Relational Perspectives Book Series

Repair of the Soul

Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis

• By Karen E. Starr

Repair of the Soul examines transformation from the perspective of Jewish mysticism and psychoanalysis, addressing the question of how one achieves self-understanding that leads not only to insight but also to meaningful change. In this beautifully written and thought-provoking book, Karen Starr draws upon a contemporary relational approach to psychoanalysis to explore the spiritual dimension of psychic change within the context of the psychoanalytic relationship. Influenced by the work of Lewis Aron, Steven Mitchell and other relational theorists, and drawing upon contemporary scholarship in the field of Jewish studies, Starr brings the ideas of the Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition, into dialogue with modern psychoanalytic thought. Repair of the Soul provides a scholarly integration of several kabbalistic and psychoanalytic themes relating to transformation, including faith, surrender, authenticity, and mutuality, as well as a unique exploration of the relationship of the individual to the universal. Starr uses the Kabbalah’s metaphors as a vivid framework with which to illuminate the experience of transformation in psychoanalytic process, and to explore the evolving view of the psychoanalytic relationship as one in which both parties - the analyst as well as the patient - are transformed.

Published June 12th 2008 by The Analytic Press.

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Adolescent Identities

A Collection of Readings

• Edited by Deborah L. Browning

Adolescent Identities draws the reader into the inner world of the adolescent to examine the process of identity formation through the various lenses of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and psychoanalysis.

The volume reveals there is no single "normal" adolescent, nor is there a singular adolescent experience. Editor Deborah L. Browning illustrates that in the course of development, each individual must integrate one’s unique biologically-given constitution and temperament, personal life history, and the influence of the social and cultural milieu.

The book consists of six sections, arranged by concentric circles of influence, from the most exterior, identifiable, and potentially overt and conscious, to the most internal, private, and potentially unconscious concerns. Opening papers are drawn from sociology, European history, and cross-cultural anthropology, and address the question of whether and how adolescence can be considered a stage in development.

The second section explores how visible or potentially knowable minority statuses are experienced, and how these interact with individual identity processes. Moving closer to the adolescent’s interpersonal world, the third section presents papers about intimate relationships between adolescents and about the conscious preoccupations of adolescents when they are alone.

Extensive excerpts of Erikson’s most important contributions on identity formation and adolescence are offered in the fourth section. Papers on the most internal, private, and potentially unconscious conflicts comprise the fifth section. The book concludes with a section of papers on "failed solutions" to the challenge of adolescent identity consolidation: homelessness, drug abuse, eating disorders, and suicide.

Adolescent Identities provides mental health practitioners, teachers, and graduate students in both fields with a variety of perspectives on the internal experience of adolescents.

Published August 16th 2007 by The Analytic Press.

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Bodies In Treatment

The Unspoken Dimension

• Edited by Frances Sommer Anderson

Bodies in Treatment is a challenging volume that brings into conceptual focus an "unspoken dimension" of clinical work - the body and nonverbal communication - that has long occupied the shadowy realm of tacit knowledge. By bringing visceral, sensory, and imagistic modes of emotional processing to the forefront, Editor Frances Sommer Anderson and the contributors to this original collection expand the domain of psychodynamic engagement. Working at the leading edge of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and in the forefront of the integrative psychotherapy movement, Anderson has created a collaborative project that stimulates interdisciplinary dialogue on the developmental neurobiology of attachment, the micro-processing of interchanges between the infant and caregiver, the neuroscience of emotional processing and trauma, body-focused talking treatments for trauma, and research in cognitive science.

Enlightened by experiencing body-based treatments for thirty years, Anderson reflects on the powerful impact of these interventions, recounting attempts to integrate her somatically-informed discoveries into the "talking" frame. Reaching further, her contributors present richly informative accounts of how experiences in body-based modalities can be creatively integrated into a psychoanalytic framework of treatment. Readers are introduced to specialized modalities, such as craniosacral therapy and polarity therapy, as well as to the adjunctive use of yoga, the effectiveness of which can be grounded neurophysiologically. Somatic interventions are discussed in terms of the extent to which they can promote depth-psychological change outside the psychoanalytic consulting room as well as how they can enrich the relational process in psychodynamic treatment. The final sections of Bodies in Treatment explore the range of ways in which patients’ and therapists’ bodies engage, sustain, and contain the dynamics of treatment.

Published June 26th 2007 by The Analytic Press.

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Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis

A Relational Perspective for the Discipline's Second Century

• By Brent Willock

This exceptionally practical and insightful new text explores the emerging field of comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. It provides an invaluable framework for approaching the currently fractious state of the psychoanalytic discipline, divided as it is into diverse schools of thought, presenting many conceptual challenges. Moving beyond the usual borders of psychoanalysis, Willock usefully draws on insights from neighboring disciplines to shed additional light on the core issue.

Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis is divided into two sections for organizational clarity. Part I is an intriguing investigation into the nature of thought and its intrinsic problems. It convincingly builds a case for the need, after a century of disciplinary development, to move beyond delineated schools, and proposes a method for achieving this goal. The succeeding section elaborates this desideratum in detail, exploring its implications with respect to theory, organizations, practice, and pedagogy. This second portion of the volume is most applicable to everyday concerns with improving work in the field, be it in the consulting room, classroom, or in and between various psychoanalytic organizations.

