Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives in Psychoanalysis PDF Download

Author: Jon Mills
Publisher: Jason Aronson
ISBN: 1461630436
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This volume is the first concentrated effort to offer a philosophical critique of relational and intersubjective perspectives in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The distinguished group of scholars and clinicians assembled here trace the theoretical underpinnings of relational psychoanalysis, its divergence from traditional psychoanalytic paradigms, and the broader implications for clinical reform and therapeutic practice.

Author: Susan Lord
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315389940
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
There are moments of connection between analysts and patients during any therapeutic encounter upon which the therapy can turn. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis explores how analysts and therapists can experience these moments of meeting, shows how this interaction can become an enlivening and creative process, and seeks to recognise how it can change both the analyst and patient in profound and fundamental ways. The theory and practice of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has reached an exciting new moment of generous and generative interaction. As psychoanalysts become more intersubjective and relational in their work, it becomes increasingly critical that they develop approaches that have the capacity to harness and understand powerful moments of meeting, capable of propelling change through the therapeutic relationship. Often these are surprising human moments in which both client and clinician are moved and transformed. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis offers a window into the ways in which some of today’s practitioners think about, encourage, and work with these moments of meeting in their practices. Each chapter of the book offers theoretical material, case examples, and a discussion of various therapists’ reflections on and experiences with these moments of meeting. With contributions from relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and Jungian analysts, and covering essential topics such as shame, impasse, mindfulness, and group work, this book offers new theoretical thinking and practical clinical guidance on how best to work with moments of meeting in any relationally oriented therapeutic practice. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, workers in other mental health fields, graduate students, and anyone interested in change processes.

Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317771087
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In his final contribution to the psychoanalytic literature published two months before his untimely death on December 21, 2000, the late Stephen A. Mitchell provided a brilliant synthesis of the interrelated ideas that hover around, and describe aspects of, the relational matrix of human experience. Relationality charts the emergence of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis by reviewing the contributions of Loewald, Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Sullivan, whose voices converge in apprehending the fundamental relationality of mind. Mitchell draws on the multiple dimensions of attachment, intersubjectivity, and systems theory in espousing a clinical approach equally notable for its responsiveness and responsible restraint. Relationality "signals a new height in Mitchell's always illuminating writing" (Nancy Chodorow) and marks the "coming of age" of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis (Peter Fonagy).

Author: Joyce Anne Slochower
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135891710
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents a fresh, thought-provoking, and clinically useful integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. Seeking to broaden the concept of holding beyond work with severely regressed patients, she addresses holding in a variety of clinical contexts and focuses especially on holding processes in relation to issues of dependence, self-involvement, and hate. She also considers clinical work with patients "on the edge" - patients who seem deperately to need a holding experience that remains paradoxically elusive. Slochower begins her study by questioning the therapeutic limitations of an interactive style. There are times, she proposes, when certain patients simply cannot tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate subjective presence and instead need a holding experience. Though this holding function is essential to work with difficult patients, it enters into the treatment of all patients, whether as figure or ground. Slochower's relational understanding of holding leads her to consider the impact of holding on patient and analyst alike. Throughout, she emphasizes the analyst's and the patient's co-construction, during moments of holding, of an essential illusion of analytic attunement; this illusion serves to protect the patient from potentially disruptive aspects of the analyst's subjective presence. Slochower's case vignettes helpfully illuminate the intersubjective aspects of the holding process, including the clinical picture when a holding frame fails. She elaborates her thesis by considering the therapeutic function of holding in mourning. And she concludes her study with a cogent examination of the theoretical and clinical limitations of working with a holding process. A welcome reprise on an essential Winnicottian theme, Holding and Psychoanalysis broadens and deepens our understanding of the therapeutic role of the analyst's holding function.

