This is a collection of the works of the Independent Group of psychoanalysts in Britain includes contributions to the theory of object relations, counter-transference, early environment, regression and female sexuality.
Arguably the most informative and readable account of the development of British independent psychoanalysis, Eric Rayner’s The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis offers a coherent account of the core concepts that influence the clinical practice. Covering the main themes and theorists with rigour and clarity, it has rightly found a central place on the reading lists of psychoanalytic and psychotherapy trainings, both in the UK and worldwide. Republished with a new foreword from Maurice Whelan, the book begins with a philosophical and historical background, describing the establishment of the ‘Middle Group’ (later called the Independents) following the controversial discussions between the supporters of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. The succeeding chapters detail the contributions by Independent psychoanalysts including Fairbairn, Balint, Rickman, Winnicott, Bowlby, and Khan, to themes such as emotions, object relations, sexuality, aggression, perversion, regression, symbolisation, creativity, art, and dreams. Rayner relays the ethos of the Independent psychoanalytic ‘mind’ as tolerant, creative and respectful, with an understanding of the developmental roots of pathology in early relationships and with balanced thinking about the impact of the real environment as well as the internal world on a person’s character. Providing a thorough exploration of the development of thinking within the tradition of the British Independent school of psychoanalysis, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, students, and even non-clinicians interested in the history of psychoanalysis.
British Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives in the Independent Tradition is a new and extended edition of The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition, which explored the successes and failures of the early environment; transference and counter-transference in the psychoanalytic encounter; regression in the situation of treatment; and female sexuality. Published in the mid-1980s, it had an important influence on the development of psychoanalysis both in Great Britain and abroad, was translated into several languages and became a central textbook in academic and professional courses. This new, updated book includes not only many of the original papers, but also new chapters written for this volume by Hannah Browne, Josh Cohen, Steven Groarke, Gregorio Kohon, Rosine Perelberg and Megan Virtue. Addressing and reflecting on the four main themes of the first collection, the new papers discuss such subjects as: · a new focus on earliest infancy · new directions in Independent clinical thinking · the question of therapeutic regression . the centrality of sexual difference in Freud. They also highlight the connections between and the mutual influence of British and French psychoanalysis, now a critical subject in contemporary psychoanalytic debates. British Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives in the Independent Tradition will be important not only to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and the full spectrum of professionals involved in mental health. It will be of great value in psychotherapy and counselling training and an important resource for teaching and academic activities.
The constant and polymorphous development of the field of psychoanalysis since its inception has led to the evolution of a wide variety of psychoanalytic ‘schools’. In seeking to find common ground between them, Alberto Stefana examines the history of countertransference, a concept which has developed from its origins as an apparent obstacle, to become an essential tool for analysis, and which has undergone profound changes in definition and in clinical use. In History of Countertransference, Stefana follows the development of this concept over time, exploring a very precise trend which begins with the original notion put forward by Sigmund Freud and leads to the ideas of Melanie Klein and the British object relations school. The book explores the studies of specific psychoanalytic theorists and endeavours to bring to light how the input from each one may have been influenced by previous theories, by the personal history of the analyst, and by their historical-cultural context. By shedding light on how different psychoanalytic groups work with countertransference, Stefana helps the reader to understand the divergences that exist between them. This unique study of a key psychoanalytical concept will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and academics and students of psychoanalytic studies and the history of psychology.
The Budapest School of Psychoanalysis brings together a collection of expertly written pieces on the influence of the Budapest (Ferenczi) conception of analytic theory and practice on the evolution of psychoanalysis. It touches on major figures Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint whilst concurrently considering topics such as Ferenczi’s clinical diary, the study of trauma, the Confusion of Tongues paradigm, and Balint’s perspective on supervision. Further to this, the book highlights Jacques Lacan’s teaching of Ferenczi, which brings a fresh perspective to a relatively unknown connection between them. The book highlights that the Hungarian analysts, influenced by Ferenczi, through their pioneering work developed a psychoanalytic paradigm which became an alternative to the Freudian tradition. That this paradigm has become recognised and admired in its own right underlines the need to clearly outline, as this book does, the historical context and the output of those who are writing and working in the tradition of the Budapest School. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the widespread and enduring influence of the Budapest School on contemporary psychoanalysis. The contributors are amongst the foremost in Budapest School scholarship and the insights they offer are at once profound as well as insightful. This book is an important read for those practitioners and students of psychoanalysis who wish for an insight into the early and developing years of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis and its impact on contemporary clinical practice.
This text provides an analysis of psychoanalytical pluralism and a celebration of psychoanalytic convergence. Recently, various psychoanalytic perspectives have become increasingly integrated. Using clinical data, this book seeks to illustrate this process.
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.
This book investigates the experiences of severely troubled children and their families, teachers, and child psychoanalytic psychotherapists working together in primary schools. The book begins by looking at children’s emotional life during the primary school years and what can disrupt ordinary, helpful social development and learning. It examines what child psychoanalytic psychotherapy is, how it works, and why it is offered in primary schools. The following chapters intersperse accounts of creative child psychoanalytic approaches with interviews with parents, carers, teachers, and clinicians. A section focusing on mainstream primary schools presents parent–child interventions for a nursery class; child group psychotherapy with children from traumatized families; and consultation to school staff, with personal accounts from parents, a kinship carer, a family support worker, a deputy head, and a child psychotherapist. Chapters then focus on alternative educational settings, featuring a school for children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities; a primary pupil referral unit; and a therapeutic school. These chapters show psychotherapy with a non-verbal boy with autism; therapy groups with children who have missed out on the building blocks of development alongside reflective groups for school staff; and child psychotherapy approaches at lunchtime and in breaks, with insights from a parent, a clinical lead nurse, a head teacher, and a child psychotherapist. Finally, there is an evaluation of evidence about the impact of child psychotherapy within primary schools. Recognizing the increasing importance of attending to the emotional difficulties of children whose relationships and learning are in jeopardy, this book will be invaluable to all those working in primary schools, to commissioners of child mental health services, to parents and carers, and to experienced and training clinicians.
What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's remarkable seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.