Published June 20th 2007 by The Analytic Press.

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Relational Psychoanalysis, V. 3

New Voices

• Edited by Melanie Suchet, Adrienne Harris, Lewis Aron

Relational psychoanalysis has revivified psychoanalytic discourse by attesting to the analyst's multidimensional subjectivity and then showing how this subjectivity opens to deeper insights about the experience of analysis. Volume 3 of the Relational Psychoanalysis Book Series enlarges this ongoing project in significant ways. Here, leading relational theorists explore the cultural, racial, class-conscious, gendered, and even traumatized anlagen of the self as pathways to clinical understanding.

Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices is especially a forum for new relational voices and new idioms of relational discourse. Established writers, Muriel Dimen, Sue Grand, and Ruth Stein among them, utilize aspects of their own subjectivity to illuminate heretofore neglected dimensions of cultural experience, of trauma, and of clinical stalemate. A host of new voices applies relational thinking to aspects of race, class, and politics as they emerge in the clinical situation.

The contributors to Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices are boldly unconventional – in their topics, in their modes of discourse, and in their innovative and often courageous uses of self. Collectively, they convey the ever widening scope of the relational sensibility. The "relational turn" keeps turning.

Published March 23rd 2007 by The Analytic Press.

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Creating Bodies

Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival

• By Katie Gentile

Amid the welter of clinical studies, memoirs, and other death-defying tales of eating disorders, we remain unclear about the relationships among trauma, anorexia, and bulimia, and about the psychological pathways to recovery. Creating Bodies offers the gripping story of healing and transformation detailed in one woman's diaries. Hannah wrote 18 diaries between the ages of 14 and 32. In the excerpts reprinted herein, we watch Hannah navigate violent adolescent friendships, descend into anorexia and bulimia, marry an abusive man, struggle to recover memories of sexual abuse, and finally to heal. And we learn of her interaction with Katie Gentile, who analyzed her diaries and met with Hannah to discuss the latter's own understanding of the diaries and of the diary analysis.

Through a close study of both the content and structure of Hannah's diaries, Gentile shows how unspeakable, embodied remnants of sexual trauma become symbolized and how, within this process, Hannah's bulimia functioned as both an act of self destruction and a lifesaving form of resistance. Anchored in relational psychoanalysis and critical feminist theory, Creating Bodies provides a uniquely longitudinal account of the development of, and ultimate recovery from, an eating disorder fueled by childhood sexual abuse. An invaluable contribution to the literature on adolescent and adult eating disorders, it is also a thoughtful meditation on how the act of writing deepens issues of relationality and, over time, promotes cure. Psychoanalysts will be intrigued by the rich process issues embedded in prose journals, notes, and letters - both close to and distinct from clinical process issues - that Gentile uses to understand Hannah's projects of self-destruction and reconstruction.

Published August 16th 2006 by The Analytic Press.

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Getting From Here to There

Analytic Love, Analytic Process

• By Sheldon Bach

It is clinical work with the most difficult patients - those with severe narcissistic, sadomasochistic, and borderline disorders - that poses the greatest challenge to the therapist's guiding assumptions about clinical process; indeed, such work often leads therapists to question beliefs and expectations that formerly seemed self-evident. In Getting From Here to There: Analytic Love, Analytic Process, Sheldon Bach elaborates the holistic vision that guides him in work with just such patients. He dwells especially on the "attentive presence" through which the analyst effects a "meeting" with patients that invites the latter's trust in the analyst and in the therapeutic process. And he writes of love - of patient for analyst and of analyst for patient - that grows out of this mutual trust and sustains therapeutic process. For Bach, analytic therapy aims at understanding the person as a mind-body unity that manifests particular states of consciousness.

This holistic vision of treatment sustains a flexible clinical orientation that enables the analyst to "meet" states of consciousness in order to bring them into a system of which the analyst forms a part. Bach thoughtfully explores the clinical issues that enter into this taxing process, among them the establishment and maintenence of basic trust; the patient's or the therapist's presence in the other's mind; and the shifts in agency between patient and therapist. And he describes at length the frequently exhausting, even demoralizing, transference-countertransference struggles that enter into this type of analytic work.

Throughout, Bach is guided by the conviction that work with extremely challenging patients promotes the psychological growth and increased self-knowledge of patient and analyst alike. And he is admirably clear that the "mutual living through" of such treatments nurtures a kind of love between patient and analyst.

Getting From Here to There not only records the clinical lessons learned by an unusually gifted analyst; it also chronicles the movement of psychoanalysis itself from the dissection of love into component parts to a synthetic grasp of its vital role in psychoanalytically informed treatment.

Published January 31st 2006 by The Analytic Press.

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Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World

• By Danielle Knafo, Kenneth Feiner

What is the role of unconscious fantasies in psychological development, in psychopathology, and in the arts? In Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World, Danielle Knafo and Kenneth Feiner return to these interlinked questions with a specific goal in mind: a contemporary appreciation of fantasy in its multiform relational contexts. To this end, they provide detailed examinations of primal scene, family romance, and castration fantasies, respectively. Each category of fantasy is pushed beyond its "classical" psychoanalytic meaning by attending to the child's ubiquitous concerns about sexual difference and feelings of incompleteness; her perception of the parental relationship; and the multiple, shifting identifications that grow out of this relationship.

