The book examines how coevolved intraspecific aggression and appeasement gestures can give rise to complex social, cultural, and psychopathological phenomena. It argues that the individual's need regulate narcissistic supplies and maintain feelings of safety is the overriding determinant of human conduct and thought in mental health and illness.

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex--child, mother, father--suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--"a likely story!"--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies--Oedipus and others--which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands ofhis stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

The unconscious dynamics that surface in groups when authority is exercised are of paramount importance in Group Relations Conferences; this volume addresses these considerations through research findings and speculation on the future of Group Relations both within conferences and outside of them. This is the sixth instalment in a series of books based on Tavistock Group Relations Conferences and contains a collection of papers presented at the sixth Belgirate conference. Combining chapters on theory and practice, this volume delivers a meditation on the relationships between the physical spaces we inhabit or co-create, the psychic, inner or spiritual space and the liminal space in-between. Group Relations provides a window of understanding into why inequity and intergroup hostilities pervade the modern world alongside a method that illuminates how people consciously and unconsciously contribute to these tensions, whether personally, in groups or in organisations. This will be an invaluable resource for practitioners, academics, and scholars of Group Relations, as well as managers and organisational members wanting to learn more about how Group Relations methods can contribute to their organisational success.

This highly innovative new book reconsiders the structure of basic emotions, the self and the mind. It clinically covers mental disorders, therapeutic interventions, defense mechanisms, consciousness and personality and results in a comprehensive discussion of human responses to the environmental crisis. For openers, a novel psychodynamic model of happiness, sadness, fear and anger is presented that captures their object relational features. It offers a look through the eyes of these specific emotions and delineates how they influence the interaction with other persons. As regulation of the emotional state is the core task of the self, dysregulation can lead to mental disorders. Clinical cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression are discussed, using the model to outline the emotional turbulence underneath. Finally, the elaborated theory is used to analyse personal responses to the environmental crisis and political strategies that capitalise on them. This book will appeal to scholars, psychotherapists and psychiatrists with an interest in emotions and who wish to challenge their own implicit theory of emotion with an explicit new model. It will also be of interest for academic researchers and professionals in fields where emotional processes play a pivotal role.

Includes discussion of virtual analytic sessions. Addresses new and different social and technological realities, the internet, the new sexual discourse. Leading psychoanalytic contributors.

Perhaps nothing is more revealing about a person than what he or she reads. In 1938, when Freud was forced by the Nazis to flee Vienna, he brought with him to London a large portion of his annotated personal library. "Reading Freud's Reading" is a guided tour of this library, the intellectual tools of the genius of Sigmund Freud.

Specialists from a wide range of areas--from the history of medicine, to literary scholarship, to the history of classical scholarship--spent two months working on questions raised by Freud's reading and his library at the Freud Museum in London. These specialists are joined here by internationally renowned scholars including Ned Lukatcher, Harold P. Blum, and Michael Molnar to apply a wide range of critical approaches, from depth psychoanalysis to cultural analysis. Together, they present a detailed look at the implications of how, and what, Freud read, including the major sources he used for his work.

"[T]his is a scholarly, commendable biography and intellectual history. Lay readers will be challenged; psychologists and historians will be grateful."-Library Journal, starred review First published in 1946, Viktor Frankl's memoir Man's Search for Meaning remains one of the most influential books of the last century, selling over ten million copies worldwide and having been embraced by successive generations of readers captivated by its author's philosophical journey in the wake of the Holocaust. This long-overdue reappraisal examines Frankl's life and intellectual evolution anew, from his early immersion in Freudian and Adlerian theory to his development of the "third Viennese school" amid the National Socialist domination of professional psychotherapy. It teases out the fascinating contradictions and ambiguities surrounding his years in Nazi Europe, including the experimental medical procedures he oversaw in occupied Austria and a stopover at the Auschwitz concentration camp far briefer than has commonly been assumed. Throughout, author Timothy Pytell gives a penetrating but fair-minded account of a man whose paradoxical embodiment of asceticism, celebrity, tradition, and self-reinvention drew together the complex strands of twentieth-century intellectual life. From the introduction: At the same time, Frankl's testimony, second only to the Diary of Anne Frankin popularity, has raised the ire of experts on the Holocaust. For example, in the 1990s the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington purportedly refused to sell Man's Search for Meaningin the gift shop.... During the late 1960s and early 1970s Frankl became very popular in America. Frankl's survival of the Holocaust, his reassurance that life is meaningful, and his personal conviction that God exists served to make him a forerunner of the self-help genre.

