Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma
Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma

Author: Sophia Richman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1136914021

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Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between trauma and creativity. It is about art in the service of healing, mourning, and memorialization. This book addresses the questions of how artistic expression facilitates the healing process; what the therapeutic action of art is, and if there is a relationship between mental instability and creativity. It also asks how self-analysis through art-making can be integrated with psychoanalytic work in order to enrich and facilitate emotional growth. Drawing on four decades of clinical practice and a critical reading of creativity literature, Sophia Richman presents a new theory of the creative process whose core components are relational conceptualizations of dissociation and witnessing. This is an interdisciplinary book which draws inspiration from life histories, clinical case material, neuroscience, and interviews with creators, as well as from various art forms such as film, literature, paintings, and music. Some areas of discussion include: art born of genocide, confrontation with mortality in illness and aging, and the clinical implications of memoirs written by psychoanalysts. Visual images are interspersed throughout the text that illustrate the reverberations of trauma and its creative transformation in the work of featured artists. Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma powerfully articulates how creative action is one of the most effective ways of coping with trauma and its aftershocks - it is in art, in all its forms, that sorrow is given shape and meaning. Here, Sophia Richman shows how art helps to master the chaos that follows in the wake of tragedy, how it restores continuity, connection and the will for a more fully lived life. This book is written for psychoanalysts as well as for other mental health professionals who practice and teach in academic settings. It will also be of interest to graduate and post-graduate students and will be relevant for artists who seek a better understanding of the creative process.

Mending Education
Mending Education

Author: Karen Gross

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 0807782548

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Discover how the crisis of a global pandemic allowed educators to improve learning across the pre-K–adult pipeline. While acknowledging the scale of loss and difficulty the COVID pandemic engendered within the field of education, this book focuses on how sudden and forced changes to teaching and learning created “Pandemic Positives,” which can be captured and brought to scale. In particular: Part I addresses how Pandemic Positives came into being, with special attention to the presence of educator hope and creativity. Part II explores the Pandemic Positives that arose in three settings: when schools were closed, when learning turned online, and when schools re-opened. Part III provides strategies for replicating the Pandemic Positives so they become positive educational game changers. This book is grounded on trauma and mental wellness theory and includes the in-the-trenches experiences and voices of educators. The text features art created by the coauthors and shares both their professional and personal experiences, humanizing and enriching the book. Mending Education completes a trilogy composed of Breakaway Learners and Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door by Karen Gross. “We have all bemoaned the COVID pandemic and its lasting negative effects, but Karen Gross and Edward Wang turn that pessimism on its head. Their extensive experience in education is augmented by the priceless data gathered through their research survey of teachers and educators. This is a must-have for educators everywhere.” —Chris Messina-Boyer, educational crisis manager/crisis communications consultant, 20Buttonwood PR Solutions LLC

The Voice of the Analyst
The Voice of the Analyst

Author: Linda Hillman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-24

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 131739996X

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The Voice of the Analyst contains personal narratives by twelve psychoanalysts, each taking the reader through his or her unique path toward developing a voice and identity as an analyst. All come from different backgrounds, theoretical orientations and stages of their careers. The narratives are courageous and uncommonly revealing in a profession that demands so much reserve and anonymity from its practitioners. This book demonstrates that the analyst’s work is a product of their characters as well as training and theory. The narrative form in this book offers a refreshing and necessary companion to the theoretical and clinical writing that dominates the field. The editors show the importance of developing a unique voice and identity if one is to function well as an analyst. This endeavor cannot be accomplished solely through technical training, especially with the isolation that characterizes clinical practice. There are pressures that analysts experience alone in their practice, from patients and themselves as well as other professionals, forces that render technical training and theory alone inadequate in facilitating the development of one’s analytic voice and identity. Enter the form of the personal narrative presented in this book. This fascinating compilation of narratives shows how the contributors bear striking similarities and differences to one another. Despite their different backgrounds, they display commonality in their sensitivity towards mental and emotional states and their wish to heal suffering. However, they also exemplify wide differences in motivations, interests and what makes them tick as psychoanalysts. The Voice of the Analyst will be a great companion book for established psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and those in training, as well as mental health professionals keen to understand what it takes to become a psychoanalyst and to enhance their personal and professional development.