Evocative clinical examples illuminate the manner in which patients and analysts play out these three core fantasies. They are balanced by chapters that explore the generative side of these same fantasies in the arts. David Lynch's film Blue Velvet provides an artistic rendering of the primal scene; Jerzy Kosinki's life and work illustrates the family romance; and French multimedia artist Orlan's "carnal art" recreates the trauma of castration. Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World is a tightly woven study
of broad and basic questions. It is in equal measure a contemporary re-visioning of the grounds of fantasy formation, a relationally informed guide to clinical techniques for dealing with unconscious fantasy, and an examination of the generative potential of unconscious fantasy in the arts. Out of the authors’ broadening and broad-minded sensibility emerges an illuminating study of the manifold ways in which unconscious fantasies shape lives and enrich clinical work.

Published December 21st 2005 by The Analytic Press.

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The Healer's Bent

Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter

• By James McLaughlin

Over the course of a 50-year career, James T. McLaughlin has sought to open the playing field of psychoanalytic exploration by treating unconscious processes as the very material from which we fashion meaningful lives. His unique, iconoclastic perspective, which challenged the conventions of his time and professional milieu, not only engages the creative tension between the stance of the analyst and the stance of the healer, but also contains striking intimations of contemporary relational and interpersonal models of psychoanalytic treatment. The Healer's Bent, which thematically integrates published and unpublished papers and contains three chapters of heretofore unpublished autobiographical reflection, bridges analytic practice and other psychotherapeutic modalities. It will make McLaughlin's distinct approach to clinical theory and practice widely available to a broad and receptive readership.

Published April 20th 2005 by The Analytic Press.

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Relational Psychoanalysis, Volume 2

Innovation and Expansion

• Edited by Lewis Aron, Adrienne Harris

The "relational turn" has transformed the field of psychoanalysis, with an impact that cuts across different schools of thought and clinical modalities.

In the six years following publication of Volume 1, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition, relational theorizing has continued to develop, expand, and challenge the parameters of clinical discourse. It has been a period of loss, with the passing of Stephen A. Mitchell and Emmanuel Ghent, but also a period of great promise, marked by the burgeoning publication of relational books and journals and the launching of relational training institutes and professional associations.

Volume 2, Relational Psychoanalysis: Innovation and Expansion, brings together key papers of the recent past that exemplify the continuing growth and refinement of the relational sensibility. In selecting these papers, Editors Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris have stressed the shared relational dimension of different psychoanalytic traditions, and they have used such commonalities to structure the best recent contributions to the literature. The topics covered in Volume 2 reflect both the evolution of psychoanalysis and the unique pathways that leading relational writers have been pursuing and in some cases establishing.

Published April 11th 2005 by The Analytic Press.

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Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors

A Relational View

• By Sebastiano Santostefano

Building on relational conceptualizations of enactment and on developmental research that attests to the role of embodied, nonverbal language in the meanings children impute to their experiences, Sebastiano Santostefano offers this compelling demonstration of effective child therapy conducted in the “great outdoors.” Specifically, he argues that, for the child, traumatic life-metaphors should be resolved at an embodied rather than an exclusively verbal level; they should be resolved, that is, as they are enacted between child and therapist. To this end, child and therapist must take advantage of all the indoor and outdoor environments available to them. As they take therapy to nontraditional places, relying on the nonverbal vocabulary they have constructed together, they move toward enacted solutions to relational crises, solutions that revise the child’s sense of self and ability to form new and productive relationships.

Published November 12th 2004 by The Analytic Press.

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The Designed Self

Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities

• By Carlo Strenger

What can contemporary psychoanalysis bring to the understanding of Generation X, a cohort for whom the trivialization of a dizzying array of possible experiences teamed with the pressure to lead spectacular lives often leads to diffuse feelings of confusion, depression, and disorientation. The Designed Self chronicles Strenger's therapeutic encounters with five extraordinarily gifted young adults for whom the ideal of authenticity long associated with the Baby-Boom generation was supplanted by the need to experiment endlessly with the self. Perpetual self-experimentation, constantly reinforced by the media, came to encompass everything from career choice, to hair color, to body shape, to gender identity. In compelling clinical stories, Strenger introduces us to patients for whom the project of shaping the self had become a cultural imperative no less than an expression of individuality. At once insightful and cautionary, The Designed Self investigates how psychoanalysis must change if it is to claim cultural relevance and therapeutic effectiveness in The Age of the Designed Self.

Published October 12th 2004 by The Analytic Press.

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Impossible Training

A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Training

• By Emanuel Berman

Over the past century psychoanalysis has gone on to establish training institutes, professional societies, accreditation procedures, and models of education, thus bringing into uneasy alliance all three impossible pursuits. In Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education, Emanuel Berman turns his attention to the current status and future prospects of this daunting project.

Berman is ideally suited to tackle the impossibility of psychoanalytic education. A graduate of two psychoanalytic institutes, one in Israel and one in America, he has devoted much of his professional life to psychoanalytic education and the organizational issues embedded in it. In Impossible Training, Berman describes the complex emotional and organizational dynamics of psychoanalytic training. Placing these issues within the context of major controversies in psychoanalytic history, he shows how generations of students have either idealized a "proper analytic identity," which evolves into a persecutory ideal, or rebelled against these standards. Are such persecuting and infantilizing trends inherent in analytic training, he asks, or can psychoanalytic education transcend them through changes in its structure and rules?

