In The Play within the Play: The Enacted Dimension of Psychoanalytic Process Gil Katz presents and illustrates the "enacted dimension of psychoanalytic process." He clarifies that enactment is not simply an overt event but an unconscious, continuously evolving, dynamically meaningful process. Using clinical examples, including several extended case reports, Gil Katz demonstrates how in all treatments, a new version of the patient’s early conflicts, traumas, and formative object relationships is inevitably created, without awareness or intent, in the here-and-now of the analytic dyad. Within the enacted dimension, repressed or dissociated aspects of the patient’s past are not just remembered, they are re-lived. Katz shows how, when the enacted dimension becomes conscious, it forms the basis for genuine and transforming experiential insight.
This book is recommended to psychoanalysts and therapists interested in the analytical technique, and particularly that work with patients who have deficits in their symbolization capacity. It presents studies of technical aspects of the analytical process with patients who are difficult to reach. Collusions named 'chronic enactments' show that the analytic dyad cannot dream and the analytical field is paralyzed without the analyst perceiving it. Chronic enactments are undone through unconscious acts or behaviours that threaten to destroy the analytical process: behaviours that are named 'acute enactments'. The thorough study of these enactments show that they take the dyad to an awareness of the discrimination between self and object and re-establish the capacity to dream. It is demonstrated that this occurs in an attenuated traumatic form, revealing in the analytical field the externalization of primitive non-dreamed traumas. Clinical, artistic, and mythical models are part of the discussion. The emphasis on clinical aspects allows readers to use different theories to consider the clinical facts. The clinical theories used by the author are mostly post-Kleinian and Bionian.
In The Play within the Play: The Enacted Dimension of Psychoanalytic Process Gil Katz presents and illustrates the "enacted dimension of psychoanalytic process." He clarifies that enactment is not simply an overt event but an unconscious, continuously evolving, dynamically meaningful process. Using clinical examples, including several extended case reports, Gil Katz demonstrates how in all treatments, a new version of the patient’s early conflicts, traumas, and formative object relationships is inevitably created, without awareness or intent, in the here-and-now of the analytic dyad. Within the enacted dimension, repressed or dissociated aspects of the patient’s past are not just remembered, they are re-lived. Katz shows how, when the enacted dimension becomes conscious, it forms the basis for genuine and transforming experiential insight.
Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice isthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and our character. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, emons in the Consulting Room, reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture. In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. emons in the Consulting Room ill appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.
The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma is an invaluable and cutting edge resource providing the current theory, practice, and research on trauma and dissociation within psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz bring together experts in the field of dissociation and psychoanalysis, providing a comprehensive and forward-looking overview of the current thinking on trauma and dissociation. The volume contains articles on the history of concepts of trauma and dissociation, the linkage of complex trauma and dissociative problems in living, different modalities of treatment and theoretical approaches based on a new understanding of this linkage, as well as reviews of important new research. Overarching all of these is a clear explanation of how pathological dissociation is caused by trauma, and how this affects psychological organization -- concepts which have often been largely misunderstood. The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, trauma therapists, and students.
Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves presents a unique approach to understanding the varied and multi-layered experience of immigration, exploring how social, cultural, political, and historical contexts shape the psychological experience of immigration, and with it the encounter between foreign-born patients and their psychotherapists. Beltsiou brings together a diverse group of contributors, including Ghislaine Boulanger, Eva Hoffman and Dori Laub, to discuss their own identity as immigrants and how it informs their work. They explore the complexity and the contradictions of the immigration process - the tension between loss and hope, future and past, the idealization and denigration of the other/stranger, and what it takes to tolerate the existential dialectic between separateness and belonging. Through personal accounts full of wisdom and nuance, the stories of immigration come to life and become accessible to the reader. Intended for clinicians, students, and academics interested in contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives on the topic of immigration, this book serves as a resource for clinical practice and can be read in courses on psychoanalysis, cultural psychology, immigrant studies, race and ethnic relations, self and identity, culture and human development, and immigrants and mental health.
