Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory

Toward a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory

Author: Morris N Eagle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1000405079

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Winner of th 2023 American Board and Academy of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology (ABAPPP) Annual Award! This book aims to integrate different psychoanalytic schools and relevant research findings into an integrated psychoanalytic theory of the mind. A main claim explored here, is that a revised and expanded ego psychology constitutes the strongest foundation not only for a unified psychoanalytic theory, but also for the integration of relevant research findings from other disciplines. Sophisticated yet accessible, the book includes a description of the basic tenets of ego psychology and necessary correctives and revisions. It also discusses research and theory on interpersonal understanding, capacity for inhibition, defense, delay of gratification, autonomous ego aims and motives, affect regulation, the nature of psychopathology; and the implications of a revised and expanded ego psychology for approaches to treatment. The book will appeal to readers who are interested in psychoanalysis, the nature of the mind, the nature of psychopathology, and the implications of theoretical formulations and research findings for approaches to treatment. As such, it will also be of great value on graduate and training courses for psychoanalysis.


From Classical to Contemporary Psychoanalysis

From Classical to Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Author: Morris N. Eagle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 113525222X

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The landscape of psychoanalysis has changed, at times dramatically, in the hundred or so years since Freud first began to think and write about it. Freudian theory and concepts have risen, fallen, evolved, mutated, and otherwise reworked themselves in the hands and minds of analysts the world over, leaving us with a theoretically pluralistic (yet threateningly multifarious) diffusion of psychoanalytic viewpoints. To help make sense of it all, Morris Eagle sets out to critically reevaluate fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of theory and practice in a topical manner. Beginning at the beginning, he reintroduces Freud's ideas in chapters on the mind, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment; he then approaches the same topics in terms of more contemporary psychoanalytic schools. In each chapter, however, there is an underlying emphasis on identification and integration of converging themes, which is reemphasized in the final chapter. Relevant empirical research findings are used throughout, thus basic concepts - such as repression - are reexamined in the light of more contemporary developments.


Repetition and Trauma

Repetition and Trauma

Author: Max M. Stern

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13: 1134878850

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The culmination of over three decades of investigation into traumatic processes, Repetition and Trauma is the late Max Stern's pioneering reconceptualization of trauma in the light of recent insights into the physiology and psychology of stress and the "teleonomic" character of human evolution in developing defenses against shock. As such, it is a highly original attempt to reformulate certain basic tenets of psychoanalysis with the findings of modern biology in general and neurobiology in particular. At the core of Stern's effort is the integration of laboratory research into sleep and dreaming so as to clarify the meaning of pavor nocturnus. In concluding that these night terrors represent "a defense against stress caused by threatening nightmares," he exploits, though he interpretively departs from, the laboratory research on dreams conducted by Charles Fisher and others in the 1960s. From his understanding of pavor nocturnus as a compulsion to repeat in the service of overcoming a developmental failure to attribute meaning to states of tension, Stern enlarges his inquiry to the phenomena of repetitive dreams in general. In a brilliant reconstruction of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he suggests that Freud was correct in attributing the repetitive phenomena of traumatic dreams to forces operating beyond the pleasure principle, but holds that these phenomena can be best illumined in terms of Freud's conception of mastery and Stern's own notion of "reparative mastery."


Attachment and Psychoanalysis

Attachment and Psychoanalysis

Author: Morris N. Eagle

Publisher: Guilford Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1462508405

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Although attachment theory was originally rooted in psychoanalysis, the two areas have since developed quite independently. This incisive book explores ways in which attachment theory and psychoanalysis have each contributed to understanding key aspects of psychological functioning--including infantile and adult sexuality, aggression, psychopathology, and psychotherapeutic change--and what the two fields can learn from each other. Morris Eagle critically evaluates how psychoanalytic thinking can aid in expanding core attachment concepts, such as the internal working model, and how knowledge about attachment can inform clinical practice and enrich psychoanalytic theory building. Three chapters on attachment theory and research are written in collaboration with Everett Waters.


Psychoanalysis at the Margins

Psychoanalysis at the Margins

Author: Paul E. Stepansky

Publisher: Other Press Professional

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781590513408

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Why has American psychoanalysis been relegated to the margins of American mental health care? In this masterful summing up of three decades of experience as a psychoanalytic editor and publisher, Paul Stepansky tells the story of a once cohesive discipline that has splintered into rivalrous “part-fields” and now struggles to survive in a postanalytic world of cognitive-behavioral interventions, brief therapy, psychopharmacology, and managed care. Simultaneously, it is a cautionary tale of the inevitable marginalization of any profession that resists integration into the scientific mainstream of its time and place. Beyond its self-evident importance to psychoanalysts and other proponents of “talking” therapy, Psychoanalysis at the Margins provides an in-depth case study of the role of books, journals, and publishing in the rise and fall of a historically insular profession. For Stepansky, the near-demise of psychoanalytic publishing in America is a microcosm of the crisis of small scholarly and professional publishing in an era that has witnessed the ascendancy of internet chat groups, online seminars, Amazon.com, and electronic journal subscriptions. Positioning present-day psychoanalysis as an alternative healing modality, Stepansky explores the initiatives that have enabled other alternative professions to survive and even thrive in the face of mainstream opposition. Is it possible, he asks, that the lessons of alternative medicine can guide psychoanalysis to an “optimal marginality” that draws the mainstream to it? Pursuing pathways to this goal, Stepansky enjoins analysts to undertake a host of initiatives in the public interest that bring analytic knowledge to bear in those contexts where it can do the most good.