For Berman, the relational and intersubjective trends in contemporary psychoanalysis call for changes in analytic supervision, not least of which is heightened attentiveness to the many relationships that gain expression in the supervisory process. Envisioned in this relational manner, supervision can become a more personal experience, less guarded, and more conducive to the development of a fertile transitional space between supervisor and supervisee. Anchoring his consideration of the present in the controversies of the past, Berman concludes by considering the mission of psychoanalytic educators today: to provide trainees with the resources to cope creatively with the as yet unknown challenges of tomorrow.

Published August 2nd 2004 by The Analytic Press.

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Holding and Psychoanalysis

A Relational Approach

• By Joyce A. Slochower

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.

Published March 25th 2004 by The Analytic Press.

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Minding Spirituality

• By Randall Lehmann Sorenson

In Minding Spirituality, Randall Sorenson, a clinical psychoanalyst, "invites us to take an interest in our patients' spirituality that is respectful but not diffident, curious but not reductionistic, welcoming but not indoctrinating." Out of this invitation emerges a fascinating and broadening investigation of how contemporary psychoanalysis can "mind" spirituality in the threefold sense of being bothered by it, of attending to it, and of cultivating it.

Both the questions Sorenson asks, and the answers he begins to formulate, reflect progressive changes in the psychoanalytic understanding of spirituality. Sorenson begins by quantitatively analyzing 75 years of journal literature and documenting how psychoanalytic approaches to religious and spiritual experiences have evolved far beyond the "wholesale pathologizing of religion" prevalent during Freud's lifetime. Then, in successive chapters, he explores and illustrates the kind of clinical technique appropriate to the modern treatment of religious issues. And the issue of technique is consequential in more than one way -- Sorenson presents evidence that how analysts work clinically has a greater impact on their patients' spirituality than the patients' own parents have.

Sorenson brings an array of disciplinary perspectives to bear in examining the multiple relationships among psychoanalysis, religion, and spirituality. Empirical analysis, psychoanalytic history, sociology of religion, comparative theory, and sustained clinical interpretation all enter into his effort to open a dialogue that is clinically relevant. Turning traditional critiques of psychoanalytic training on their head, he argues that psychoanalytic education has much to learn from models of contemporary theological education. Beautifully crafted and engagingly written, Minding Spirituality not only invites interdisciplinary dialogue but, via Sorenson's wide-ranging and passionately open-minded scholarship, exemplifies it.

Published February 17th 2004 by The Analytic Press.

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Relationality

From Attachment to Intersubjectivity

• By Stephen A. Mitchell

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).

Published December 1st 2003 by The Analytic Press.

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Sexuality, Intimacy, Power

• By Muriel Dimen

Can contemporary psychoanalysis tell us anything about sexuality that is new and clinically meaningful? It most certainly can, answers Muriel Dimen in Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, a compelling attempt to revivify Freud's core interest, in "sexual impulses in the ordinary sense of the term." But there is nothing ordinary about Dimen's project. Drawing on contemporary relational theory, feminism, and postmodernism, she takes a sustained, sometimes irreverent, look at assumptions about psychosexuality. For Dimen, the shift from dualism to multiplicity that has reshaped a range of disciplines can also be brought to bear on our thinking about sexuality. She urges us to return to the open-mindedness hiding between the lines and buried in the footnotes of Freud's writings, and to replace the determinism into which his thought has hardened with more fluid notions of contingency, paradox, and thirdness.

By unveiling the colloquy among psychoanalysis, social theory, and feminism, Dimen challenges clinicians and academicians alike to rethink ideas about gender, eroticism, and perversion. She explores, among other topics, the relations between Lust and libido; the limitations of Darwinian thought in theorizing homosexuality; the body as projective test; and the intimate tangle of love and hate between women. Generous clinical examples illustrate the ways in which a radical re-visioning of psychosexuality benefits therapists and patients alike.

Mixing medium and message, Dimen draws on a variety of disciplines and styles to delineate the ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes that subtend sexuality in all its personal and clinical complexity. A brilliant example of contemporary psychoanalytic theory at its destabilizing best, Sexuality, Intimacy, Power is equally a historical document that will intrigue and enlighten students of women's, gender, and queer studies.

Published June 1st 2003 by The Analytic Press.

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September 11

Trauma and Human Bonds

• Edited by Susan Coates, Jane Rosenthal, Daniel Schechter

Drawing on research from a variety of domains - clinical studies of trauma, developmental psychopathology, interpersonal psychobiology, epidemiology, and social policy - September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds addresses especially the fundamental relatiobship of human bonds to trauma and underscores the manner in which developments in all these fields are coming together in complementary ways that sustain a key finding: that trauma must be understood in its relational and attachment contexts. The quality of early emotional attachments, differences in attachment styles to family milieus, and the psychological qualities that enable traumatized parents to avoid traumatizing their children are among the topics through which these contexts are explored. From their various disciplinary vantage points, the contributions converge to show how human relationships can either provide an anodyne to trauma or serve as the vehicle of its transmission.