In 1932 Einstein asked Freud, 'Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?' Freud answered that war is inevitable because humans have an instinct to self-destroy, a death instinct which we must externalize to survive. But nearly four decades of study of aggression reveal that rather than being an inborn drive, destructiveness is generated in us by experiences of excessive psychic pain. In War is Not Inevitable: On the Psychology of War and Aggression, Henri Parens argues that the death-instinct based model of aggression can neither be proved nor disproved as Freud's answer is untestable. By contrast, the 'multi-trends theory of aggression' is provable and has greater heuristic value than does a death-instinct based model of aggression. When we look for causes for war we turn to history as well as national, ethnic, territorial, and or political issues, among many others, but we also tend to ignore the psychological factors that play a large role. Parens discusses such psychological factors that seem to lead large groups into conflict. Central among these are the psychodynamics of large-group narcissism. Interactional conditions stand out: hyper-narcissistic large-groups have, in history, caused much narcissistic injury to those they believe they are superior to. But this is commonly followed by the narcissistically injured group's experiencing high level hostile destructiveness toward their injury-perpetrator which, in time, will compel them to revenge. Among groups that have been engaged in serial conflicts, wars have followed from this psychodynamic narcissism-based cyclicity. Parens details some of the psychodynamics that led from World War I to World War II and their respective aftermath, and he addresses how major factors that gave rise to these wars must, can, and have been counteracted. In doing so, Parens considers strategies by which civilization has and is constructively preventing wars, as well as the need for further innovative efforts to achieve that end.

Is the Ego nothing but our brain? Are our mental and psychological states nothing but neuronal states of our brain? Though Sigmund Freud rejected a neuroscientific foundation for psychoanalysis, recent knowledge in neuroscience has provided novel insights into the brain and its neuronal mechanisms. This has also shed light on how the brain itself contributes to the differentiation between neuronal and psychological states.
In Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice, Georg Northoff discusses the various neuronal mechanisms that may enable the transformation of neuronal into psychological states, looking at how these processes are altered in psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia. He focuses specifically on how the brain is organized and how this organization enables the brain to differentiate between neuronal and psychodynamic states, that is, the brain and the psyche. This leads him to discuss not only empirical issues but also conceptual problems, for instance, the concept of the brain. Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice applies these concepts and mechanisms to explain the various symptoms observed in psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. In addition to the empirical issues, he also discusses various conceptual and methodological issues that are relevant in linking neuroscience and psychoanalysis, developing a novel transdisciplinary framework for linking neuroscience, psychoanalysis and philosophy.
This highly original new book will help foster new dialogues between neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, and will be fascinating reading for anyone in these disciplines.

In this important book, esteemed psychoanalyst Otto F. Kernberg reviews some of the recent developments and controversies in psychoanalytic theory and technique.
Gathering together both previously published articles and extensive new material, Dr. Kernberg examines such issues as the new psychoanalytic views of homosexuality, bisexuality, and the influence of gender in the analytic relationship. He explores the application of psychoanalysis to non-clinical fields, including the problem of psychoanalytic research and its clinical implications, the validation of psychoanalytic interventions in the clinical process, and the challenges of psychoanalytic education. He shows how psychoanalysis can be helpful in addressing such cultural problems as socially sanctioned violence. And he asserts the continued relevance of object relations theory and its compatibility with Freud's dual drive theory.