The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory

The Road to Unity in Psychoanalytic Theory

Author: Elliott Oring

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0765704293

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Over the approximately 100-year course of the development of psychoanalytic theory, from its Freudian foundations to its current fragmented state, psychoanalytic theory has largely abandoned coherence and the inspiration to understand the human mind, argues Rangell Far from suggesting that psychoanalysis be abandoned, he instead traces the evolution of the various strands of psychoanalytic theory so that what is valuable can be extracted and included in a new effort to formulate a unitary theory.


Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

Author: Jay R. Greenberg

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-12-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0674417003

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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.


Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science

Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science

Author: Wilma Bucci

Publisher: Guilford Press

Published: 1997-05-16

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9781572302136

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Although psychoanalytic concepts underlie most forms of psychotherapy practiced today, the basic Freudian theory of mind the metapsychology does not mesh with current scientific views in psychology and related fields. As a result, despite its many strengths, psychoanalysis has been relegated to the periphery by clinicians and researchers alike. Filling a significant void, this book from cognitive scientist and psychoanalytic researcher Wilma Bucci proposes a new model of psychological organization that integrates psychoanalytic theory with the investigation of mental processes. Solidly rooted in current cognitive science, multiple code theory recognizes the focus on meanings and motives that is intrinsic to psychoanalytic clinical work. The theory points to parallel functions underlying free association and dreams, as well as conceptual development in children and creative work in sciences and the arts, and provides a strong foundation for empirical research on the psychoanalytic treatment process.


The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye

The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye

Author: Nancy Chodorow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-02

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0429649150

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In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, Nancy J. Chodorow brings together her two professional identities, psychoanalyst and sociologist, as she also brings together and moves beyond two traditions within American psychoanalysis, naming for the first time an American independent tradition. The book's chapters move inward, toward fine-tuned discussions of the theory and epistemology of the American independent tradition, which Chodorow locates originally in the writings of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, and outward toward what Chodorow sees as a missing but necessary connection between psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the social world. Chodorow suggests that Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson, self-defined ego psychologists, each brings in the intersubjective, attending to the fine-tuned interactions of mother and child, analyst and patient, and individual and social surround. She calls them intersubjective ego psychologists—for Chodorow, the basic theory and clinical epistemology of the American independent tradition. Chodorow describes intrinsic contradictions in psychoanalytic theory and practice that these authors and later American independents address, and she points to similarities between the American and British independent traditions. The American independent tradition, especially through the writings of Erikson, points the analyst and the scholar to individuality and society. Moving back in time, Chodorow suggests that from his earliest writings to his last works, Freud was interested in society and culture, both as these are lived by individuals and as psychoanalysis can help us to understand the fundamental processes that create them. Chodorow advocates for a return to these sociocultural interests for psychoanalysts. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality and advocates for a field of individuology in the university.


Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty

Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty

Author: Doris Brothers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1135469016

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Since trauma is a thoroughly relational phenomenon, it is highly unpredictable, and cannot be made to fit within the scientific framework Freud so admired. In Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis, Doris Brothers urges a return to a trauma-centered psychoanalysis. Making use of relational systems theory, she shows that experiences of uncertainty are continually transformed by the regulatory processes of everyday life such as feeling, knowing, forming categories, making decisions, using language, creating narratives, sensing time, remembering, forgetting, and fantasizing. Insofar as trauma destroys the certainties that organize psychological life, it plunges our relational systems into chaos and sets the stage for the emergence of rigid, life-constricting relational patterns. These trauma-generated patterns, which often involve denial of sameness and difference, the creation of complexity-reducing dualities, and the transformation of certainty into certitude, figure prominently in virtually all of the complaints for which patients seek analytic treatment. Analysts, she claims, are no more strangers to trauma than are their patients. Using in-depth clinical illustrations, Dr. Brothers demonstrates how a mutual desire to heal and to be healed from trauma draws patients and analysts into their analytic relationships. She recommends the reconceptualization of what has heretofore been considered transference and countertransference in terms of the transformation of experienced uncertainty. In her view the increased ability of both analytic partners to live with uncertainty is the mark of a successful treatment. Dr. Brothers’ perspective sheds fresh light on a variety of topics of great general interest to analysts as well as many of their patients, such as gender, the acceptance of death, faith, cult-like training programs, and burnout. Her discussions of these topics are enlivened by references to contemporary cinema and theatre.