As Susan Coates observes, a major legacy of 9/11 is the realization that "there are no simple truths in the world of trauma studies, no easy-to-remember anodynes or pharmacologic magic bullets or depth-psychological schematizations that will hold true for a majority or even a sizable minority of cases." Yet, in delineating the multiple connections between human relations and trauma, and in elaborating these connections from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to September 11 have taken a decisive first step to consolidate new knowledge about trauma and to demonstrate how it can assist clinicians who encounter diverse responses to trauma in their day-to-day work. A sobering reminder of shared human vulnerability in the face of devastating events, September 11 is also a heartening reminder of resiliency in the face of overwhelming loss and of the healing potential of human connection.

Published June 1st 2003 by The Analytic Press.

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Soul on the Couch

Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

• Edited by Charles Spezzano, Gerald J. Gargiulo

Ever since Freud put religion on the couch in "The Future of an Illusion," there has been an uneasy peace, with occasional skirmishes, between these two great disciplines of subjectivity. As prime meaning givers, God and the unconscious have vied for supremacy in our thinking about ourselves, especially our thinking about our human nature, our moral stature, and our destiny. Freud, in his bold manner, found projection, fear, and denial to be the wellspring of religion's domination over man. In analogous fashion, those giving primacy to the soul over the unconscious have long dismissed psychoanalysis as mechanistic, reductionistic, and hence inadequate to the examination of spirituality. Soul on the Couch is premised on the belief that discourse about the soul and discourse from the couch can inform, and not simply ignore, one another. It brings together scholars and psychoanalysts at the forefront of an interdisciplinary dialogue that is vitally important to the growth of both disciplines. Their essays are not only models of reflective inquiry; they also illuminate the syntheses that emerge when analysts and scholars of religion bridge the gap that has long separated them and speak to one another.

Published April 1st 2003 by The Analytic Press.

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Affect in Psychoanalysis

A Clinical Synthesis

• By Charles Spezzano

Drawing on the writings of Freud, Fairbairn, Klein, Sullivan, and Winnicott, Spezzano offers a radical redefinition of the analytic process as the intersubjective elaboration and regulation of affect. The plight of analytic patients, he holds, is imprisonment within crude fantasy elaborations of developmentally significant feeling states. Analytic treatment fosters the patient's capacity to keep alive in consciousness, and hence reflect on, these previously warded-off affective states; it thereby provides a second chance to achieve competence in using feeling states to understand the self within its relational landscape.

Published February 1st 2003 by The Analytic Press.

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The Reproduction of Evil

A Clinical and Cultural Perspective

• By Sue Grand

Why is it that victims of abuse so often become perpetrators, and what can psychoanalysis offer to these survivor-perpetrators, whose criminal conduct seems to transcend the possibilities of empathic psychoanalytic inquiry. In The Reproduction of Evil, Sue Grand engages these deeply troublesome issues in the belief that psychoanalysts can and should reclaim the study of what lies beyond ordinary human empathy. Her goal is to elucidate the link between traumatic memory and the perpetration of evil. To this end, she presents an interdisciplinary analysis, at once scholarly and passionate, of the ways in which families and cultures transform victims of malignant trauma into perpetrators of these very traumas on others. Through intensive case studies, Grand draws the reader into the world of the survivor-perpetrators who commit acts of child abuse, of incest, of racial persecution, even of homicide and genocide. By infusing psychoanalytic inquiry with cultural analysis and by supplementing clinical vignettes with well-chosen literary illustrations, Grand is able to convey the survivor-perpetrator's immediacy of experience in a manner that readers may find unsettling, even uncanny.

By interweaving psychoanalytic, sociohistorical, and literary perspectives, Grand fills a critical lacuna in the literature about trauma and its intergenerational transmission. Her analysis of the psychodynamic processes and cultural tensions that bind perpetrators, victims, and bystanders provides trenchant insights into the violence and fragmentation that beset our society. Essential reading for a wide clinical audience, The Reproduction of Evil will also be powerfully informative for academic and lay readers interested in the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural factors that account for the perpetuation of evil from generation to generation.

Published June 1st 2002 by The Analytic Press.

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A Meeting of Minds

Mutuality in Psychoanalysis

• By Lewis Aron

In this richly nuanced assessment of the various dimensions of mutuality in psychoanalysis, Aron shows that the relational approach to psychoanalysis is a powerful guide to issues of technique and therapeutic strategy. From his reappraisal of the concepts of interaction and enactment, to his examination of the issue of analyst self-disclosure, to his concluding remarks on the relational import of the analyst's ethics and values, Aron squarely accepts the clinical responsibilities attendant to a postmodern critique of psychoanalytic foundations.

Published December 1st 2001 by The Analytic Press.

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The Therapist as a Person

Life Crises, Life Choices, Life Experiences, and Their Effects on Treatment

• Edited by Barbara Gerson

In this collection of powerfully illuminating and often poignant essays, contributors candidly discuss the impact of central life crises and identity concerns on their work as therapists. With chapters focusing on identity concerns associated with the body-self (body size, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age), urgent life crises, and defining life circumstances, The Therapist as a Person exemplifies the myriad ways in which the therapist's subjectivity shapes his or her interaction with patients. Included in the collection are life events rarely if ever dealt with in the literature: the death of family members, late pregnancy loss, divorce, the failure of the therapist's own therapy, infertility and childlessness, the decision to adopt a child, and the parenting of a profoundly deaf child.

Published July 1st 2001 by The Analytic Press.

