Interviews with a broad range of senior analysts. International selection of interviewees. Personal questions providing unique insight into their motivations and career experiences.

Has an internationally renowned list of contributors * Covers theory and practice * Offers a range of visions of likely futures for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis

This book is a selection of papers written between 2002 and 2012 on the subject of group analysis and relational psychoanalysis. From the author s point of view, these two disciplines are really the two sides of the same coin, since both explore and use therapeutically what happens in the interphase between individual and collective ways of existence. It is divided into three parts. The first deals with the construction of a theory that articulates individual, relational, and collective mental processes; the second, with the problems of interpretation from the hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, and group-analytic points of view; the third, with the clinic and applications of relational analysis and group analysis."

"This paper is based on research into European economics and politics on the basis of ten months travelling in ten countries, as well as on four workshops run in Europe. Two hypotheses will be explored: It is possible to discern psychodynamic evidence that unresolved humiliation trauma is being re-evoked and recycled by attempts to find solutions and cures through the tyranny of austerity measures. But the question will be asked whether these are "chosen trauma" (Volkan, 2010) which may be at the heart of the foundation matrix (Foulkes, 1973) of the European Community. The exploration of political and economic leadership in the crisis in the European Union builds on the notion of society as a large group proliferating crises of identity. From a systemic perspective it is possible to analyse the nation states of Europe protesting with regressive nationalism, refusing collaboration by engaging in economic warfare while at the same time attempting rescue packages. The protest could be seen as defensive denial of their humbling at the hands of the over-ambitious aspects of the European single currency project and the demise of the potency of the nation state. The concluding section reflects on these issues and tries to distinguish the recycling of humiliation trauma from defence against the experience of being humbled."

This book examines adults' identifications and internal relationships with their siblings' mental representations. The authors believe that the best way to illustrate clinical formulations and psychoanalytic theoretical concepts is to provide detailed clinical data. The influence of childhood sibling experiences and associated unconscious fantasies, in their own right, in adults' personality characteristics, behaviour patterns, and symptoms are presented from seventeen case reports. Clinicians who have patients with fear of pregnancy, claustrophobia, incestuous fantasies, extreme dependency on or murderous rage against siblings, guilt due to the death of a sister or brother in childhood, replacement child syndrome, history of adoption, certain types of animal phobias and related issues will find this volume most helpful. The authors have made a rare, but needed, psychoanalytic contribution that examines mental representations of sisters and brothers in our daily lives.

As inequality widens in all sectors of contemporary society, we must ask: is psychoanalysis too white and well-to-do to be relevant to social, economic, and racial justice struggles? Are its ideas and practices too alien for people of color? Can it help us understand why systems of oppression are so stable and how oppression becomes internalized? In A People's Historyof Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, Daniel Jose Gaztambide reviews the oft-forgotten history of social justice in psychoanalysis. Starting with the work of Sigmund Freud and the first generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts, Gaztambide traces a series of interrelated psychoanalytic ideas and social justice movements that culminated in the work of Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martin-Baro. Through this intellectual genealogy, Gaztambide presents a psychoanalytically informed theory of race, class, and internalized oppression that resulted from the intertwined efforts of psychoanalysts and racial justice advocates over the course of generations and gave rise to liberation psychology. This book is recommended for students and scholars engaged in political activism, critical pedagogy, and clinical work.

Contains chapters from internationally respected authors * Includes material from all schools of psychoanalytic thought * Looks at the likely future directions of psychoanalytic theory, practice and influence

Wilhelm Stekel was an Austrian physician and psychologist and one of Freud's earliest followers. A prolific writer, this book originally published in 1921, was considered by the translator 'the best general introduction of its author to the English public', containing as is does many of his central ideas. Although the author had already fallen out with him by this time, in the preface to this book, he acknowledges Freud's significance to the field and says he regards his 'Psycho-Analysis as being a step towards a new psycho-therapy'.

This volume aims to question the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies in the light of what unconscious fantasies are involved in these developments. It examines both recent movements of right-wing extremism and the way in which rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas have been adopted by mainstream politicians and in mainstream public discourse. Politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties have tended to resist specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation. Governments across Europe have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies. Xenophobia and hostility towards 'others' is on the rise, along with appeals to "Tradition and Security". 'Cultures of fear' are linked with fantasies of fusion or 'imagined sameness'. Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body, echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) characterization of 'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics.