New diversity in psychoanalytic technique offers analysts and therapists a wide array of treatment options. But many of these techniques, says Dr. Fred Pine, can be viewed as additions to a clinician's approach rather than substitutes. Access to more treatment choices enables the clinician to better meet the multiple challenges encountered daily in a psychoanalytic practice. Dr. Pine urges clinicians to be flexible and integrative as they select, test, and then use or reject diverse treatment techniques, and he shows how this may be done. He warns that adhering too closely to a powerful theory of technique can prevent the therapist from doing the best for the patient.

This book is both a highly personal statement by an experienced clinician and teacher and a concise discussion of selected issues that confront the practicing psychoanalyst today. Focusing specifically on technique, the volume is rich in clinical reasoning, clinical concepts, and clinical examples. The author establishes some of the sources of the current diversity in technique, then illustrates and evaluates some of the many pathways the clinician may choose. Practicing psychoanalysts and therapists will find enrichment in the intellectual searchings and open-minded approach of this valuable book.

"Psychoanalysis needs this kind of fair pluralistic statement to combat the paradigm warfare that occupies so much of psychoanalytic writing. This is a serious work and is highly recommended". -- Joseph Reppen, editor of Psychoanalytic Books and Psychoanalytic Psychology

Narcissism and Its Discontents challenges the received wisdom that narcissism is only destructive of good social relations. By building on insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory it puts forward a theorisation of narcissistic sociability which redeems Narcissus from his position as the subject of negative critique.

Klein's model of projective and introjective processes and Bion's theory of the relationship between container and contained have become increasingly significant in much clinical work. in a highly imaginative development of these models of thought, the distinguished clinician gianna williams, one of the leading figures in the field, elucidates the psychodynamics of these processes in the context of impairment of dependent relationships and of eating disorders in both men and women. This is a timely and brilliant account of an area of psychopathology that is rapidly growing in significance.

Michael Palmer's book provides a detailed account of the theories of religion of both Freud and Jung - widely held to be the two most important theories of religion in the history of psychology.
In the first section Dr Palmer analyses Freud's claim that religion is an obsessional neurosis - a psychological illness fuelled by sexual repression. The second section considers Jung's rejection of Freud's theory and his own assertion that it is the absence of religion, not its presence, which leads to neurosis.
Freud and Jung on Religion will be suitable for general and specialist reader alike, as it assumes no prior knowledge of the theories of Freud and Jung. It will be essential reading for all those concerned with contemporary debates between the disciplines of psychology and religion.

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A wide-ranging reading of Freud's work, this book focuses on Freud's scientifically discredited ideas about inherited memory in relation both to poststructuralist debates about mourning, and to certain uncanny figurative traits in his writing. "Freud's Memory" argues for an enriched understanding of the strangenesses in Freud rather than any denunciation of psychoanalysis as a bogus explanatory method.

This book provides easy-to-read, concise, and clinically useful explanations of over 1000 terms and concepts from the field of psychoanalysis. The history of each term is included as is the name of its originator. An attempt is made to demonstrate how the meanings of the term under consideration might have changed, with new connotations accruing with the passage of time and with growth of knowledge. Where possible, the glossary includes diverse perspectives on a given idea and highlights how different analysts have used the same term for different purposes and with different theoretical aims in mind.Ranging from abreaction and abstinence, metapsychology and malignant narcissism to xenophobia and zoophilia, the terms and ideas covered in the book make for a panoramic view of the psychoanalytic universe. The collection is wide-ranging, eclectic, and fundamentally generous: it includes the old, new, controversial, odd-sounding, familiar, unfamiliar all sorts of terms and phrases from the one hundred years history of psychoanalysis. While generally crisp and pithy, a definition here and there also includes an endearing anecdote, a wry remark regarding the hidden ironies in the concept at hand, and a deliciously surprising linkage with another idea in the book."

This publication encapsulates the work of this highly respected British therapist. "Precision Therapy" is an extremely practical book that describes how to initiate healing processes. It is eclectic in nature and free from dogma and jargon. The book is designed for the therapist-healer who does not have the need, the time or the inclination to subject clients to protracted mind games. Its practicality is illustrated in the training material: each page is a script or a prompt-sheet that can be adapted easily to deal effectively with most problems in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months. It is a comprehensive manual of fast, effective hypnoanalytic techniques designed for the professional.

