Many are fascinated by the phenomenon of genius and search for an understanding of its nature. Modern research is not especially helpful in elucidating the inner process or its relation to ordinary thought. The present work comes from clinical studies of focal brain injuries that dissect unconscious cognition to reveal sub-surface lines of processing. The outcome is a process (microgenetic) theory of the mental state that differs markedly from mainstream (cognitive) psychology, but with the potential to clarify many features of thought and imagery, normal and exceptional. Creativity is not an isolated problem but touches many central issues in philosophical psychology.

The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction explores Bollas’s extraordinarily wide contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis. The book aims to introduce and explain the fundamentals of Bollas’s theory of the mind in a systematic way, addressing many of the questions that commonly arise when people approach his work. Through chapters on topics such as the receptive subject, the creative unconscious and the implications of Bollas’s metapsychology for the technique of free association, the book enables the reader to acquire an understanding of his unique psychoanalytic language, to grasp the conceptual building blocks of his thinking and how these interrelate, and to appreciate the theoretical and clinical coherence of his thinking. The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas: An Introduction will be of use to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and counsellors, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers wishing to explore the applications of psychoanalytic thinking to their practice. It will be of great value to trainees in these disciplines, as well as to postgraduate students and academics interested in contemporary psychoanalysis.

No single factor determined the growth of this book. It may have been that as a novice researcher in Behavioral Psychology I experienced growing discontent with the direction of intellectual activity in which the accent was on methodology and measurement, with a distinct atmosphere of dogmatism, insecurity and defensiveness. The anathema of tender-mindedness was attached to any study of mental manifes tations that avoided laboratory confirmation and statistical significance. Man in his uniqueness and unpredictable potentialities remained un explored. Yet outside the systematic vivisection of variables and their measurement men of originality and genius were studying the mind in its complex yet natural interaction of aspirations, values and creative capacities. It was almost too easy for me to turn to them for the re orientation of my psychological interest, and it was not difficult to find in Freud the most daring and penetrating representant of humanistic psychology. Furthermore, it could have been the fact that Freud's thoughts on creative processes appeared to me at once starkly original and yet incomplete and fragmentary, that led me to reconsider and expand on them. Freud's fascination with culture and creativity, although frank and serious, led him to a peculiar indecisiveness and overcautiousness which was radically different from the dramatic boldness of his thera peutic methods and the depth of his personality theories.

Metapsychology for Contemporary Psychoanalysis is a complete revision of the theoretical underpinnings of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. It seeks to replace the traditional drive–defence model of Freudian tradition with an information processing model of the mind. This book argues that the central human need is for self-knowledge, and that drives are best understood as means towards this end. Richard Sembera begins with a close reading of Freud’s own metapsychological writings, isolating the many unresolved difficulties and inconsistencies which continue to burden psychoanalytical theory today. By returning to the actual observable clinical phenomena in the analytic situation, it is shown that an alternative interpretation is possible that eliminates the theoretical difficulties in question. In the analytic situation, Sembera argues that clinicians do not in fact see individuals struggling against the expression of biological drives, rather they observe individuals struggling to clarify their experience of themselves in the presence of the analyst and put this experience into words. When this process is formalized and expressed in theoretical terms, it is found to consist of three distinct aspects: objectification, imagination, and symbolization. This process as a whole—ascent towards the other, relationship with the other, disclosure of self in the light of the other—is termed the dialectical structure of the self. It is conceptualized as the main accomplishment of the core mental process, the process of contextualization. This work is distinguished from other attempts at theoretical revision by its fundamental commitment to coherence and clarity as well as its determination to challenge accepted psychoanalytic dogma. It argues for the complete irrelevance of biology and neuroscience to the psychoanalytic enterprise and rejects the theory of drives in its entirety. Instead it affirms the centrality of the traumatic response to mental functioning, emphasises the social matrix in which drives are embedded, re-examines the concepts of free will, accountability, and responsibility, and concludes with an attempt to understand waking life as a creative product analogous to the lucid dream. Drawing on major psychoanalytic thinkers including Bollas and Benjamin, and current philosophy of mind, this book provides readers with a clear, updated model of metapsychology. Metapsychology for Contemporary Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as philosophy scholars and anyone with an interest in the philosophy of psychoanalysis.