Winnicott's thinking continues to grow in importance in psychoanalysis today. This book can be described as a clinical primer: by presenting her own personal responses to Winnicott and her initial understanding of his thinking, Margaret Boyle Spelman aims to help others develop their own 'Winnicott' to assist with their clinical thinking. This book makes explicit the parallel in Winnicott's thinking between the situation of the baby and the 'nursing couple', and the patient and the 'analytic couple'. There are two helpful baby observation pieces which are aimed at first giving something of the experience of completing a baby observation and then of the reporting of it. In addition to these, there are chapters that treat Winnicott's thinking and the comparison of the original baby with the one who appears in the course of an adult therapy. Winnicott's thinking is first situated historically. Then each of his three stages of dependence are explored in detail: absolute dependence, relative dependence, and going towards independence. These are looked at from the viewpoint of the patient/baby and the mother/therapist in both developmental and clinical situations.

"Mutuality, Recognition, and the Self" examines emerging trends in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, highlighting intersubjective and relational models of the mind. It presents vivid and extended clinical vignettes that demonstrate the analyst s use of the self in building clinical momentum and continued development. The author highlights the importance of mutuality and recognition in the development of the self, illustrating the impact of family, the larger group context, and the contribution of the analytic encounter.This book is divided into three sections: First, the contribution of family to development, including some relatively neglected topics, such as the importance of fathers in female development, the role of siblings, the experience of only children or singletons in the family, and the impact of the extended family (including grandparents) upon the individual. A second section examines the influence of unconscious group processes upon individual development and functioning, and includes papers that highlight the contribution of group psychotherapy as a form of treatment. The last section of the book focuses upon challenging cases in which there has come to be a transference-countertransference impasse, illustrating the author s approach to enabling both patient and analyst to work through these daunting moments, resulting in renewed therapeutic action."

Wilhelm Stekel was an Austrian physician and psychologist and one of Freud's earliest followers. This title, originally published in 1921, was the author's favourite of his own work. In the preface he says: 'It was written in the beautiful years in which the first rays of analytic psychognosis penetrated the darkness of the human soul'. Covering a variety of topics he takes a psychoanalytic look into the depths of the soul.

Shrinking the News brings together Coline Covington's wide range of articles from her regular column in the online newspaper, The Week. The articles cover current events from October 2008 until December 2010, concluding with more recent articles from 2013.These articles form a fascinating psychoanalytic insight on crime, politics, the economy, sports and stardom, and the quirky, bizarre events and trends that make up our daily life. The widespread popularity of these articles is a testimony to the public's interest in a psychoanalytic view of the world around us and why people do the things they do.

What happens to the thinking of a thinker who refuses a discipleship? This book attempts to answer this question in relation to D. W. Winnicott and the evolution of his thinking. He eschewed a following, privileging the independence of his thinking and fostering the same in others. However Winnicott s thinking exerts a growing influence in areas including psychoanalysis, psychology, and human development. This book looks at the nature of Winnicott s thought and its influence. It first examines the development of Winnicott s thinking through his own life time (first generation) and then continues this exploration by viewing the thinking in members of the group with a strong likelihood of influence from him; his analysands (second generation) and their analysands (third generation)."

First book to give an overview of all Dimen's ground-breaking work; contains a very clear analysis for future psychoanalysis of her importance by Hartman; Dimen's work is genuinely multi-disciplinary and radical

Political Pathologies from The Sopranos to Succession argues that highly praised prestige TV shows reveal the underlying fantasies and contradictions of upper-middle class political centrists. Through a psychoanalytic interpretation of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, House of Cards, Dexter, Game of Thrones, and Succession, Robert Samuels reveals how moderate "liberals" have helped to produce and maintain the libertarian Right. Samuels' analysis explores the difference between contemporary centrists and the foundations of liberal democracy, exposing the myth of the "liberal media" and considers the consequences of these celebrated series, including the undermining of trust in modern liberal democratic institutions. Political Pathologies from The Sopranos to Succession contributes to a greater understanding of the ways media and political ideology can circulate on a global level through the psychopathology of class consciousness. This book will be of great interest to academics and scholars considering intersections of psychoanalytic studies, television studies and politics.

Just as concerts emerge from the interaction of many instruments, so our understanding of Shakespeare is enriched by different approaches to him. Psychoanalysis assumes that creative writers have the need to both reveal and conceal their own inner conflicts in their works. They leave residues in their works that, if we pay attention, can become building blocks that reveal aspects of the unconscious. This book will help readers find that the questions raised add to the pleasure of reading Shakespeare and that these questions deepen their understanding of his plays. Topics covered include the pivotal position of Hamlet, the poet and his calling, the Oedipus complex, intrapsychic conflict, the battle against paranoia and the homosexual compromise. Using psychoanalytic techniques in analyzing his plays and characters, the author reveals more insights about Shakespeare s hidden motivations and mental health."