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Looking for Ground

Countertransference and the Problem of Value in Psychoanalysis

• By Peter G. M. Carnochan

Despite a half-century of literature documenting the experience and meanings of countertransference in analytic practice, the concept remains a source of controversy. For Peter Carnochan, this can be addressed only by revisiting historical, epistemological, and moral issues intrinsic to the analytic enterprise. Looking for Ground is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of countertransference on the basis of a contemporary reappraisal of just such foundational assumptions.

Carnochan begins by reviewing the history of the psychoanalytic encounter and how it has been accompanied by changes in the understanding of countertransference. He skillfully delineates the complexities that underlie Freud's apparent proscription of countertransference before tracing the broadening of the concept in the hands of later theorists. Part II examines the problem of epistemology in contemporary analytic practice. The answer to this apparent quandary, he holds, resides in a contemporary appreciation of affect, which, rather than merely limiting or skewing perception, forms an essential "promontory" for human knowing. The final section of Looking for Ground takes up what Carnochan terms the "moral architecture" of psychoanalysis. Rejecting the claim that analysis operates in a realm outside conventional accounts of value, he argues that the analytic alternative to traditional moralism is not tantamount to emancipation from the problem of morality.

With wide-ranging scholarship and graceful writing, Carnochan refracts the major theoretical and clinical issues at stake in contemporary psychoanalytic debates through the lens of countertransference - its history, its evolution, its philosophical ground, its moral dimensions. He shows how the examination of countertransference provides a unique and compelling window through which to apprehend and reappraise those basic claims at the heart of the psychoanalytic endeavor.

Published May 1st 2001 by The Analytic Press.

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Relational Perspectives on the Body

• Edited by Lewis Aron, Frances Sommer Anderson

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.

Published October 1st 2000 by The Analytic Press.

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Objects of Hope

Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

• By Steven H. Cooper

Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness.

Cooper's task is challenging, given that the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives. The analysis of hope, then, implicates what Cooper sees as a central dialectic tension in psychoanalysis: that between psychic possibility and psychic limit. He argues that analysts have historically had difficulty integrating the concept of limit into a treatment modality so dedicated to the creation and augmentation of psychic possibility. And yet, it is only by accepting the realm of limit as a necessary counterpoise to the realm of possibility and clinically embracing the tension between the two realms that analysts can further their understanding of therapeutic process in the interest of better treatment outcomes.

Cooper persuasively demonstrates how each psychoanalytic theory provides its own logic of hope; this logic, in turn, translates into a distinctive sense of what the analyst may hope for the patient, and what the patient is encouraged to hope for himself or herself. Objects of Hope brings ranging scholarship and refreshing candor to bear on the knotty issue of what can and cannot be achieved in the course of psychoanalytic therapy. It will be valued not only as an exemplary exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, but also as a thoughtful, original effort to place the vital issue of hope at the center of clinical concern.

Published August 1st 2000 by The Analytic Press.

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Who Is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream?

A Study of Psychic Presences

• By James S. Grotstein

In Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences, James Grotstein integrates some of his most important work of recent years in addressing fundamental questions of human psychology and spirituality. He explores two quintessential and interrelated psychoanalytic problems: the nature of the unconscious mind and the meaning and inner structure of human subjectivity. To this end, he teases apart the complex, tangled threads that constitute self-experience, delineating psychic presences and mystifying dualities, subjects with varying perspectives and functions, and objects with different, often phantasmagoric properties.

Whether he is expounding on the Unconscious as a range of dimensions understandable in terms of nonlinear concepts of chaos, complexity, and emergence theory; modifying the psychoanalytic concept of psychic determinism by joining it to the concept of autochthony; comparing Melanie Klein's notion of the archaic Oedipus complex with the ancient Greek myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur; or examining the relationship between the stories of Oedipus and Christ, Grotstein emerges as an analyst whose clinical sensibility has been profoundly deepened by his scholarly use of mythology, classical thought, and contemporary philosophy. The result is both an important synthesis of major currents of contemporary psychoanalytic thought and a moving exploration of the nature of human suffering and spirituality.

Published August 1st 2000 by The Analytic Press.

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Psychoanalytic Participation

Action, Interaction, and Integration

• By Kenneth A. Frank

In Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration, Kenneth Frank argues that the gulf between analysis and what he terms "action-oriented" or cognitive-behavioral techniques is anachronistic and has unnecessarily limited the repertoire of analytically oriented clinicians. In point of fact, action-oriented and even cognitive-behavioral techniques may be employed in ways that are consistent with the analytic goal of promoting profound personality change, and so may be profitably incorporated into analytic treatments.

Anchoring his discussion in a contemporary two-person model of psychoanalysis, Frank clarifies and extends the shift toward analyst participation that has developed within recent relational theorizing. On the basis of this orientation, which calls attention to the therapeutic importance of the real qualities of the analyst and of the analytic relationship, Frank sets forth a pragmatic analytic approach that balances traditional "process" elements with patients' problem-solving and outside progress in realizing life goals. By letting themselves be known by their patients and by participating intensively and actively in their treatment, analysts as analysts can help patients shape new and adaptive behaviors in their daily lives. It is the participatory possibilities growing out of a contemporary relational perspective that provide the ground for a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and cognitive-behavior therapy. To this end, Frank presents numerous examples of how action-oriented, cognitive-behavioral principles and techniques can be used to potentiate and accelerate the analytic process.

