Ascertaining the genre of this volume has been difficult. It is much more than memoire, book of poetry, case study, dream journal, and travelogue. It is all that, plus their integration into a creative product. It begins before the authors birth, when enterprising Grandfather Joseph Abrahams came to America, soon to meet a mysterious death. The extended family to follow prospered, and his grandson Joseph likewise pursued the American dream, first in Texas, then New England, New York, and during the war years, much of America. In the course of a career in psychoanalysis, he ventured into study of his own inner world for understanding of his life drives. There analysis of his dreams have been central, then a bent for poetry. The result is this volume, centering about a protracted rendezvous with death, surfacing with an epic poem, entitled, A Passionate Psychoanalyst.
Interpersonal, object relations, and self psychology owe a debt to Sandor Ferenczi, the father of active and humanistic approach to therapy. Before Freud suppressed his radical ideas, Ferenczi made great progress in formulating new techniques to treat difficult-to-reach patients, such as people with character disorders, borderline conditions, and incest survivors. With this book, Rachman gives contemporary therapists what has been denied them: access to Ferenczi as a role model for working flexibly, creatively, and innovatively with diverse patients.
This book is about love, about how we fall in love and why we fall in love, and about how much we suffer if unable to love or be loved. The need to love and be loved can be read as the prototype of every human need and every relationship between human beings. To be loved is wishing to be seen, known, recognised for what we are in our deepest and most hidden inner self, in our wildest desires to live and be free. It is a need for knowledge, gratefulness and recognition. Literature, cinema and our very experience of life tell us about it. By listening to love, can psychoanalysis add anything further and new to what has already been said by culture, art and by our life experiences? In psychoanalysis, the events of love can be understood by going back to the most primitive forms of human relationships, that is, to the earliest childhood experiences.
He was the rising star of psychoanalysis, an intimate associate of Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler, a member of the Freudian "inner circle" with unrestricted access to the Freud Archives. And then Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson threw it all away because he dared to break the psychoanalytic community's deepest taboo: he told the truth in public. As he unmasks the pretensions and abuses of this elite profession, Masson invites us to eavesdrop on the shockingly unorthodox analysis he was subjected to in the course of his analytic training. But the more prestige Masson attained, the more he came to doubt not only the integrity of his colleagues, but the validity of their method. In the end, he blew the whistle-fully aware of the personal and professional consequences. With wit, wonder, and unflinching candor, Masson brilliantly exposes the cult of psychoanalysis and recounts his own self-propelled fall from grace. A sensation when it first appeared, Final Analysis is even more provocative and engrossing today. Written with passion and humor, this is the book that revealed a revered profession for what it was-and launched Masson on his true career.
Integrating cutting-edge relational theory with technique, this volume reveals the deeply personal nature of the intersubjective process of group therapy as it affects the group therapist and other group members. By locating the group therapist's experience in the centre of the action, Richard M. Billow moves away from traditional approaches in group psychotherapy. Instead, he places emphasis on the effect of the therapist's own evolving psychology on what occurs and what does not occur in group psychotherapy. Building on Bion's early theory of group and his later formulations regarding the structure of thought and the role of affect, this work expands on the present understanding of relational theory and technique. Through the use of clinical anecdotes the author is able to ground theory in the realities of clinical experience making this essential reading for group psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, academics and students of psychoanalytic theory.
Justin Clemens examines psychoanalysis under the rubric of 'antiphilosophy': a practice that offers the strongest possible challenges to thought. Drawing on the work of Badiou, Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Agamben, he examines the relationships of humans to dr
Elizabeth Severn: The ‘Evil Genius’ of Psychoanalysis chronicles the life and work of Elizabeth Severn, both as one of the most controversial analysands in the history of psychoanalysis, and as a psychoanalyst in her own right. Condemned by Freud as "an evil genius", Freud disapproved of Severn’s work and had her influence expelled from the psychoanalytic mainstream. In this book, Rachman draws on years of research into Severn to present a much needed reappraisal of her life and work, as well as her contribution to modern psychoanalysis. Arnold Rachman’s re-discovery, restoration and analysis of the Elizabeth Severn Papers – including previously unpublished interviews, books, brochures and photographs – suggests that, far from a failure, that the analysis of Severn by Ferenczi constitutes one of the great cases in psychoanalysis, one that was responsible a new theory and methodology for the study and treatment of trauma disorder, in which Severn played a pioneering role. Elizabeth Severn should be of interest to any psychoanalyst looking to glean fresh light on Severn’s progressive views on clinical empathy, self-disclosure, countertransference analysis, intersubjectivity and the origins of relational analysis.
As inequality widens in all sectors of contemporary society, we must ask: is psychoanalysis too white and well-to-do to be relevant to social, economic, and racial justice struggles? Are its ideas and practices too alien for people of color? Can it help us understand why systems of oppression are so stable and how oppression becomes internalized? In A People’s Historyof Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, Daniel José Gaztambide reviews the oft-forgotten history of social justice in psychoanalysis. Starting with the work of Sigmund Freud and the first generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts, Gaztambide traces a series of interrelated psychoanalytic ideas and social justice movements that culminated in the work of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martín-Baró. Through this intellectual genealogy, Gaztambide presents a psychoanalytically informed theory of race, class, and internalized oppression that resulted from the intertwined efforts of psychoanalysts and racial justice advocates over the course of generations and gave rise to liberation psychology. This book is recommended for students and scholars engaged in political activism, critical pedagogy, and clinical work.
Written in the form of letters from an experienced analyst to a young colleague, Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst expands the psychoanalytic frame to include South American, French, and British theory, and examine a wide variety of theoretical and clinical topics. Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst is ground-breaking in more than one respect. It re-examines major psychoanalytic theories in the light of rich clinical practice, and in the light of the practice of friendship, whilst portraying the practice of analysis as the choice of a personal code of ethics. Covering such core issues as transference, trauma, hysteria, the influence of the mother, and love and hate, and drawing on the work of notable analysts such as Winnicott, McDougall, Pankow and Ferenczi, the book explores the many facets of healing function of psychoanalysis in practice and discloses the workings of the psyche in human existence. This book considers psychoanalysis a humanist endeavour, focussing on its healing function and using captivating examples to illustrate different modes of commitment on the part of the analyst. Rejecting a view of psychoanalysis as a painful and laborious process, the book insists instead on the joyous and passionate nature of the work of psychic elaboration. Uniquely, the transmission of knowledge and skill which it provides, constituting a veritable training, is not at all didactic in tone. It places the two interlocutors, as well as the reader, on the same level: people who share the desire to remain attentive to themselves and to others, and who believe that empathy heals, within the setting of therapy and in human relations in general. Written in a remarkably engaging and accessible style, Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, students of all levels studying in these fields, as well as lay readers wishing to understand fundamental psychoanalytic concepts.
