Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation

Author: Karen J. Maroda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135060843
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation demonstrates how interpersonal psychoanalysis obliges analysts to engage their patients with genuine emotional responsiveness, so that not only the patient but the analyst too is open to ongoing transformation through the analytic experience. In so doing, the analyst moves from the position of an "interpreting observer" to that of an "active participant and facilitator" whose affective communications enable the patient to acquire basic self-trust along with self-knowledge. Drawing on the current literature on affect, Maroda argues that psychological change occurs through affect-laden interpersonal processes. Given that most patients in psychotherapy have problems with affect management, the completing of cycles of affective communication between therapist and patient becomes a vitally important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise. Through emotionally open responses to their patients and careful use of patient-prompted self-disclosures, analysts can facilitate affect regulation responsibly and constructively, with the emphasis always remaining on the patients' experience. Moments of mutual surrender - the honest emotional giving over of patient to analyst and analyst to patient - epitomize the emotionally intense interpersonal experiences that lead to enduring intrapsychic change. Maroda's work is profoundly personal. She does not hesitate to share with the reader how her own personality affects her thinking and her work. Indeed, she believes her theoretical and clinical preferences are emblematic of the way in which the analyst's subjectivity necessarily shapes theory choice and practice preferences in general. Seduction, Surrender, and Transfomation is not only a powerful brief for emotional honesty in the analytic relationship but also a model of the personal openness that, according to Maroda, psychoanalysis demands of all its practitioners.

Psychodynamic Techniques

Author: Karen J. Maroda
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 1462509592
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Helping therapists navigate the complexities of emotional interactions with clients, this book provides practical clinical guidelines. Master clinician Karen J. Maroda adds an important dimension to the psychodynamic literature by exploring the role of both clients' and therapists' emotional experiences in the process of therapy. Vivid case examples illustrate specific techniques for becoming more attuned to one's own experience of a client; offering direct feedback and self-disclosure in the service of treatment goals; and managing intense feelings and conflict in the relationship. Maroda clearly distinguishes between therapeutic and nontherapeutic ways to work with emotion in this candid and instructive guide.

The Analyst’s Vulnerability

Author: Karen J. Maroda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000411451
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
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.

A Shining Affliction

Author: Annie G. Rogers
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440621098
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."—The Los Angeles Times. A moving account of a true-life double healing through psychotherapy. In this brave, iconoclastic, and utterly unique book, psychotherapist Annie Rogers chronicles her remarkable bond with Ben, a severely disturbed five-ear-old. Orphaned, fostered, neglected, and forgotten in a household fire, Ben finally begins to respond to Annie in their intricate and revealing platy therapy. But as Ben begins to explore the trauma of his past, Annie finds herself being drawn downward into her own mental anguish. Catastrophically failed by her own therapist, she is hospitalized with a breakdown that renders her unable to speak. Then she and her gifted new analyst must uncover where her story of childhood terror overlaps with Ben's, and learn how she can complete her work with the child by creating a new story from the old—one that ultimately heals them both.

September 11

Author: Susan Coates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134910142
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
Drawing on research from a variety of domains - clinical studies of trauma, developmental psychopathology, interpersonal psychobiology, epidemiology, and social policy - September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds addresses especially the fundamental relationship of human bonds to trauma and underscores the manner in which developments in all these fields are coming together in complementary ways that sustain a key finding: that trauma must be understood in its relational and attachment contexts. The quality of early emotional attachments, differences in attachment styles to family milieus, and the psychological qualities that enable traumatized parents to avoid traumatizing their children are among the topics through which these contexts are explored. From their various disciplinary vantage points, the contributions converge to show how human relationships can either provide an anodyne to trauma or serve as the vehicle of its transmission. As Susan Coates observes, a major legacy of 9/11 is the realization that "there are no simple truths in the world of trauma studies, no easy-to-remember anodynes or pharmacologic magic bullets or depth-psychological schematizations that will hold true for a majority or even a sizable minority of cases." Yet, in delineating the multiple connections between human relations and trauma, and in elaborating these connections from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to September 11 have taken a decisive first step to consolidate new knowledge about trauma and to demonstrate how it can assist clinicians who encounter diverse responses to trauma in their day-to-day work. A sobering reminder of shared human vulnerability in the face of devastating events, September 11 is also a heartening reminder of resiliency in the face of overwhelming loss and of the healing potential of human connection.

Bodies In Treatment

Author: Frances Sommer Anderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136823069
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 505

Book Description
Bodies in Treatment is a challenging volume that brings into conceptual focus an "unspoken dimension" of clinical work - the body and nonverbal communication - that has long occupied the shadowy realm of tacit knowledge. By bringing visceral, sensory, and imagistic modes of emotional processing to the forefront, Editor Frances Sommer Anderson and the contributors to this original collection expand the domain of psychodynamic engagement. Working at the leading edge of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and in the forefront of the integrative psychotherapy movement, Anderson has created a collaborative project that stimulates interdisciplinary dialogue on the developmental neurobiology of attachment, the micro-processing of interchanges between the infant and caregiver, the neuroscience of emotional processing and trauma, body-focused talking treatments for trauma, and research in cognitive science. Enlightened by experiencing body-based treatments for thirty years, Anderson reflects on the powerful impact of these interventions, recounting attempts to integrate her somatically-informed discoveries into the "talking" frame. Reaching further, her contributors present richly informative accounts of how experiences in body-based modalities can be creatively integrated into a psychoanalytic framework of treatment. Readers are introduced to specialized modalities, such as craniosacral therapy and polarity therapy, as well as to the adjunctive use of yoga, the effectiveness of which can be grounded neurophysiologically. Somatic interventions are discussed in terms of the extent to which they can promote depth-psychological change outside the psychoanalytic consulting room as well as how they can enrich the relational process in psychodynamic treatment. The final sections of Bodies in Treatment explore the range of ways in which patients’ and therapists’ bodies engage, sustain, and contain the dynamics of treatment.