Micro-trauma
Micro-trauma

Author: Margaret Crastnopol

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-01-09

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1135968195

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Micro-trauma: A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury explores the "micro-traumatic" or small, subtle psychic hurts that build up to undermine a person’s sense of self-worth, skewing his or her character and compromising his or her relatedness to others. These injuries amount to what has been previously called "cumulative" or "relational trauma." Until now, psychoanalysis has explained such negative influences in broad strokes, using general concepts like psychosexual urges, narcissistic needs, and separation-individuation aims, among others. Taking a fresh approach, Margaret Crastnopol identifies certain specific patterns of injurious relating that cause damage in predictable ways; she shows how these destructive processes can be identified, stopped in their tracks, and replaced by a healthier way of functioning. Seven different types of micro-trauma, all largely hidden in plain sight, are described in detail, and many others are discussed more briefly. Three of these micro-traumas—"psychic airbrushing and excessive niceness," "uneasy intimacy," and "connoisseurship gone awry"—have a predominantly positive emotional tone, while the other four—"unkind cutting back," "unbridled indignation," "chronic entrenchment," and "little murders"—have a distinctly negative one. Margaret Crastnopol shows how these toxic processes may take place within a dyadic relationship, a family group, or a social clique, causing collateral psychic damage all around as a consequence. Using illustrations drawn from psychoanalytic treatment, literary fiction, and everyday life, Micro-trauma : A psychoanalytic understanding of cumulative psychic injury outlines how each micro-traumatic pattern develops and manifests itself, and how it wreaks its damage. The book shows how an awareness of these patterns can give us the therapeutic leverage needed to reshape them for the good. This publication will be an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and for trainees and graduate students in these fields and related disciplines. Margaret Crastnopol (Peggy), Ph.D. is a faculty member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a Supervisor of Psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology. She is also a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She writes and teaches nationally and internationally about the analyst's and patient's subjectivity; the vicissitudes of love, lust, and attachment drives; and varieties of micro-trauma. She is in private practice for the treatment of individuals and couples in Seattle, WA.

Trauma, Posttraumatic Growth, and World Literature
Trauma, Posttraumatic Growth, and World Literature

Author: Suzanne LaLonde

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1000578666

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Pandemics, global climate chaos, worldwide migration crises? These phenomena are provoking traumatic experiences in unprecedented ways and numbers. This book is targeted for clinicians, scientists, cultural theorists, and other scholars and students of trauma studies interested in cultivating interdisciplinary understandings of trauma and posttraumatic conditions, especially resistance, resilience, and posttraumatic growth. Following clinicians’ invitation for trauma survivors to wear a philosopher’s hat, to engage in creative activities, and to employ cognitive exercises to combat psychic constriction, I introduce the concept of a Literary Arts Praxis. The Praxis is built on clinical research and literature seeped in existential, phenomenological, and aesthetic themes. I argue that an educational training in a Praxis might help trauma survivors to get at trauma, as they engage in imaginative escapades, while forging alliances with characters; interpretative exercises, such as triggering emotions through phenomenological experiences; and creative writing endeavors, that include turning testimonies into imaginative stories.

On Coming into Possession of Oneself
On Coming into Possession of Oneself

Author: Donnel B. Stern

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-05

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1040100732

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This book is Donnel B. Stern’s latest contribution to the kind of understanding of the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic process offered by field theory. Stern anchors his understanding of therapeutic action in the freedom of both patient and analyst to create a meaningful experience with minimum inhibition. The field’s capacity to generate meaning—and thus to make possible fully realized human living—rows from its freedom to respond spontaneously to the feelings, wants, and needs of its participants. To whatever extent this spontaneity is diminished, as it is in unconscious mutual enactment, we can be sure that some part of the field is frozen or otherwise rigidified. This position serves as the foundation of the psychoanalysis that Stern practices. The analyst aims to feel their way into compromises in the field, and then do whatever they can to grasp and dissolve them, knowing that they will have to be visited repeatedly, and dissolved again. These insights into interpersonal and relational field theory lead to descriptions of clinical interventions that are focused on the moment-to-moment emotional experience of both the patient and the analyst. With valuable contributions to theory and emotionally immediate clinical vignettes, this book is essential for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wishing to understand how the analyst’s interventions grow from the analyst’s emotional involvement in the clinical process.

