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 is a completely revised and enlarged edition of the well-known classic. In the twenty years since the previous edition was published much progress has been made in regard to the clinical concept of psychoanalysis, and this new edition brings the subject completely up to date. New knowledge of the psychoanalytic process has been added, together with advances in understanding the clinical situation, the treatment alliance, transference, countertransference, resistance, the negative therapeutic reaction, acting out, interpretations and other interventions, insight, and working through. The book is both a readable introduction to the subject and an authorities work of reference.
The psychoanalytic process is characterized by a complex weave of interrelated polarities: transference and countertransference, repetition and new experience, enactment and interpretation, discipline and personal responsiveness, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, construction and discovery. In Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, Irwin Z. Hoffman, through compelling clinical accounts, demonstrates the great therapeutic potential that resides in the analyst's struggle to achieve a balance within each of these dialectics. According to Hoffman, the psychoanalytic modality implicates a dialectic tension between interpersonal influence and interpretive exploration, a tension in which noninterpretive and interpretive interactions continuously elicit one another. It follows that Hoffman's "dialectical constructivism" highlights the intrinsic ambiguity of experience, an ambiguity that coexists with the irrefutable facts of a person's life, including the fact of mortality. The analytic situation promotes awareness of the freedom to shape one's life story within the constraints of given realities. Hoffman deems it a special kind of crucible for the affirmation of worth and the construction of meaning in a highly uncertain world. The analyst, in turn, emerges as a moral influence with an ironic kind of authority, one that is enhanced by the ritualized aspects of the analytic process even as it is subjected to critical scrutiny. An intensely clinical work, Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process forges a new understanding of the curative possibilities that grow out of the tensions, the choices, and the constraints inhering in the intimate encounter of a psychoanalyst and a patient. Compelling reading for all analysts and analytic therapists, it will also be powerfully informative for scholars in the social sciences and the humanities.
Sets forth an integrated concept of the "natural history" of the psychoanalytical process, viewed in the light of experience gained in the child-analytical playroom, and applied to the more complicated phenomena of adult patients.
The Psycho-Analytical Process started as a series of lecture-seminars to child psychotherapists shortly after the death of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in 1960. It is intended for the use of practicing analysts and as a contribution to a new and widespread interest in the analytical process. This book was published under the auspices of the Melanie Klein Trust. This book is organized into two main sections. Section I provides a vivid reference to the transactions of the consulting room and playroom in order to evoke in the reader the experience of being both a patient and analyst. Section II which deals with the analyst's task and functions and uses clinical material to illustrate aspects of psychoanalysis presented in Section I. This book will be of interest to student psychotherapists, students of child analysis, the analysts and students of the Argentinian Psycho-analytical Society and finally with a research seminar of student and graduate child analysts.
Sets forth an integrated concept of the 'natural history' of the psychoanalytical process, viewed in the light of experience gained in the child-analytical playroom, and applied to the more complicated phenomena of adult patients.
In this landmark volume-- already acclaimed as "certain to become a milestone in the history of psychoanalysis and ego psychology"-- Joseph Weiss' theory of the psychotherapeutic process is presented and supported by the systematic, quantitative research carried out by Sampson, Weiss, and the Mount Zion Psychotherapy Research Group. This remarkable work delineates clear-cut implications for doing therapy and for conceptualizing the therapeutic process. The theory extends and develops concepts that Freud introduced in his later writings. It assumes that psychopathology stems from certain grim, unconscious, pathogenic beliefs that the patient acquires by inference from early traumatic experiences. The patient suffers unconsciously from these beliefs and the feelings of guilt, shame, and remorse that stem from them. He is, therefore, powerfully motivated unconsciously to change them. Moreover, the patient is able to exert considerable control over unconscious mental life and, indeed, to make and carry out unconscious plans. He works unconsciously throughout his treatment to change pathogenic beliefs, both by testing them in relation to the analyst and by using insights conveyed by the analyst's interpretations. Since the theory is close to observation it enables the clinician to monitor the patient's progress--to understand, throughout the treatment, how the patient improves, or is set back, by the analyst's interventions. The quantitative, empirical research presented bears directly on this theory. It offers strong evidence that the patient exerts control over the emergence of previously repressed mental contents, bringing them to consciousness when he unconsciously decides he may safely experience them. Supporting the hypothesis that the patient tests pathogenic beliefs throughout treatment in an effort to disconfirm them, it shows that the patient is very likely to respond favorably to interpretations that he can use in his struggle to disconfirm his pathogenic beliefs--but unfavorably to interpretations he cannot use for this purpose. A model of how rigorous psychoanalytic research can both sharpen and modify theoretical constructs and also lend support to a clinical approach, this distinguished volume will be valued by theoreticians, clinicians, researchers, and anyone interested in how the mind works. It provides a clear, accessible, and empirically testable approach to psychoanalytic practice.
The contents of the three volumes are grouped not chronologically but under the headings of 'Personality and Family Structure', 'Philosophy and History of Psychoanalysis', and 'The Psychoanalytic Process and the Analyst'. Together they present his interpretation of the 'Kleinian development' from Freud, through Abraham and Klein, to Bion and the post-Kleinian model; and within this evolution, his view of the natural history of the psychoanalytic process, the aesthetics of the method, and his insights into the operation of the transference and countertransference. Meltzer saw the psychoanalytic process as a new method that contributes alongside more traditional art-forms to our scientific knowledge of the mind. Working with both adults and children, he viewed psychoanalysis in developmental rather than narrowly therapeutic terms, with potential for both analyst and analysand. All his theories derived from clinical work, above all from dream-reading and children's phantasy play; and owing to his extensive international teaching experience, his own material was enriched by that of many supervisees. This collection of papers, read as a whole, invites new readers to follow and partake in what he called 'the most interesting conversation in the world'.
The term 'psychoanalytical process', though occurring but rarely in Freud's works, has become firmly established nowadays despite being hard to define, explain, or pin down in conceptual or meta-psychological terms. Although it is often employed as equivalent to 'psychoanalytic work', currents of thought that draw on the idea display a certain ambivalence, for it can relate both to a theory of treatment (the practice of analysis) and to a theory of mind (a theory of psychic functioning). Before developing his own original perspectives about the consequences of the heterogeneity of psychic functioning, the author examines how various practitioners have approached this subject since Freud. He shows how each has shed useful new light on this issue, leading to a diversity of points of view, thereby justifying the idea of the 'process' within psychoanalytic treatment.
Sets forth an integrated concept of the 'natural history' of the psychoanalytical process, viewed in the light of experience gained in the child-analytical playroom, and applied to the more complicated phenomena of adult patients.