This volume heralds the appearance, for the first time in many years, of a totally new document by Sigmund Freud. It is the draft of a lost metapsychological paper, one of twelve essays written during World War I at the peak of the master's powers. Freud intended to publish all twelve in book form, under the title Preliminaries to a Metapsychology, and thereby set out the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis. Scholars have long lamented the disappearance without a trace of seven of these important essays. Only in 1983 did Ilse Grubrich-Simitis happen upon this draft, in Freud's handwriting, in an old trunk containing papers and documents of his Hungarian collaborator Sándor Ferenczi. With the help of a brief letter Freud had written on the back of the last page, she soon realized that the manuscript she had found was the draft of the final paper in the series. That draft is published here in facsimile, together with a transcription in German of the facsimile and the English translation. In the first part of the draft, which is written in a kind of shorthand, Freud contrasts the three classic transference neuroses: anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis. In the second part, which is written in complete sentences, Freud undertakes a daringly speculative "phylogenetic fantasy" He explores whether the debilitating illnesses of the neurotic and the psychotic today might have originated long ago as adaptive responses of the entire species to threatening environmental changes or to traumatic events in the prehistory of mankind. In the draft "Fantasy" Freud modifies and expands the line of reasoning he began in Totem and Taboo (1912-13) after an intensely productive exchange with Ferenczi about Lamarckian concepts, making this recovered draft of major significance to students not only of psychoanalysis but also of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has contributed a detailed essay, setting the overview in the context of Freud's life, his work, and his historical and scientific prominence. She quotes from relevant letters of Freud and Ferenczi, some published here for the first time.

Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival explores the integration of traumatic helplessness in the course of psychoanalytic treatment. Based on the author’s many years of experience of working with psychotic and severely traumatised patients, this book offers guidelines to approach extreme psychic trauma in the therapeutic setting. Simo Salonen links psychic representation of the elementary drive phenomena and metaphorical thinking to primary identification understood as a mode of object finding. The collapse of this connection signifies a radical psychic trauma, the integration of which into the temporal continuity of an individual’s life is an essential task for psychoanalysis. Another key element of this book is Salonen’s notion of the primal representative matrix, referring to a resource of primary narcissism that an individual has been endowed with, carrying vital meanings. Also explored is the crucial work of mourning, as the result of which the impoverished ego may recover its primary narcissistic resources. Using insights from numerous case studies, Salonen offers a new way of understanding severe trauma, which can be used to advance both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Metapsychological Perspectives on Psychic Survival will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Over the course of the past 15 years, there has been a vast sea change in American psychoanalysis. It takes the form of a broad movement away from classical psychoanalytic theorizing grounded in Freud's drive theory toward models of mind and development grounded in object relations concepts. In clinical practice, there has been a corresponding movement away from the classical principles of neutrality, abstinence and anonymity toward an interactive vision of the analytic situation that places the analytic relationship, with its powerful, reciprocal affective currents, in the foreground. These developments have been evident in virtually all schools of psychoanalysis in America, from the most traditional to the most radical. The wellspring of these innovations is the work of a group of psychoanalysts who have struggled to integrate aspects of interpersonal psychoanalysis, various British object relations theories, and psychoanalytic feminism. Although not self-selected as a school, these theorists have generated a distinct tradition of psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice that has become extremely influential within psychoanalysis in the United States. Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition brings together for the first time the seminal papers of the major authors within this tradition. Each paper is accompanied by an introduction, in which the editors place it in its historical context, and a new afterward, in which the author suggests subsequent developments in his or her thinking. This book is an invaluable resource for any clinical practitioner, teacher or student of psychoanalysis interested in exploring the exciting developments of recent years.

An account of perception is essential for an interpretation of memory, thought, and the mental state. The theory expounded in this book, developed from clinical studies of brain-damaged individuals, is a dynamic process account that departs from static computational models of the mind, with implications for our understanding of all aspects of mental function, including the mind/brain problem. The various topics are discussed in lengthy essays that cover such phenomena as imagery, reality and illusion, time and the present moment, subjectivity, will and agency, and psychoanalysis and group psychology.