Forthcoming Books in the Relational Perspectives Book Series

Gender as Soft Assembly

• By Adrienne Harris

Gender as Soft Assembly weaves together insights from different disciplinary domains to open up new vistas of clinical understanding of what it means to inhabit, to perform, and to be, gendered. Opposing the traditional notion of development as the linear unfolding of predictable stages, Adrienne Harris argues that children become gendered in multiply configured contexts. And she proffers new developmental models to capture the fluid, constructed, and creative experiences of becoming and being gendered. According to Harris, these models, and the images to which they give rise, articulate not only with contemporary relational psychoanalysis but also with recent research into the origins of mentalization and symbolization.

In urging us to think of gender as co-constructed in a variety of relational contexts, Harris enlarges her psychoanalytic sensibility with the insights of attachment theory, linguistics, queer theory, and feminist criticism. Nor is she inattentive to the impact of history and culture on gender meanings. Special consideration is given to chaos theory, which Harris positions at the cutting edge of developmental psychology and uses to generate new perspectives and new images for comprehending and working clinically with gender.

Published August 21st 2008 by The Analytic Press.

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Dare to Be Human

A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Journey

• By Shoshani Michael

Daniel is 35, successful, a high level professional and an accomplished academic - yet he is also a virgin, who fears that he will spend the rest of his life alone. More importantly, Daniel has existed in an emotional bubble all of his life, and has had no intimate friendships. In other words, he is not fully alive, and seeks psychotherapy because he is haunted by not understanding what is wrong with him. He is attractive to women, yet as soon as a woman tries to get close to him, he runs away. Lacking an inner foundation, he fears that women will annihilate him, like his overbearing mother who abused him as a child.

Quite simply, this book is an unprecedented achievement, taking the reader into actual psychoanalytic sessions and sharing with the reader Michael Shoshani’s dialogues with Daniel, vividly illustrating his pain and struggle to transcend his existential plight. Furthermore, as the author of two sections of the book, Daniel himself provides a rare, insightful view from the other side of the couch, illuminating the challenge and change experienced within the other half of the therapeutic relationship.

It is a compelling psychological adventure, fusing together the intimacy of the therapy with an account of the revolutionary changes that have occurred in the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis over the last decades. Daniel is like no one else, and yet he is everyone, making this book a must for every person searching for self-knowledge, allowing the reader to identify with Daniel and his struggle to become human.

Published January 22nd 2009 by Routledge.

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The Hero in the Mirror

From Fear to Fortitude

• By Sue Grand

Recent socio-political conditions have moved psychoanalysis into an ongoing consideration of the nature of terror. In her previous book, The Reproduction of Evil (Analytic Press 2002), Sue Grand examined the perpetrator of 'evil': the way a history of trauma was transmuted into a repetition of trauma. In this book, she will offer a phenomenology of terror - through a look at war, genocide, terrorism, torture, as well as familial abuse - and query the conditions through which an individual (or group) retains its humanity through acts of rescue, resistance and memorial activity. This book asks questions about how/why some individuals (and communities) are immobilized by fear, while others can act without fear, or, in spite of it. Why do some abandon the persecuted other, while others retain a vision of that other as human, deserving of shelter? Why do some patients address dread in openness and concern, while others abandon the internal persecuted self, evacuating terror through schizoid compromise, manic defense, or narcissistic insularity? How have the practitioners of the 'impossible profession' defined their own affective and moral 'courage' in the consulting room; how does courage fail them in encounters with terror? Should the patient's social concern and 'heroic motility' be considered an important component of the therapeutic agenda? How does such motility develop, appear, and collapse within the analytic dyad? In the tradition of applied psychoanalysis, Grand moves back and forth from the individual to the historic-sociocultural, from literary to clinical narratives, articulating intrapsychic and intersubjective dynamisms which elucidate these issues.

Published September 1st 2009 by The Analytic Press.

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The Analyst in the Inner City, 2E

Race, Culture, and Class

• By Neil Altman

Published November 1st 2009 by The Analytic Press.

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