Debating Relational Psychoanalysis
Debating Relational Psychoanalysis

Author: Jon Mills

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-10

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 100006803X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Debating Relational Psychoanalysis, Jon Mills provides an historical record of the debates that had taken place for nearly two decades on his critique of the relational school, including responses from his critics. Since he initiated his critique, relational psychoanalysis has become an international phenomenon with proponents worldwide. This book hopes that further dialogue may not only lead to conciliation, but more optimistically, that relational theory may be inspired to improve upon its theoretical edifice, both conceptually and clinically, as well as develop technical parameters to praxis that help guide and train new clinicians to sharpen their own theoretical orientation and therapeutic efficacy. Because of the public exchanges in writing and at professional symposiums, these debates have historical significance in the development of the psychoanalytic movement as a whole simply due to their contentiousness and proclivity to question cherished assumptions, both old and new. In presenting this collection of his work, and those responses of his critics, Mills argues that psychoanalysis may only advance through critique and creative refinement, and this requires a deconstructive praxis within the relational school itself. Debating Relational Psychoanalysis will be of interest to psychoanalysts of all orientations, psychotherapists, mental health workers, psychoanalytic historians, philosophical psychologists, and the broad disciplines of humanistic, phenomenological, existential, and analytical psychology.

Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis
Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis

Author: Stephen A. Mitchell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1317771206

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Stephen A. Mitchell has been at the forefront of the broad paradigmatic shift in contemporary psychoanalysis from the traditional one-person model to a two-person, interactive, relational perspective. In Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, Mitchell provides a critical, comparative framework for exploring the broad array of concepts newly developed for understanding interactive processes between analysand and analyst. Drawing on the broad traditions of Kleinian theory and interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as object relations and progressive Freudian thought, he considers in depth the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, anachronistic ideals like anonymity and neutrality, the nature of analytic knowledge and authority, and the problems of gender and sexual orientation in the age of postmodernism. The problem of influence guides his discussion of these and other topics. How, Mitchell asks, can analytic clinicians best protect the patient’s autonomy and integrity in the context of our growing appreciation of the enormous personal impact of the analyst on the process? Although Mitchell explores many facets of the complexity of the psychoanalytic process, he presents his ideas in his customarily lucid, jargon-free style, making this book appealing not only to clinicians with various backgrounds and degrees of experience, but also to lay readers interested in the achievements of, and challenges before, contemporary psychoanalysis. A splendid effort to relate parallel lines of theorizing and derivative changes in clinical practice and informed by mature clinical judgment and broad scholarship into the history of psychoanalytic ideas, Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis takes a well-deserved place alongside Mitchell’s previous books. It is a brilliant synthesis of converging insights that have transformed psychoanalysis in our time, and a touchstone for enlightened dialogue as psychoanalysis approaches the millennium.

Inventing God
Inventing God

Author: Jon Mills

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1317218442

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value. After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity’s need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous. Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

Relational Psychotherapy
Relational Psychotherapy

Author: Patricia A. DeYoung

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-03-24

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 131752876X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The new edition of Relational Psychotherapy offers a theory that’s immediately applicable to everyday practice, from opening sessions through intensive engagement to termination. In clear, engaging prose, the new edition makes explicit the ethical framework implied in the first edition, addresses the major concepts basic to relational practice, and elucidates the lessons learned since the first edition's publication. It’s the ideal guide for beginning practitioners but will also be useful to experienced practitioners and to clients interested in the therapy process.

Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis
Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis

Author: Peter Fonagy

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2010-09-07

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1590514602

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Bestseller Attachment Theory shows scientifically how our earliest relationships with our mothers influence our later relationships in life. This book offers an excellent introduction to the findings of attachment theory and the major schools of psychoanalytic thought. "The book every student, colleague, and even rival theoretician has been waiting for. With characteristic wit, philosophical sophistication, scholarship, humanity, incisiveness, and creativity, Fonagy succinctly describes the links, differences, and future directions of his twin themes. [His book] is destined to take its place as one of a select list of essential psychology books of the decade." -Jeremy Holmes, Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, University of Exeter "Extraordinary--an invaluable resource for developmental psychoanalysis." -Joy D. Osofsky, Professor, Louisiana State University

Conundrums
Conundrums

Author: Jon Mills

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1136512489

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

2013 Goethe Award Winner! This is the first book of its kind to offer a sustained critique of contemporary psychoanalytic thought favoring relational, postmodern, and intersubjective perspectives, which largely define American psychoanalysis today. Conundrums turns an eye toward the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary theory; its theoretical relation to traditional psychoanalytic thought; clinical implications for therapeutic practice; political and ethical ramifications of contemporary praxis; and its intersection with points of consilience that emerge from these traditions. Central arguments and criticisms advanced throughout the book focus on operationally defining the key tenets of contemporary perspectives; the seduction and ambiguity of postmodernism; the question of selfhood and agency; illegitimate attacks on classical psychoanalysis; the role of therapeutic excess; contemporary psychoanalytic politics; and the question of consilience between psychoanalysis as a science versus psychoanalysis as part of the humanities. The historical criticisms against psychoanalysis are further explored in the context of the current philosophical-scientific binary that preoccupies the field.

