cuts that are available to the psyche and traces the longer, more painful path to maturity. She develops in her own way Freud's view that people are forever seeking to regain a lost state of perfection, the state in which they were their own ideal - "primary narcissism." The book includes chapters on the following aspects of the ego ideal: perversion, genitality, being-in-love, groups, sublimation in the creative process, reality testing, and the superego.

This book follows the personal and professional journeys of three Jewish women from Budapest, originally classmates in the same high school. The book shows how they and their families were marked by the Shoah, and explores the impact of the social, cultural, and political milieu in which they travelled upon their development as psychoanalysts. Following an introduction by the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Judit Mészáros, who gives a broad historical review of Hungarian Jewry during the Shoah and the Soviet era, the three authors provide autobiographical accounts of their own psychoanalytic evolution and interconnectedness. They describe their motivations for emigrating from Hungary, their early struggles to fit in, and their eventual acculturation. The authors explore their coming of age as clinicians in their adopted homelands and explain how their theoretical orientation and clinical styles were shaped by their respective analytic environments, their training experiences, and their own personal histories. They offer clinical vignettes to illustrate their respective psychoanalytic perspective. The book closes with an afterword from American psychoanalyst, Adrienne Harris, who contemplates the authors’ immigration experiences alongside her own. Replete with personal, cultural, and political history, this book will prove both informative and fascinating for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists as well as the general public.

The superego is one of those psychoanalytic concepts that has been assimilated into ordinary language, like repression, the unconscious and the Oedipus complex. Because it has become such a familiar notion, its complexity may not always be appreciated, nor the controversy that it can inspire. Its origins, for example, its timing in the course of development, whether and how it is influenced by gender all these questions and others have been the source of lively disagreement. For psychoanalysts it is a fundamental concept of their discipline, but it belongs to a meta psychology whose value is often questioned, and opinions might vary on whether it remains truly alive as a generative, energising idea in contemporary psychoanalysis.