The body, of both the patient and the analyst, is increasingly a focus of attention in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially from a relational perspective. There is a renewed regard for the understanding of embodied experience and sexuality as essential to human vitality. However, most of the existing literature has been written by analysts with no formal training in body-centered work. In this book William Cornell draws on his experience as a body-centered psychotherapist to offer an informed blend of the two traditions, to allow psychoanalysts a deep understanding, in psychoanalytic language, of how to work with the body as an ally. The primary focus of Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy situates systematic attention to somatic experience and direct body-level intervention in the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It provides a close reading of the work of Wilhelm Reich, repositioning his work within a contemporary psychoanalytic frame and re-presents Winnicott’s work with a particular emphasis on the somatic foundations of his theories. William Cornell includes vivid and detailed case vignettes including accounts of his own bodily experience to fully illustrate a range of somatic attention and intervention that include verbal description of sensate experience, exploratory movement and direct physical contact. Drawing on relevant theory and significant clinical material, Somatic Experience in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy will allow psychoanalysts an understanding of how to work with the body in their clinical practice. It will bring a fresh perspective on psychoanalytic thinking to body-centred psychotherapy where somatic experience is seen as an ally to psychic and interpersonal growth. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, transactional analysts, body-centred psychotherapists, Gestalt therapists, counsellors and students. William Cornell maintains an independent private practice of psychotherapy and consultation in Pittsburgh, PA. He has devoted 40 years to the study and integration of psychoanalysis, neo-Reichian body therapy and transactional analysis. He is a Training and Supervising Transactional Analyst and has established an international reputation for his teaching and consultation.
Psychoanalysts increasingly find themselves working with patients and states that are not amenable to verbal and dialogic engagement. Such patients are challenging for a psychoanalytic approach that assumes that the patient relates in the verbal realm and is capable of reflective function. Both the classical stance of neutrality and abstinence and a contemporary relational approach that works with mutuality and intersubjectivity, can often ask too much of patients. The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst introduces a new psychoanalytic register for working with such patients and states, involving a present and engaged analyst who is unobtrusive to the unfolding of the patient’s inner world and the flow of mutual enactments. For the unobtrusive relational analyst, the world and idiom of the patient becomes the defining signature of the clinical interaction and process. Rather than seeking to bring patients into greater dialogic relatedness, the analyst companions the patient in the flow of enactive engagement and into the damaged and constrained landscapes of their inner worlds. Being known and companioned in these areas of deep pain, shame and fragmentation is the foundation on which psychoanalytic transformation and healing rests. In a series of illuminating chapters that include vivid examples drawn from his work with individuals and with groups, Robert Grossmark illustrates the work of the unobtrusive relational analyst. He reconfigures the role of action and enactment in psychoanalysis and group-analysis, and expands the understanding of the analyst’s subjectivity to embrace receptivity, surrender and companioning. Offering fresh concepts regarding therapeutic action and psychoanalytic engagement, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
Alongside its continuing volume, The Emerging Tradition of Hans Loewald, this rich collection of essays addresses the current lack of familiarity with the ideas and life of the eminent psychoanalytic teacher and scholar, Hans Loewald (1906–1993), by presenting the most comprehensive account of his work ever produced. Its chapters present Loewald’s intellectual history and his reception in the North American psychoanalytic scene, as well as clinical developments from his thinking and their importance for the future. An obituary, written by a close friend, also provides a summary of Loewald’s personal and professional life. With the benefit of authors being able to detect the functions and place of Heidegger’s teaching in Loewald’s thought, this book will newly enlighten readers to Heidegger’s place in Loewald’s expansive, open-system vision of the psyche. Featuring contributions from those who worked directly with Loewald, and those inspired by his ideas, this book will be essential reading for any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist working today.
Freud described changes in the structure of the mind, including the consolidation of the superego with resolution of the oedipal complex. Important psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud have studied and emphasized the role of pre-oedipal development in the creation of psychological structure. While each of these authors developed his or her own language and concepts, they all described a fundamental transition in the structure and working of the mind that has profound importance for the psychological functioning of the child and the adult she later becomes. This book closely examines the analyses of two little girls. One began analysis having already achieved the transition to a more enduring and reliable psychic structure, a cohesive self. Because she had several experiences that overwhelmed her emotional capacities prior to entering the oedipal phase of development, her oedipal experience was filled with anxiety and overstimulation. At the start of her analysis , the second child contended with anxiety about loss of the object and abandonment, and she struggled with the process of separation/individuation. Her psychic structure, her self, was not cohesive, and she was vulnerable to fragmentation. During her analysis, her stymied development was freed up, and the authors trace the changes within her as psychic structure consolidated and oedipal material took center stage. Comparison of these two young girls and their analyses enables the authors to illustrate and describe important mental phenomena and psychoanalytic concepts. These include psychic structure, the self, the similarities and differences between a mind that is vulnerable to fragmentation and one that is not, and the internal states associated with fragmentation and trauma. By looking into the differences (and similarities) in the ways each girl responded to interventions by her analyst, the authors explore psychoanalytic technique and therapeutic action, including the many manifestations of interpretation and insight, the role of the analyst as a developmental object, and the development of psychic structure. The authors show how similar manifest behavior and content have different latent meanings and sources for each child, and they further illustrate the transformations of fantasies, anxieties, preoccupations, and ego structures over the course of their analyses.
