This masterful new book presents for the first time an approach to psychotherapy based on Shapiro's classic Neurotic Styles. A series of eloquent chapters, illustrated with clinical vignettes, bring to bear his brilliant ideas about character development on the actual conduct of psychotherapy. "This long awaited volume richly fulfills its promise. Few writers on the psychotherapy scene have as interesting, or as important, things to say. This beautifully written book is fresh, insightful, and wise".--Paul Wachtel, Ph.D. Index.
Beginning with a discussion of the problem of autonomy in dynamic psychiatry and a review of its development from infancy to adolescence, the author of Neurotic Styles explores, with numerous clinical examples, the distortion of the development of autonomy in obsessive-compulsive conditions, in sadism and masochism, and, finally, in paranoia.
Dr. David Shapiro's first new book in ten years, Dynamics of Character deepens his now-classic studies of psychopathology with this conceptualization of a dynamics of the whole character--a self-regulatory system that encompasses personal attitudes, modes of activity, and relationship with the external world. Extending and magnifying Shapiro's original vision of psychopathology, Dynamics of Character is a resonantly reasoned response to the reduction of complex processes of mind to products of biological defect of psychological trauma.
This new book by David Shapiro, author of the classic Neurotic Styles, throws light, from a clinical standpoint, on a subject of importance, both theoretically and for therapeutic practice, for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as for those with general interests in philosophy or psychology. A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility explores the individual’s experience of ownership or responsibility for what he or she does, says, and even believes, and their avoidance of that experience. David Shapiro considers the self-deception necessary for these disclaimers of responsibility and the surrender of personal conviction and autonomous judgment. With numerous excerpts from therapeutic sessions, he shows these to be self-protective reactions forestalling or dispelling the anxiety of internal conflict and also, as in false confessions, external threat or intimidation. Shapiro presents this important thesis in his usual lucid way and in many contexts. Its recognition, in his view, is critical for therapeutic work. This book demonstrates the central place in psychological dynamics of the subjective sense of personal responsibility or ownership of what one says or does. The subject is nowhere treated with the depth and emphasis on subjective experience seen in these chapters. A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility will appeal to professionals and students of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, as well as clinical psychologists, CBT practitioners, philosophers, and legal scholars.
In Neurosis and Human Growth, Dr. Horney discusses the neurotic process as a special form of the human development, the antithesis of healthy growth. She unfolds the different stages of this situation, describing neurotic claims, the tyranny or inner dictates and the neurotic's solutions for relieving the tensions of conflict in such emotional attitudes as domination, self-effacement, dependency, or resignation. Throughout, she outlines with penetrating insight the forces that work for and against the person's realization of his or her potentialities. First Published in 1950. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
With his penetrating theory of personality and his nuanced understanding of the psychotherapeutic relationship, David Shapiro has influenced clinicians across the theoretical spectrum since the publication of Neurotic Styles in 1965. This influence is on vivid display in Personality and Psychopathology, as noted contemporary theorists critically evaluate his work in a fascinating dialogue with Shapiro himself. Starting with a crucial therapeutic observation—the centrality of the relationship between what the client says in session and how it is said—contributors revisit his core concepts regarding personality development, the prevolitional aspects of psychopathology, the limits to self-understanding, and the defensive uses of self-deception in light of current psychodynamic, evolutionary, and systems theory. Shapiro’s replies, and the contributors’ rejoinders, highlight points of departure and agreement and provide further clarification and extension of his ideas on a wide range of salient topics, including: The experience of autonomy in schizophrenia. Defensive thinking to prevent dreaded states of mind. The linguistics of self-deceptive speech. Self-deception as a reproductive strategy. Intentionality and craving in addiction. The subjective experience of hypomania. Personality and Psychopathology affords psychotherapists and research psychologists not only a unique opportunity to gain insight into Shapiro’s contributions, but also new lenses for re-examining their own work.
This acclaimed clinical guide and widely adopted text has filled a key need in the field since its original publication. Nancy McWilliams makes psychoanalytic personality theory and its implications for practice accessible to practitioners of all levels of experience. She explains major character types and demonstrates specific ways that understanding the patient's individual personality structure can influence the therapist's focus and style of intervention. Guidelines are provided for developing a systematic yet flexible diagnostic formulation and using it to inform treatment. Highly readable, the book features a wealth of illustrative clinical examples. New to This Edition *Reflects the ongoing development of the author's approach over nearly two decades. *Incorporates important advances in attachment theory, neuroscience, and the study of trauma. *Coverage of the contemporary relational movement in psychoanalysis. Winner--Canadian Psychological Association's Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship
Psychoanalysis began over a century ago as a treatment for neurosis. Rooted in the positivistic mindset of the medicine from which it stemmed, it trained its empiricist gaze directly upon the symptoms of the malaise, only to be seduced into attributing it to causes as numerous as there are aspects of human experience. Edifying as this was for our understanding of the life of the psyche, it left the sickness of the soul that was its actual subject matter, the neurosis which it was supposed to be about, out of its purview. The crux of this problem was of a conceptual nature. As psychology increasingly gave up on its constituting concept, its concept of soul, it succumbed to the same extent to treating its patients without an adequate concept of what both it and neurosis were about. Attention was paid to mishaps and traumas, the vicissitudes of development, and the Oedipus complex. But neurosis, according to the thesis of this ground-breaking book, comes from the soul, even is soul; the soul in its untruth. Indeed, both it and the modern field of psychology are successors of the soul-forms that preceded them, religion and metaphysics, with the difference that psychology's reluctance to recognize and take responsibility for its status as such has been matched by the neurotic soul's clinging to obsolete metaphysical categories even as the often quite ordinary life disappointments of its patients are inflated with absolute importance. The folie à deux has been on a massive scale. Owing their provenance to the supplement they each provide the other, psychology and neurosis are entwined in a Gordian knot, the cutting of which requires insight into the logic that pervades both. Taking up this sword, Giegerich exposes and critiques the metaphysics that neurosis indulges in even as he returns psychology to the soul, not, of course, to the soul as some no longer credible metaphysical hypostasis, but as the logically negative life of the mind and power of thought. Using several fairy tales as models for the logic of neurosis, he brilliantly analyses its enchanting background processes, exposing thereby, in a most lively and thoroughgoing manner, the spiteful cunning by which the neurotic soul, against its already existing better judgement, betrays its own truth. Topics include the historicity of neurosis, its soulful purpose as a general cultural phenomenon, its internal logic, functioning, and enabling conditions, as well as the Sacred Festival drama character of symptomatic suffering, the theology of neurosis, and ‘the neurotic’ as the figure of modernity's exemplary man. A collection of vignettes descriptive of various kinds of neurotic presentation routinely met with in the consulting room is also included in an appendix under the heading, ‘Neurotic Traps.’