Although psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare is a prominent and prolific field of scholarship, the analytic methods and tools, theories, and critics who apply the theories have not been adequately assessed. This book fills that gap. It surveys the psychoanalytic theorists who have had the most impact on studies of Shakespeare, clearly explaining the fundamental developments and concepts of their theories, providing concise definitions of key terminology, describing the inception and evolution of different schools of psychoanalysis, and discussing the relationship of psychoanalytic theory (especially in Shakespeare) to other critical theories. It chronologically surveys the major critics who have applied psychoanalysis to their readings of Shakespeare, clarifying the theories they are enlisting; charting the inception, evolution, and interaction of their approaches; and highlighting new meanings that have resulted from such readings. It assesses the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to Shakespeare studies and the significance and value of the resulting readings.

This is a critical study of French philosopher Julia Kristeva (born 1841) which explores many different aspects of Kristeva's work.

Psychoanalytic theory has been the critical instrument of choice for colonial critics. This book examines why critics who are otherwise suspicious of Western forms of knowledge are drawn to psychoanalytic theories, and whether it is possible to use such theories without reproducing the colonial discourse that also structures psychoanalytic thought.

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein explores the literary aspects of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic tradition that has come to be known as British Object Relations psychoanalysis. Focusing on Melanie Klein's legacy to psychoanalysis between the 1930s and 1970s, it deals with major figures such as Riviere, Isaacs, Winnicott, Milner, and Bion, as well as Klein's contemporary, Ella Sharpe. Mary Jacobus breaks new ground by giving a central place to the literary and aesthetic concerns of the British Object Relations tradition. Paying close attention to writing that is often side-lined by literary critics and theorists, she makes fruitful connections with particular works of literature and art, along with pressing contemporary issues. The three sections focus on the transitions, mediations, and transformations that took place in British Object Relations psychoanalysis as Klein's ideas were developed and transformed. Situating Kleinian thought in relation to later developments and differences, while making it accessible to non-psychoanalytic readers, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis argues against the separation of British and continental traditions and for the continuing links between psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Rather than applying psychoanalytic ideas to literature and aesthetics, the book traces the British Object Relations tradition as a form of proto-modernist discourse in its own right. Linked by a common thread of ideas and structured to reflect a roughly chronological trajectory, individual chapters can also be read as free-standing critical essays. Aimed at literary readers, this book will also be of interest to psychoanalytic practitioners and cultural theorists.

Psychoanalysis has always grappled with its Jewish origins, sometimes celebrating them and sometimes trying to escape or deny them. Through exploration of Freud's Jewish identity, the fate of psychoanalysis in Germany under the Nazis, and psychoanalytic theories of anti-Semitism, this book examines the significance of the Jewish connection with psychoanalysis and what that can tell us about political and psychological resistance, anti-Semitism and racism.

Freud's collection of antiquities-his "old and dirty gods"-stood as silent witnesses to the early analysts' paradoxical fascination and hostility toward religion. Pamela Cooper-White argues that antisemitism, reaching back centuries before the Holocaust, and the acute perspective from the margins that it engendered among the first analysts, stands at the very origins of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The core insight of psychoanalytic thought- that there is always more beneath the surface appearances of reality, and that this "more" is among other things affective, memory-laden and psychological-cannot fail to have had something to do with the experiences of the first Jewish analysts in their position of marginality and oppression in Habsburg-Catholic Vienna of the 20th century. The book concludes with some parallels between the decades leading to the Holocaust and the current political situation in the U.S. and Europe, and their implications for psychoanalytic practice today. Covering Pfister, Reik, Rank, and Spielrein as well as Freud, Cooper-White sets out how the first analysts' position as Europe's religious and racial "Other" shaped the development of psychoanalysis, and how these tensions continue to affect psychoanalysis today. Old and Dirty Gods will be of great interest to psychoanalysts as well as religious studies scholars.