North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context. During the time span covered in this book, interpersonal psychoanalysis was most concerned with revising the understanding of the analytic relationship—transference and countertransference-and how to work with it. Most of the works collected here center on this theme. The interpersonal perspective introduced the view that the analyst is always and unavoidably a particular, "real" person, and that transference and countertransference need to be reconceptualized to take the analyst’s individual humanity into account. The relationship needs to be grasped as one taking place between two very particular people. Many of the papers are by writers well known in the broader psychoanalytic world, such as Bromberg, Greenberg, Levenson, and Mitchell. But also included are those by writers who, while not as widely recognized beyond the interpersonal literature, have been highly influential among interpersonalists, including Barnett, Schecter, Singer, and Wolstein. Donnel B. Stern and Irwin Hirsch, prominent interpersonalists themselves, present each piece with a prologue that contextualizes the author and their work in the interpersonal literature. An introductory essay also reviews the history of interpersonal psychoanalysis, explaining why interpersonal thinking remains a coherent clinical and theoretical perspective in contemporary psychoanalysis. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to know more about interpersonal theory and practice than can be learned from current sources.

North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context. During the time span covered in this book, interpersonal psychoanalysis was most concerned with revising the understanding of the analytic relationship—transference and countertransference-and how to work with it. Most of the works collected here center on this theme. The interpersonal perspective introduced the view that the analyst is always and unavoidably a particular, "real" person, and that transference and countertransference need to be reconceptualized to take the analyst’s individual humanity into account. The relationship needs to be grasped as one taking place between two very particular people. Many of the papers are by writers well known in the broader psychoanalytic world, such as Bromberg, Greenberg, Levenson, and Mitchell. But also included are those by writers who, while not as widely recognized beyond the interpersonal literature, have been highly influential among interpersonalists, including Barnett, Schecter, Singer, and Wolstein. Donnel B. Stern and Irwin Hirsch, prominent interpersonalists themselves, present each piece with a prologue that contextualizes the author and their work in the interpersonal literature. An introductory essay also reviews the history of interpersonal psychoanalysis, explaining why interpersonal thinking remains a coherent clinical and theoretical perspective in contemporary psychoanalysis. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to know more about interpersonal theory and practice than can be learned from current sources.

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.

Through a series of expansive essays, Transference, Love, Being explores the centrality of love in psychoanalytic practice. Starting with the immersion of the analyst, this book reimagines several aspects of the psychoanalytic process, including transference, countertransference, boundaries, embodiment, subjectivity and eroticism. To love is to cultivate to be. Psychoanalysis, as essentially vitalizing, is a playspace for taboo subjects within clear and safe parameters. Interweaving loving, being and perceiving, this book provides challenging new perspectives on the analysts's subjectivity, receptivity and its immersive influence on the analytic process. These essays refine theoretical understandings of the irreducible and omnipresent nature of love in psychoanalysis, thereby offering clarity to psychoanalysts, psychodyanmic therapists and scholars through the often-prohibited love and eroticism, here viewed as indispensible psychoanalytic theory and practice.

This collection covers all the topics relevant for understanding the importance of Sándor Ferenczi and his influence on contemporary psychoanalysis. Pre-eminent Ferenczi scholars were solicited to contribute succint reviews of their fields of expertise. The book is divided in five sections. 'The historico-biographical' describes Ferenczi's childhood and student days, his marriage, brief analyses with Freud, his correspondences and contributions to daily press in Budapest, list of his patients' true identities, and a paper about his untimely death. 'The development of Ferenczi's ideas' reviews his ideas before his first encounter with psychoanalysis, his relationship with peers, friendship with Groddeck, emancipation from Freud, and review of the importance of his Clinical Diary. The third section reviews Ferenczi's clinical concepts and work: trauma, unwelcome child, wise baby, identification with aggressor, mutual analysis, and many others. In 'Echoes', we follow traces of Ferenczi's influence on virtually all traditions in contemporary psychoanalysis: interpersonal, independent, Kleinian, Lacanian, relational, etc.

From its very inception, psychoanalysis has been a discipline encompassing two contradictory tendencies. This dualistic tendency – tradition alongside disenchantment and the will to improve knowledge – is likely responsible for psychoanalysis’s powerful capacity to survive. In Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress, Aner Govrin and Jon Mills bring together the most eminent and diverse psychoanalysts to reflect upon the evolution, vitality, and richness of psychoanalysis today. Psychoanalysis is undergoing significant transformations involving the entire spectrum of disciplinary differences. This book illuminates these transformations, importantly revealing the innovations in technique, the evolving understanding of theory within existing schools of thought, the need for empirical resurgence, innovations in infant research, neuropsychoanalysis, in the development of new interventions and methods of treatment, and in philosophical and metatheoretical paradigms. Uniquely bringing together psychoanalysts representing different fields of expertise, the contributors answer two questions in this collection of ground-breaking essays: "What are the most important developments in psychoanalysis today?" and "What impact has your chosen perspective had on conducting psychoanalytic treatment?" Their thought-provoking and challenging answers are essential for anyone who wants to fully understand the field of psychoanalysis in our changing, current world. Innovations in Psychoanalysis brings a whole array of differing schools of thought in dialogue with one another and will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, philosophers, and historians of the behavioral sciences worldwide.

Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s-2010s is the second collection of selected classic articles of the modern era by psychoanalysts identified with the interpersonal perspective. The first, The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s presented articles by second and third generation interpersonalists. This book contains those written by the third and fourth generation of interpersonal psychoanalysts. The articles selected by the Editors for this second book extend the theme of transference and countertransference that was the throughline of the first book, lending even greater significance in clinical practice to the analyst’s subjectivity and its relation to the patient’s mind. One chapter after another in this book reveal ways that the analyst’s experience can lead to a greater appreciation of the patient’s unconscious experience. It is because of papers such as these that interpersonal psychoanalysis has been described as the origin, at least in North America, of the contemporary clinical interest in psychoanalytic subjectivity. As in the first, the articles in this second book include classic contributions from Bromberg, Greenberg, Hirsch, Mitchell, Levenson, Stern, and Wolstein; these writers are joined here by Blechner, Bonovitz, Buechler, Fiscalini, Held-Weiss, Kuriloff, and White. North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. Along with its companion work, this book provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context.

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living examines how psychoanalysts can draw on their training, reading, and clinical experience to help their patients address some of the recurrent challenges of everyday life. Sandra Buechler offers clinicians poetic, psychoanalytic, and experiential approaches to problems, drawing on her personal and clinical experience, as well as ideas from her reading, to confront challenges familiar to us all. Buechler addresses issues including difficulties of mourning, aging, living with uncertainty, finding meaningful work, transcending pride, bearing helplessness, and forgiving life's hardships. For those contemplating a clinical career, and those in its beginning stages, she suggests ways to prepare to face these quandaries in treatment sessions. More experienced practitioners will find echoes of themes that have run through their own clinical and personal life experiences. The chapters demonstrate that insights from a poem can often guide the clinician as well as concepts garnered from psychoanalytic theory and other sources. Buechler puts her questions to T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz and many other poets and fiction writers. She "asks" Sharon Olds how to meet emergencies, Erich Fromm how to live vigorously, and Edith Wharton how to age gracefully, and brings their insights to bear as she addresses challenges that make frequent appearances in clinical sessions, and other walks of life. With a final section designed to improve training in the light of her practical findings, Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living is an essential book for all practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

From time to time therapists find themselves in a bind—faced with a challenging situation, unsure how to proceed. Such a conundrum leaves the therapist on edge, concerned that the success of treatment might rest on how he or she responds to the circumstance. The situation seems to call for more than pat clinical protocol, leaving the therapist uncertain as he or she ventures into novel territory wondering "what do I do now?" Conundrums and Predicaments in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: The Clinical Moments Project comprises twelve distinct clinical moments during which the treating/presenting analyst feels him- or herself in just such a quandary. The presented moment comes to a head at a point where the therapist feels uncertain what his or her next and best "move" might be—one that balances the protection of the therapeutic alliance with the need to address a clinical development head on. Space is then left for 25 well-known analysts ("commentators") of varying theoretical persuasions to weigh in, sharing what they think about the situation and how they imagine they might have proceeded. In the final analysis, the point of this project is not to determine how the moment "should" have been handled given the input of experts; rather, it aims to illuminate the clinical theories that therapists carry with them into sessions where they operate implicitly, directing their attention to select sorts of data that are then used to fashion an intervention. This, then, is the ultimate lesson of the Clinical Moments Project—to learn how to listen to how therapists listen to the unfolding material. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists of all persuasions.

A Beholder's Share demonstrates how a sense of reality is evoked in the unpredictable space between imagination and adaptation. The world calls forth something in each of us—a beholder’s share—which in turn calls forth something in the world. Though usually viewed as opposites, imagination and reality make uneasy but necessary bedfellows. Part I of A Beholder’s Share shows how fantasy generates novelty by creating versions of what is already known, while imagination allows what seems familiar to be seen afresh. Goldman’s essays offer unexpected takes on common clinical encounters: clashes of belief, the search for generational dialogue, the awkward discomfort of feeling like a fake, the problem of how and when to end analysis, the strains of working with psychotic anxieties. Part II, ‘Winnicott’s Living Legacy,’ illuminates Winnicott’s preoccupation with difficulties inherent in contact with reality. These chapters bring to life Winnicott’s personal struggle with an area of experience his own two analyses failed to touch, the tangled relationship with Masud Khan, his recognition of dissociation as "a queer kind of truth," and how Romantic poets shaped Winnicott’s view of what is felt as real. Bringing together Dodi Goldman’s seminal and new writings, A Beholder’s Share will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of the arts, literature, and humanities.