Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series
Making a Difference in Patients' Lives
Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting
- By Sandra Buechler
Within the title of her book, Making a Difference in Patients' Lives, Sandra Buechler echoes the hope of all clinicians. But, she counters, experience soon convinces most of us that insight, on its own, is often not powerful enough to have a significant impact on how a life is actually lived. Many clinicians and therapists have turned toward emotional experience, within and outside the treatment setting, as a resource. How can the immense power of lived emotional experience be harnessed in the service of helping patients live richer, more satisfying lives?
Most patients come into treatment because they are too anxious, or depressed, or don’t seem to feel alive enough. Something is wrong with what they feel, or don’t feel. Given that the emotions operate as a system, with the intensity of each affecting the level of all the others, it makes sense that it would be an emotional experience that would have enough power to change what we feel. But, ironically, the wider culture, and even psychoanalysts, seem to favor "solutions" that aim to mute emotionality, rather than relying on one emotion to modify another. We turn to pharmaceutical, cognitive, or behavioral change to make a difference in how life feels. Because we are afraid of emotional intensity, we cut off our most powerful source of regulation.
In clear, jargon-free prose that utilizes both clinical vignettes and excerpts from poetry, art, and literature, Buechler explores how the power to feel can become the power to change. Through an active empathic engagement with the patient and an awareness of the healing potential inherent in each of our fundamental emotions, the clinician can make a substantial difference in the patient’s capacity to embrace life.
Published June 6th 2008 by The Analytic Press.
more information about Making a Difference in Patients' Lives
Coasting in the Countertransference
Conflicts of Self Interest between Analyst and Patient
- By Irwin Hirsch
Irwin Hirsch, author of Coasting in the Countertransference, asserts that counter-transference experience always has the potential to be used productively to benefit patients. However, he also observes that it is not unusual for analysts to 'coast' in their countertransferences, and to not use this experience to help treatment progress toward reaching patients and analysts stated analytic goals. He believes that it is quite common that analysts who have some conscious awareness of a problematic aspect of countertransference participation, or of a mutual enactment, nevertheless do nothing to change that participation and to use their awareness to move the therapy forward. Instead, analysts may prefer to maintain what has developed into perhaps a mutually comfortable equilibrium in the treatment, possibly rationalizing that the patient is not yet ready to deal with any potential disruption that a more active use of countertransference might precipitate.
This 'coasting' is emblematic of what Hirsch believes to be an ever present (and rarely addressed) conflict between analysts’ self-interest and pursuit of comfortable equilibrium, and what may be ideal for patients’ achievement of analytic aims. The acknowledgment of the power of analysts’ self-interest further highlights the contemporary view of a truly two-person psychology conception of psychoanalytic praxis. Analysts’ embrace of their selfish pursuit of comfortable equilibrium reflects both an acknowledgment of the analyst as a flawed other, and a potential willingness to abandon elements of self-interest for the greater good of the therapeutic project.
Published February 12th 2008 by The Analytic Press.
more information about Coasting in the Countertransference
Wounded By Reality
Understanding and Treating Adult Onset Trauma
- By Ghislaine Boulanger
The culmination of three decades of studying and treating survivors of adult onset trauma, Wounded by Reality is the first systematic attempt to differentiate adult onset trauma from childhood trauma, with which it is frequently confused.
When catastrophic events overtake adult lives, they often scar the psyche in ways that psychodynamically oriented clinicians struggle to understand. For Ghislaine Boulanger, the enormous challenge of working with these patients is unsurprising. Survivors of major catastrophe, whether a natural disaster, a life-threatening assault, a serious accident, or an act of terrorism, experience a near-fatal disruption of fundamental aspects of self experience. The sense of agency, of affectivity, of bodily integrity, the capacity for self-reflection, the sense of time, and the ability to relate to others - all are called into question.
Published March 2nd 2007 by The Analytic Press.
more information about Wounded By Reality
Prologue to Violence
Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime
- By Abby Stein
Despite mounting references to the "transgenerational transmission of violence," we still lack a compelling understanding of the linkage between the interpersonal violence of early life and the criminal violence of adulthood. In Prologue to Violence, Abby Stein draws on the gripping narratives of 65 incarcerated subjects and extensive material from law enforcement files to remedy this lacuna in both the forensic and psychodynamic literature. In the process, she calls into question prevailing beliefs about criminal character and motivation. For Stein the early trauma to which adult criminals are subjected remains unformulated and, as such, unavailable for reflection. Contrary to common belief, these criminals, especially sex murderers, do not commit their crimes in a rational or fully conscious way. They are not driven by deviant fantasy, their psychopathy is not inborn, and they rarely commit acts of violence "without conscience."
Stein’s interdisciplinary analysis of her data infuses contemporary relational psychoanalysis with the insights of neuroscience, traumatology, criminology, and cognitive and narrative psychology. A powerful challenge to offender treatment programs to address the shaping impact of childhood trauma rather than merely to "correct" the cognitions of violent offenders, Prologue to Violence will be equally compelling to researchers and academics investigating child abuse and adult violence. Its mental health readership will be broad and deep, ranging beyond clinicians who work with offender populations to all therapists who wrestle with experiences of dissociation and aggressive enactment in everyday life.