At once scholarly and exploratory, pragmatic and visionary, Psychoanalytic Participation helps shepherd psychoanalysis into the 21st century while making psychoanalytic wisdom - both traditional and contemporary - available to the broad community of psychotherapists appreciative of the usefulness of cognitive-behavioral treatment strategies.

Published August 1st 1999 by The Analytic Press.

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The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration

• By Rochelle G. K. Kainer

The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration is a rich and clinically detailed account of the therapeutic restoration of the self, and speaks to the healing process for analysts themselves that follows from Rochelle Kainer's sensitive integration of heretofore dissociated realms of psychoanalytic theory. In describing how the reworking of pathological internal object relationships occurs in conjunction with the transformation of selfobject failures, Kainer brings new insight to bear on the healing of the self at the same time as she contributes to healing the historic split in psychoanalysis between Kleinian theory and self psychology.

Extensive case illustrations, refracted through the lens of her uniquely integrative perspective, bring refreshing clarity to elusive theoretical concepts. Of special note is Kainer's distinction between normal and pathological identifications. Equally valuable is her introduction of the term "imaginative empathy" to characterize the kind of attunement that is integral to analytic healing; her nuanced description of the relation between imaginative empathy and projective identification bridges the worlds of Kleinian theory and self psychology in an original and compelling way. She ends by spelling out how her theoretical viewpoint leads to a more comprehensive understanding of various clinical phenomena.

The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration, is a sophisticated yet accessible work, gracefully written, that elaborates a relational theory of thinking, of creativity, of identification, and of the formation and healing of psychic structure. Kainer's ability to bring the often dissonant voices of different psychoanalytic schools into theoretical harmony as she develops her viewpoint conveys both the breadth of intellectual engagement with colleagues and the depth of clinical engagement with patients that inform her project from beginning to end.

Published July 1st 1999 by The Analytic Press.

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Relational Psychoanalysis

The Emergence of a Tradition

• Edited by Stephen A. Mitchell, Lewis Aron

Over the course of the past 15 years, there has been a vast sea change in American psychoanalysis. It takes the form of a broad movement away from classical psychoanalytic theorizing grounded in Freud's drive theory toward models of mind and development grounded in object relations concepts. In clinical practice, there has been a corresponding movement away from the classical principles of neutrality, abstinence and anonymity toward an interactive vision of the analytic situation that places the analytic relationship, with its powerful, reciprocal affective currents, in the foreground. These developments have been evident in virtually all schools of psychoanalysis in America, from the most traditional to the most radical.

The wellspring of these innovations is the work of a group of psychoanalysts who have struggled to integrate aspects of interpersonal psychoanalysis, various British object relations theories, and psychoanalytic feminism. Although not self-selected as a school, these theorists have generated a distinct tradition of psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice that has become extremely influential within psychoanalysis in the United States.

Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition brings together for the first time the seminal papers of the major authors within this tradition. Each paper is accompanied by an introduction, in which the Editors place it in its historical context, and a new afterward, in which the author suggests subsequent developments in his or her thinking. This book is an invaluable resource for any clinical practitioner, teacher or student of psychoanalysis interested in exploring the exciting developments of recent years.

Published April 1st 1999 by The Analytic Press.

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Building Bridges

The Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis

• By Stuart A. Pizer

In Building Bridges, Stuart A. Pizer gives much-needed recognition to the central role of negotiation in the analytic relationship and in the therapeutic process. Building on a Winnicottian perspective that comprehends paradox as the condition for preserving an intrapsychic and relational "potential space," Pizer explores how the straddling of paradox requires an ongoing process of negotiation and demonstrates how such negotiation articulates the creative potential within the potential space of analysis.

Following careful review of Winnicott's perspective on paradox-via the pairings of privacy and interrelatedness, isolation and interdependence, ruthlessness and concern, and the notion of transitional phenomena-Pizer locates these elemental paradoxes within the negotiations of an analytic process. Together, he observes, analyst and patient negotiate the boundaries, potentials, limits, tonalities, resistances, and meanings that determine the course of their clinical dialogue. Elaborating on the theme of a multiply constituted, "distributed" self, Pizer presents a model for the tolerance of paradox as a developmental achievement related to ways in which caretakers function as "transitional mirrors." He then explores the impact of trauma and dissociation on the child's ability to negotiate paradox and clarifies how negotiation of paradox differs from negotiation of conflict. Pizer also broadens the scope of his study by turning to negotiation theory and practices in the disciplines of law, diplomacy, and dispute resolution.

Enlivened by numerous clinical vignettes and a richly detailed chronicle of an analytic case from its earliest negotiations to termination, Building Bridges adds a significant dimension to theoretical understanding and clinical practice. It is altogether a psychoanalytic work of our time.

Published August 1st 1998 by The Analytic Press.