Trauma Doesn't Stop at the School Door
Trauma Doesn't Stop at the School Door

Author: Karen Gross

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0807778672

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This book explores how educational institutions have failed to recognize and effectively address the symptoms of trauma in students of all ages. Given the prevalence of traumatic events in our world, Gross argues that it is time for educational institutions and those who work within them to change their approaches and responses to traumatic symptoms that manifest in students in schools and colleges. These changes can alter how and what we teach, how we train teachers, how we structure our calendars and create our schedules, how we address student behavior and disciplinary issues, and how we design our physical space. Drawing on real-life examples and scenarios that will be familiar to educators, this resource provides concrete suggestions to assist institutions in becoming trauma-responsive environments, including replicable macro and micro changes. “Ideas and strategies that teachers, parents, students, and leaders of any organization can leverage to make positive transformational changes.” —Martha J. Kanter, U.S. under secretary of education (2009–2013) “A treasure trove of information on trauma, as well as thoughtful recommendations for schools from pre–K through college.” —Kathleen Ross, president emeritus, Heritage University “It is a book for the ‘Generation T’ in the context of our time. Offers strategies of quieting the hyper-aroused stress response system. —Ed K.S. Wang, Massachusetts General Hospital

Sex, Drugs and Creativity
Sex, Drugs and Creativity

Author: Dustin Kahoud

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-19

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1317353455

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In Sex, Drugs, and Creativity: The Search for Magic in a Disenchanted World, Kahoud and Knafo take a close look at omnipotent fantasies in three domains: sex, drugs, and creativity. They demonstrate how these fantasies emerge and how artists draw on them both to create and destroy—sometimes simultaneously – and how understanding this can help psychoanalysts work more effectively with these individuals. Using the personal statements of influential artists and entertainers, in addition to clinical material, the authors examine the omnipotence of self-destruction as it contends with that of creative artists. The authors argue that creative artists use omnipotent fantasies to imagine the world differently - this enables them to produce their art, but also leaves these artists vulnerable to addiction. Chapters devoted to Stephen King and Anne Sexton demonstrate the ways these authors used drugs and alcohol to fuel imagination and inspire creative output while simultaneously doing harm to themselves. A detailed case study also demonstrates successful clinical work with a creative substance user. Sex, Drugs, and Creativity will appeal to anyone interested in the links between creativity and substance use, and will be of great use to psychoanalysts and mental health practitioners working with these challenging clients.

Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal
Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal

Author: Liz DeBetta

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-06-19

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 900468171X

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We live in a world where conversations about trauma are becoming commonplace and adopted people are using their voices to educate the general public about the effects of maternal separation and genealogical bewilderment. But for many adult adoptees the act of speaking truth to power is still fraught. Personal writing can unlock long held silences and help adult adoptees feel empowered to rewrite their narratives. The need to deconstruct dominant narratives about adoption and its inherent loss and trauma is necessary if we are to reform an institution that has damaged many generations of mothers and children. Because many adoptees do not have access to adoption and trauma competent therapists, writing is an accessible therapeutic modality that can be used to reframe narratives that position adoptees as the object rather than the subject. Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal shares the framework and method of using writing as a practice for adult adoptees, therapists, teachers, and researchers interested in learning how to migrate and heal embodied trauma. It analyzes lived experience and the author’s own writing to develop a methodology for moving toward wholeness by writing and speaking the truth of internal adoptee experiences.

Wounds of History
Wounds of History

Author: Jill Salberg

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1317614038

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Wounds of History takes a new view in psychoanalysis using a trans-generational and social/political/cultural model looking at trauma and its transmission. The view is radical in looking beyond maternal dyads and Oedipal triangles and in its portrayal of a multi-generational world that is no longer hierarchical. This look allows for greater clinical creativity for conceptualizing and treating human suffering, situating healing in expanding circles of witnessing. The contributors to this volume look at inherited personal trauma involving legacies of war, genocide, slavery, political persecution, forced migration/unwelcomed immigration and the way attachment and connection is disrupted, traumatized and ultimately longing for repair and reconnection. The book addresses several themes such as the ethical/social turn in psychoanalysis; the repetition of resilience and wounds and the repair of these wounds; the complexity of attachment in the aftermath of trauma, and the move towards social justice. In their contributions, the authors remain close to the human stories. Wounds of History will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists and other mental health professionals, as well as students or teachers of trauma studies, Jewish and gender studies and studies of genocide.