Author: Lewis Aron
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317771265
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Contemporary psychoanalysis has devoted so much of its attention to relational and interpersonal aspects of psychic life that questions have begun to emerge regarding the place of the body and bodily experience in our psychological worlds. Relational Perspectives on the Body addresses these questions in exemplary fashion. Contemporary relational theorists synthesize a variety of theoretical trends and influences - including feminism and postmodernism - in order to provide innovative relational models of psyche-soma integration. Throughout the book, contributors pay attention to the analysand's and the analyst's experiences as they devise original technical responses to the multifaceted ways in which bodily experiences enter into the relational matrix of psychoanalytic treatment. In the process, contributors take up subjects that are seldom addressed in the clinical literature, including breast cancer in the analyst, psychoanalytic treatment of Munchausen's Syndrome, physical deformity, and musculoskeletal back pain. The final three chapters, by Looker, Balamuth, and Anderson, respectively, grew out of a study group that continues to investigate the relationship between somatic and symbolized experience. The editors are well equipped to undertake this project. Lewis Aron is a leading relational theorist and clinical analyst, and Frances Sommer Anderson has employed a psychoanalytically informed approach to treating musculoskeletal back pain and other somatic symptoms for 18 years. The editors have enlisted original contributions from an excellent group of colleagues, placing Relational Perspectives on the Body at the forefront of the revival of interest in the body and bodily experience in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Author: Marie T. Hoffman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135838488
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Ever since its nascent days, psychoanalysis has enjoyed an uneasy coexistence with religion. However, in recent decades, many analysts have been more interested in the healing potential of both psychoanalytic and religious experience and have explored how their respective narrative underpinnings may be remarkably similar. In Toward Mutual Recognition, Marie T. Hoffman takes just such an approach. Coming from a Christian perspective, she suggests that the current relational turn in psychoanalysis has been influenced by numerous theorists - analysts and philosophers alike - who were themselves shaped by an embedded Christian narrative. As a result, the redemptive concepts of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection - central to the tenets of Christianity - can be traced to relational theories, emerging analogously in the transformative process of mutual recognition in the concepts of identification, surrender, and gratitude, a trilogy which she develops as forming the "path of recognition." Each movement on this path of recognition is given thought-provoking, in-depth attention. Chapters dedicated to theoretical perspectives utilize the thinking of Benjamin, Hegel, and Ricoeur. In her historical perspectives, she explores the personal and professional histories of analysts such as Sullivan, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Erikson, Kohut, and Ferenczi, among others, who were influenced by the Christian narrative. Uniting it all together is the clinical perspective offered in the compelling extended case history of Mandy, a young lady whose treatment embodies and exemplifies each of the steps along the path of growth in both the psychoanalytic and Christian senses. Throughout, a relational sensibility is deployed as a cooperative counterpart to the Christian narrative, working both as a consilient dialogue and a vehicle for further integrative exploration. As a result, the specter of psychoanalysis and religion as mutually exclusive gives way to the hope and redemption offered by their mutual recognition.

Author: Neil J. Skolnick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000103897
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Includes a foreword by Nancy McWilliams In Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality, Neil J. Skolnick takes us on a journey that traces his personal evolution from a graduate student through to his career as a relational psychoanalyst. Skolnick uniquely shares his publications and presentations that span his professional career, weaving in issues around temporality and relational psychoanalysis. Accessible and deeply thought-provoking, this book explores the many ways our lives are pervaded and shaped by time, and how it infuses the problems that psychoanalysts work with in the consulting room. Skolnick begins each chapter with an introduction, contextualizing the papers in his own evolution as a relational analyst as well as in the broader evolution of the relational conceit in the psychoanalytic field. Following an incisive description of the realities and mysteries of time, he highlights how psychoanalysts have applied several temporal phenomena to the psychoanalytic process. The papers and presentations address an assortment of time-worn psychoanalytic issues as they have become redefined, reconfigured and re-contextualized by the application of a relational psychoanalytic perspective. It purports to chart the changes in the field and the author’s practice as, like many psychoanalysts, Skolnick explains his shifted perspective from classical to ego psychological, to relational psychoanalysis across the trajectory of his career. Finally, the author struggles to understand the contributions of time to the process of change in psychoanalytic thought and practice. This book also provides a fascinating guide to how our lives are contextualized in the invisibilities of time, illuminating the most frequent ways time influences psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Relational Psychoanalysis and Temporality will be of immense interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and therapists of all persuasions in their practice and training. It should also be of interest to philosophers, historians and scholars of psychoanalysis who have a general interest in studying the role of psychoanalysis in influencing contemporary trends of Western thought.