Published November 17th 2006 by The Analytic Press.
more information about Prologue to Violence
Prelogical Experience
An Inquiry into Dreams and Other Creative Processes
- By Edward S. Tauber, Maurice R. Green
One of the foundational texts of interpersonal psychoanalysis, Prelogical Experience (1959) is a pioneering attempt to elaborate an interpersonal theory of personality that encompasses the nonpropositional, nonverbal dimension of human experience. Prelogical processes, the authors hold, cannot be consigned to infancy; rather they shape experience throughout life and are especially salient in relation to dreams, emotion, perception, and the arts.
Of special note is Tauber and Green's elaboration of the clinical situation that grows out of an appreciation of prelogical experience. In a striking anticipation of contemporary thinking, they approach patient-therapist interaction in terms of the continuous exchange of "presentational data" by patient and analyst. These data enable patient and therapist alike to "know" more about the other than can ever be expressed in propositional terms.
This perspective assigns an important role to what Piaget would term "the cognitive unconscious" in the clinical process. It likewise sustains a view of the countertransference - which includes the analyst's own dreams - as a vital source of presentational data about the patient. As Donnel Stern notes in his Introduction, these and other insights "amount to a surprisingly contemporary description of psychoanalytic treatment."
Published November 29th 2005 by The Analytic Press.
more information about Prelogical Experience
The Fallacy of Understanding & The Ambiguity of Change
- By Edgar Levenson
In The Fallacy of Understanding (1972) and The Ambiguity of Change (1983), Edgar Levenson elaborated the many ways in which the psychoanalyst and the patient interact - unconsciously, continuously, inevitably. For Levenson, it was impossible for the analyst not to interact with the patient, and the therapeutic power of analysis derived from the analyst's ability to step back from the interactive embroilment (and the mutual enactments to which it led) and to reflect with the patient on what each was doing to, and with, the other.
Invariably, Levenson found, the analyst-analysand interaction reprised patterns of experience that typified the analysand's early family relationships. The reconceptualization of the analyst-analysand relationship and of the manner in which the analytic process unfolded would become foundational to contemporary interpersonal and relational approaches to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But Levenson's perspective was revolutionary at the time of its initial formulation in The Fallacy of Understanding and remained so at the time of its fuller elaboration in The Ambiguity of Change.
The Analytic Press is pleased to reprint within the Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Beries two works that have proven influential in the realignment of psychoanalytic thought and practice away from Freudian drive theory and toward a contemporary appreciation of clinical process in its interactive, enactive, and participatory dimensions. Newly introduced by series editor Donnel Stern, The Fallacy of Understanding and The Ambiguity of Change are richly deserving of the designation "contemporary classics" of psychoanalysis.
Published October 14th 2005 by The Analytic Press.
more information about The Fallacy of Understanding & The Ambiguity of Change
What Do Mothers Want?
Developmental Perspectives, Clinical Challenges
- Edited by Sheila F. Brown
What do mothers want and need from their parenting partners, their extended families, their friends, colleagues, and communities? And what can mental health professionals do to help them meet their daunting responsibilities in the contemporary world? The talented contributors to What Do Mothers Want? address these questions from perspectives that encompass differences in marital status, parental status, gender, and sexual orientation. Traversing the biological, psychological, cultural, and economic dimensions of mothering, they provide a compelling brief on the perplexing choices confronting mothers in the contemporary world.
Of course, mothers most basically want their children to be safe and healthy. But to this end they want and need many things: caring partners, intergenerational and community support, a responsive workplace, public services, and opportunities to share their experiences with other mothers. And they want their feelings and actions as mothers to be understood and accepted by those around them and by society at large. The role of psychotherapy in reaching these latter goals is taken up by many of the contributors. They reflect on the special psychological challenges of pregnancy, birth, and the arrival of a newborn into a couple’s (whether hetero- or homosexual) life, and they address new venues of therapeutic assistance, such as brief low-cost therapy for at-risk mothers and infants and group interventions to help couples grow into the new role of parental couples.
Published July 20th 2005 by The Analytic Press.
more information about What Do Mothers Want?
Clinical Values
Emotions That Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment
- By Sandra Buechler
In this refreshingly honest and open book, Sandra Buechler looks at therapeutic process issues from the standpoint of the human qualities and human resourcefulness that the therapist brings to each clinical encounter. Her concern is with the clinical values that shape the psychoanalytically oriented treatment experience. How, she asks, can one person evoke a range of values--curiosity, hope, kindness, courage, sense of purpose, emotional balance, the ability to bear loss, and integrity--in another person and thereby promote psychological change? For Buechler, these core values, and the emotions that infuse them, are at the heart of the clinical process. They permeate the texture and tone, and shape the content of what therapists say. They provide the framework for formulating and working toward treatment goals and keep the therapist emotionally alive in the face of the often draining vicissitudes of the treatment process.
Clinical Values: Emotions That Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment is addressed to therapists young and old. By focusing successively on different emotion-laden values, Buechler shows how one value or another can center the therapist within the session. Taken together, these values function as a clinical compass that provides the therapist with a sense of direction and militates against the all too frequent sense of "flying by the seat of one's pants." Buechler makes clear that the values that guide treatment derive from the full range of the clinician's human experiences, and she is candid in relating the personal experiences--from inside and outside the consulting room--that inform her own matrix of clinical values and her own clinical approach. A compelling record of one gifted therapist's pathway to clinical maturity, Clinical Values has a more general import: It exemplifies the variegated ways in which productive clinical work of any type ultimately revolves around the therapist's ability to make the most of being "all too human."
Published July 13th 2004 by The Analytic Press.
more information about Clinical Values