Travels with the Self

Author: Philip Cushman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429886446
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
Travels with the Self uses a hermeneutic perspective to critique psychology and demonstrate why the concept of the self and the modality of cultural history are so vitally important to the profession of psychology. Each chapter focuses on a theory, concept, sociopolitical or professional issue, philosophical problem, or professional activity that has rarely been critiqued from a historical, sociopolitical vantage point. Philip Cushman explores psychology’s involvement in consumerism, racism, shallow understandings of being human, military torture, political resistance, and digital living. In each case, theories and practices are treated as historical artifacts, rather than expressions of a putatively progressive, modern-era science that is uncovering the one, universal truth about human being. In this way, psychological theories and practices, especially pertaining to the concept of the self, are shown to be reflections of the larger moral understandings and political arrangements of their time and place, with implications for how we understand the self in theory and clinical practice. Drawing on the philosophies of critical theory and hermeneutics, Cushman insists on understanding the self, one of the most studied and cherished of psychological concepts, and its ills, practitioners, and healing technologies, as historical/cultural artifacts — surprising, almost sacrilegious, concepts. To this end, each chapter begins with a historical introduction that locates it in the historical time and moral/political space of the nation’s, the profession’s, and the author’s personal context. Travels with the Self brings together highly unusual and controversial writings on contemporary psychology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists of all stripes, as well as scholars of philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians

Author: Jack Drescher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317712757
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Examine gay and lesbian psychoanalysis from a variety of perspectives! Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians: Contemporary Dynamic Approaches presents case histories of psychotherapy sessions with gay and lesbian patients, focusing on today's psychoanalytical approaches. Dedicated to enhancing the emotional, psychological, and psychiatric treatment of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals, the book features prominent analysts with a wide range of clinical and theoretical approaches. The foremost experts in the therapeutic field address issues affecting gay and lesbian patients from psychoanalytic perspectives that respect the patients' sexual identities. Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians reflects the significant clinical and theoretical changes therapists face in dealing with issues of gender and sexuality. New ways of thinking coexist with traditional theory as paradigm shifts in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis affect the treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual patients. This book provides a forum to address those changes through clinical papers and discussions. Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians includes discussion of case reports that deal with: gay therapists treating gay patients countertransferential enactments of sex and gender in treatment rethinking the meanings of homosexuality psychotherapeutic treatment of gay male patients with AIDS and much more! Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians is an essential forum for the exchange of clinical information on gay and lesbian psychotherapy. The book is a valuable resource for psychiatrists, psychologists, social work therapists, psychoanalysts, and anyone interested in today's psychoanalytic approaches to homosexuality.

Getting From Here to There

Author: Sheldon Bach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134914628
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
It is clinical work with the most difficult patients - those with severe narcissistic, sadomasochistic, and borderline disorders - that poses the greatest challenge to the therapist's guiding assumptions about clinical process; indeed, such work often leads therapists to question beliefs and expectations that formerly seemed self-evident. In Getting From Here to There: Analytic Love, Analytic Process, Sheldon Bach elaborates the holistic vision that guides him in work with just such patients. He dwells especially on the "attentive presence" through which the analyst effects a "meeting" with patients that invites the latter's trust in the analyst and in the therapeutic process. And he writes of love - of patient for analyst and of analyst for patient - that grows out of this mutual trust and sustains therapeutic process. For Bach, analytic therapy aims at understanding the person as a mind-body unity that manifests particular states of consciousness. This holistic vision of treatment sustains a flexible clinical orientation that enables the analyst to "meet" states of consciousness in order to bring them into a system of which the analyst forms a part. Bach thoughtfully explores the clinical issues that enter into this taxing process, among them the establishment and maintenence of basic trust; the patient's or the therapist's presence in the other's mind; and the shifts in agency between patient and therapist. And he describes at length the frequently exhausting, even demoralizing, transference-countertransference struggles that enter into this type of analytic work. Throughout, Bach is guided by the conviction that work with extremely challenging patients promotes the psychological growth and increased self-knowledge of patient and analyst alike. And he is admirably clear that the "mutual living through" of such treatments nurtures a kind of love between patient and analyst. Getting From Here to There not only records the clinical lessons learned by an unusually gifted analyst; it also chronicles the movement of psychoanalysis itself from the dissection of love into component parts to a synthetic grasp of its vital role in psychoanalytically informed treatment.

The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition

Author: Albert Newen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191054364
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1029

Book Description
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) is a relatively young and thriving field of interdisciplinary research. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments. With essays from leading scholars and researchers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition investigates this recent paradigm. It addresses the central issues of embodied cognition by focusing on recent trends, such as Bayesian inference and predictive coding, and presenting new insights, such as the development of false belief understanding. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition also introduces new theoretical paradigms for understanding emotion and conceptualizing the interactions between cognition, language, and culture. With an entire section dedicated to the application of 4E cognition in disciplines such as psychiatry and robotics, and critical notes aimed at stimulating discussion, this Oxford handbook is the definitive guide to 4E cognition. Aimed at neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in this young and thriving field.