The Future of Psychoanalysis
The Future of Psychoanalysis

Author: Peter Zagermann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0429906641

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is concerned with the question of what psychoanalytic training should look like today. Should we go on with the system that has developed over time? Or should we abandon it, and if so, for which reasons?It provides a detailed and compelling account of the ongoing, sometimes heated, international debate about psychoanalytic training. After nearly a century since the onset of formal psychoanalytic training in the 1920s in Berlin, experiences with the prevalent Eitingon model are presented and looked at from different perspectives. Experienced psychoanalysts from all the regions of the psychoanalytic world and from different schools of psychoanalytic thought and clinical conceptualizations share their ideas, critique, and on occasion, their diagnoses. Perhaps no other topic of present-day scientific discussion in the field is as prone to evoke more controversial and passionate reactions than the subject of training.

Impossible Training
Impossible Training

Author: Emanuel Berman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1135061777

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the past century psychoanalysis has gone on to establish training institutes, professional societies, accreditation procedures, and models of education, thus bringing into uneasy alliance all three impossible pursuits. In Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education, Emanuel Berman turns his attention to the current status and future prospects of this daunting project. Berman is ideally suited to tackle the impossibility of psychoanalytic education. A graduate of two psychoanalytic institutes, one in Israel and one in America, he has devoted much of his professional life to psychoanalytic education and the organizational issues embedded in it. In Impossible Training, Berman describes the complex emotional and organizational dynamics of psychoanalytic training. Placing these issues within the context of major controversies in psychoanalytic history, he shows how generations of students have either idealized a "proper analytic identity," which evolves into a persecutory ideal, or rebelled against these standards. Are such persecuting and infantilizing trends inherent in analytic training, he asks, or can psychoanalytic education transcend them through changes in its structure and rules? For Berman, the relational and intersubjective trends in contemporary psychoanalysis call for changes in analytic supervision, not least of which is heightened attentiveness to the many relationships that gain expression in the supervisory process. Envisioned in this relational manner, supervision can become a more personal experience, less guarded, and more conducive to the development of a fertile transitional space between supervisor and supervisee. Anchoring his consideration of the present in the controversies of the past, Berman concludes by considering the mission of psychoanalytic educators today: to provide trainees with the resources to cope creatively with the as yet unknown challenges of tomorrow.

The Analyst’s Vulnerability
The Analyst’s Vulnerability

Author: Karen J. Maroda

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-19

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1000411451

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book closely examines the analyst’s early experiences and character traits, demonstrating the impact they have on theory building and technique. Arguing that choice of theory and interventions are unconsciously shaped by clinicians’ early experiences, this book argues for greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and open dialogue as a corrective. Linking the analyst’s early childhood experiences to ongoing vulnerabilities reflected in theory and practice, this book favors an approach that focuses on feedback and confrontation, as well as empathic understanding and acceptance. Essential to this task, and a thesis that runs through the book, are analysts’ motivations for doing treatment and the gratifications they naturally seek. Maroda asserts that an enduring blind spot arises from clinicians’ ongoing need to deny what they are personally seeking from the analytic process, including the need to rescue and be rescued. She equally seeks to remove the guilt and shame associated with these motivations, encouraging clinicians to embrace both their own humanity and their patients’, rather than seeking to transcend them. Providing a new perspective on how analysts work, this book explores the topics of enactment, mirror neurons, and therapeutic action through the lens of the analyst’s early experiences and resulting personality structure. Maroda confronts the analyst’s tendencies to favor harmony over conflict, passivity over active interventions, and viewing the patient as an infant rather than an adult. Exploring heretofore unexamined issues of the psychology of the analyst or therapist offers the opportunity to generate new theoretical and technical perspectives. As such, this book will be invaluable to experienced psychodynamic therapists and students and trainees alike, as well as teachers of theory and practice.

Partners in Thought
Partners in Thought

Author: Donnel B. Stern

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-04-02

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1135837643

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Building on the innovative work of Unformulated Experience, Donnel B. Stern continues his exploration of the creation of meaning in clinical psychoanalysis with Partners in Thought. The chapters in this fascinating book are undergirded by the concept that the meanings which arise from unformulated experience are catalyzed by the states of relatedness in which the meanings emerge. In hermeneutic terms, what takes place in the consulting room is a particular kind of conversation, one in which patient and analyst serve as one another’s partner in thought, an emotionally responsive witness to the other’s experience. Enactment, which Stern theorizes as the interpersonalization of dissociation, interrupts this crucial kind of exchange, and the eventual breach of enactments frees analyst and patient to resume it. Later chapters compare his views to the ideas of others, considering mentalization theory and the work of the Boston Change Process Study Group. Approaching the link between dissociation and enactment via hermeneutics, metaphor, and narrative, among other perspectives, Stern weaves an experience-near theory of psychoanalytic relatedness that illuminates dilemmas clinicians find themselves in every day. Full of clinical illustrations showing how Stern works with dissociation and enactment, Partners in Thought is destined to take its place beside Unformulated Experience as a major contribution to the psychoanalytic literature.