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Fairbairn, Then and Now

• Edited by Neil J. Skolnick, David E. Scharff

W. R. D. Fairbairn was both a precursor and an architect of revolutionary change in psychoanalysis. Through a handful of tightly reasoned papers written in the 1940s and 1950s, Fairbairn emerged as an incisive, albeit relatively obscure, voice in the wilderness, at considerable remove from mainstream Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. But in the 1970s Harry Guntrip made Fairbairn's thinking more accessible to a wide readership, and Fairbairn's object relations theory, with its innovative theoretical and clinical concepts, was at the center of the turn toward relational thinking that swept psychoanalysis in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fairbairn, Then and Now is a landmark volume, because a thorough grasp of Fairbairn's contribution is crucial to any understanding of what is taking place within psychoanalysis today. And Fairbairn's work remains a treasure trove of rich insights into the problems and issues in theory and clinical practice with which analysts and therapists are struggling today.

This is a particularly propitious time for renewed focus on Fairbairn's contribution. A wealth of previously unpublished material has recently emerged, and the implications of Fairbairn's ideas for current developments in trauma, dissociation, infant research, self theory, field theory, and couple and family therapy are becoming increasingly clear. The conference that stimulated the contributions to this volume by internationally eminent Fairbairn clinicians and scholars was a historically important event, and Fairbairn, Then and Now makes the intellectual ferment generated by this event available to all interested readers.

Published June 1st 1998 by The Analytic Press.

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Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis

• By Stephen A. Mitchell

Stephen A. Mitchell has been at the forefront of the broad paradigmatic shift in contemporary psychoanalysis from the traditional one-person model to a two-person, interactive, relational perspective. In Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, Mitchell provides a critical, comparative framework for exploring the broad array of concepts newly developed for understanding interactive processes between analysand and analyst. Drawing on the broad traditions of Kleinian theory and interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as object relations and progressive Freudian thought, he considers in depth the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, anachronistic ideals like anonymity and neutrality, the nature of analytic knowledge and authority, and the problems of gender and sexual orientation in the age of postmodernism. The problem of influence guides his discussion of these and other topics. How, Mitchell asks, can analytic clinicians best protect the patient’s autonomy and integrity in the context of our growing appreciation of the enormous personal impact of the analyst on the process?

Although Mitchell explores many facets of the complexity of the psychoanalytic process, he presents his ideas in his customarily lucid, jargon-free style, making this book appealing not only to clinicians with various backgrounds and degrees of experience, but also to lay readers interested in the achievements of, and challenges before, contemporary psychoanalysis. A splendid effort to relate parallel lines of theorizing and derivative changes in clinical practice and informed by mature clinical judgment and broad scholarship into the history of psychoanalytic ideas, Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis takes a well-deserved place alongside Mitchell’s previous books. It is a brilliant synthesis of converging insights that have transformed psychoanalysis in our time, and a touchstone for enlightened dialogue as psychoanalysis approaches the millennium.

Published November 1st 1997 by The Analytic Press.

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The Analyst in the Inner City

Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

• By Neil Altman

Psychoanalytic theory and technique have rarely addressed clinical work in inner city public clinics, much less the complex social issues revolving around race, culture, and social class that arise in this setting. In The Analyst in the Inner City, Neil Altman undertakes this challenging task. In so doing, he takes psychoanalysis to its margins: to the people excluded by traditional theory and practice, the very people made peripheral by society at large. Just as psychoanalytic treatment seeks to foster personal integration of the psychically marginal, so Altman seeks to identify, explore, and transcend the exclusionary boundaries of traditional psychoanalytic practice.

In an effort to bridge the gap between psychoanalysis and social theory, Altman argues that racial, cultural, and social-class divisions reflect the splits that accompany the consolidation of an individual sense of self. In developing a self image, that is, people construct images of a "disowned other" who is made to embody, often unconsciously, those psychic qualities unacceptable to the self. Societal polarization along racial and class lines supports this psychic process by delineating groups with which one identifies either positively or negatively. The opposition between private and public sectors further reinforces this creation of a "not me" space in which to project and the find all the unwanted aspects of self.

As Altman examines these interdigitating processes, social theory and clinical theory come together in mutually illuminating ways. In the clinical situation, for example, psychic splitting often emerges at the very time that socioeconomic differences between patient and therapist become a focus of complementary efforts to delineate notions of self and other.

Published October 1st 1995 by The Analytic Press.

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Conversing With Uncertainty

Practicing Psychotherapy in A Hospital Setting

• By Rita W. McCleary

Conversing with Uncertainty is a unique chronicle of why therapists must use theory while resisting the allure of theory, maintaining a double vision that allows them to appropriate theory only to break it open to enlarge the interactive and interpretive possibilities of therapy. But McCleary offers far more than a vivid experiential rendering of this insight. She argues persuasively, here in conversation with the writings of Irwin Hoffman and Lawrence Friedman, that a narrative case study - such as her case study of Kay - offers a unique window to comprehending the type of reflection that culminates in psychotherapeutic knowing. It follows, for McCleary, that case narratives are especially relevant to psychotherapeutic training, and by implication, to the way in which therapists acquire expertise.

Framed by a foreword by Stephen Mitchell and an afterword by Glen Gabbard, Conversing with Uncertainty is the premier volume of the Relational Perspectives Book Series. It also introduces a gifted writer of rare therapeutic sensibility. For it is McCleary's achievement, finally, not merely to convey with arresting candor the stress and uncertainty of clinical training, but to use her encounter with Kay to probe with fresh insight perennial questions about the narrative structure of therapeutic knowledge, the experiential foundations of theory choice, and the use and abuse of theory in clinical practice.

Published September 1st 1992 by The Analytic Press.

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