Author: Lewis Kirshner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317383508
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In this book, Lewis Kirshner explains and illustrates the concept of intersubjectivity and its application to psychoanalysis. By drawing on findings from neuroscience, infant research, cognitive psychology, Lacanian theory, and philosophy, Kirshner argues that the analytic relationship is best understood as a dialogic exchange of signs between two subjects—a semiotic process. Both subjects bring to the interaction a history and a set of unconscious desires, which inflect their responses. In order to work most effectively with patients, analysts must attend closely to the actual content of the exchange, rather than focusing on imagined contents of the patient's mind. The current situation revives a history that is shaped by the analyst's participation. Supported by numerous case studies, Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis: A Model for Theory and Practice is a valuable resource for psychotherapists and analysts seeking to refine their clinical goals and methods.

Author: Carlos Nemirovsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000166430
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Given the complexity of scientific developments inside and outside the psychoanalytic field, traditional definitions of basic psychoanalytic notions are no longer sufficiently comprehensive. We need conceptualizations that encompass new clinical phenomena observed in present-day patients and that take into account contributions inside, outside, and on the boundaries of our practice. This book discusses theoretical concepts which explain current clinical expressions that are as ineffable as they are commonplace. Our patients resort to these expressions when they feel distressed by their perception of themselves as unreal, empty, fragile, non-existent, non-desiring, doubtful about their identity, beset by feelings of futility and apathy, and emotionally numb. The book aims at contrasting the ideas of Winnicott and Kohut, which are connected with a clinical practice that sees each patient as unique and are moreover in direct contact with empirical facts, and applies them to the benefit of complex patients. These ideas facilitate the expansion of paths in both the theory and the practice of our profession. Uniquely contrasting the works of two seminal thinkers with a Latin American perspective, Winnicott and Kohut on Intersubjectivity and Complex Disorders will be invaluable to clinicians and psychoanalysts.

Author: Stephen Seligman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113696505X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The recent explosion of new research about infants, parental care, and infant-parent relationships has shown conclusively that human relationships are central motivators and organizers in development. Relationships in Development examines the practical implications for dynamic psychotherapy with both adults and children, especially following trauma. Stephen Seligman offers engaging examples of infant-parent interactions as well as of psychotherapeutic process. He traces the place of childhood and child development in psychoanalysis from Freud onward, showing how different images about babies evolved and influenced analytic theory and practice. Relationships in Development offers a new integration of ideas that updates established psychoanalytic models in a new context: "Relational-developmental psychoanalysis." Seligman integrates four crucial domains: Infancy Research, including attachment theory and research Developmental Psychoanalysis Relational/intersubjective Psychoanalysis Classical Freudian, Kleinian, and Object Relations theories (including Winnicott). An array of specific sources are included: developmental neuroscience, attachment theory and research, studies of emotion, trauma and infant-parent interaction, and nonlinear dynamic systems theories. Although new psychoanalytic approaches are featured, the classical theories are not neglected, including the Freudian, Kleinian, Winnicottian, and Ego Psychology orientations. Seligman links current knowledge about early experiences and how they shape later development with the traditional psychoanalytic attention to the irrational, unconscious, turbulent, and unknowable aspects of the mind and human interaction. These different fields are taken together to offer an open and flexible approach to psychodynamic therapy with a variety of patients in different socioeconomic and cultural situations. Relationships in Development will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and graduate students in psychology, social work, and psychotherapy. The fundamental issues and implications presented will also be of great importance to the wider psychodynamic and psychotherapeutic communities.