Within the last few decades a dizzying array of scientific disciplines and "explanations" of the motivating forces behind the profound enigmas of human behavior have emerged: sociobiology, cognitive psychology, game theory, experimental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, "existential" neurology, social psychology, genetics, and other attempts at interdisciplinary thinking. Each, according to its own reductive approach, strives to separate, isolate, examine in laboratories and through experiments extracted from real-life experience, and thereby "understand" the most complex aspects of being human--including our subjectivity; morality and altruism; our economic survival and our irrational biases that affect it; our innate need for religion and wonder; and the cross-cultural stalwart, humor.But as Alper argues in his exciting and challenging new work, this sort of contemporary balkanization of the human mind actually achieves the opposite of its purpose. Rather than unraveling and illuminating the "Ur" source of a particular behavior or mindset, it merely shrinks the richly threaded tapestry to a single frayed thread dissevered and abstractly disconnected from the everyday experiential realities of human existence.Examining the assertions and fallacies of the theories conceived (or contrived) by some of today's most brilliant scientists and thinkers (including Dan Ariely, John Barrow, Pascal Boyer, Frank Close, Nicholas Humphrey, Richard Dawkins, Stanley Milgram, Oliver Sacks, and Carl Sagan), Alper explores why these varied attempts at joining the world of experience and the world of measurement so regularly fail, how consciousness explained is really a concentrated effort to explain away the subjective phenomena of consciousness.From the psychic rat to the gorilla in the room, from British double-agent Kim Philby to comedian Steve Martin, "The Incredible Shrinking Mind" not only offers a provocative and entertaining critique, but also a profound and practical solution: the psychodynamic approach, which takes seriously the question of meaning and not solely observable behavior, which combines the quantitative and the experimental with the human and multidimensional, which seeks to understand not just how but why. No single equation, no theory, no dazzling fMRI image of the hidden brain can ever accomplish this for us. It must be patiently done, one person at a time.

Overlap between psychoanalysis and the arts is a perennially hot topic * Uses literature to inform psychoanalytic theory and practice * Fresh take on understanding key psychoanalytic topic of unconscious processes

Offers a contemporary perspective on one of Freud's most famous cases * Brings both a psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective to the case * Draws on the work of Ferenczi, who is increasingly popular in contemporary psychoanalysis

- will be widely used in the graduate school at the Program in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan (one of the largest and most reputed universities in Israel) - appliable to other universities with humanistic and interdisciplinary studies programs

The Poetry of the Word in Psychoanalysis presents selected key papers by leading Spanish psychoanalyst Pere Folch Mateu. The pieces chosen for this book address clinical, psychopathological, technical and theoretical issues approached in Folch Mateu's unique style, providing an introduction to his impressive output. Folch Mateu integrates a wide range of psychoanalytic sources - Freud, Klein and Bion, and French psychoanalysis - in approaching topics like the psychoanalytic process, obsessive modes of control, the pathology of the negative and intellectual inhibition. The author's interest in exploring the interactions between the analyst and the patient in minute detail through the course of the psychoanalytic process is a key theme that emerges throughout, as is his devotion to the intersections between music, literature and psychoanalysis. The Poetry of the Word in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training, particularly those wishing to explore the boundaries of psychoanalysis and the integration of different psychoanalytic approaches.

The editors find in psychoanalysis a natural and necessary ally for investigations in myth and myth-informed literature and the arts. At the same time the collection re-values myths and myth-based cultural products as vital aids to the discipline and practice of psychoanalysis. The volume spans a vast geo-cultural range and investigates cultural products from the Mahabharata to J. W. Goethe s opus and eighteenth-century Japanese fiction, and from William Blake s visionary poetry to contemporary blockbuster television series. It encompasses mythic topics and figures such as Oedipus, Orpheus, the Scapegoat, and the Hero, while mobilizing Freudian, Jungian, object relations, and Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches. Bringing together an international array of both leading and emerging researchers, "Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious" provides an exceptionally rich overview of the concerns and exciting possibilities of this new interdisciplinary field while simultaneously contributing to scholarship on the literary texts and psychoanalytic concepts it evokes."

"This is a scholarly study in which the author explores a difficult subject matter that has been a tabooed topic in psychoanalysis. She undertakes a serious study of the underlying arguments as to why psychoanalysts have seldom been able to live in harmony with each other. In a very lucid and systematic manner, Dr Utrilla Robles examines how a discipline, in this case psychoanalysis, can be manipulated to its detriment. She explains the disquieting processes that take place, which impede the development of psychoanalysis. These influences insidiously infiltrate the organisational ranks as a kind of arguing which should ostensibly enrich psychoanalysis but instead deprives it of its creativity. For a discipline to prosper, it is necessary to have the freedom to air doubts, ask questions, raise hypotheses, and contrast discoveries by sharing them with others, debating different positions to reflect on the discussions, and to change one s views if necessary.This type of attitude stands in stark contrast to the kind of thinking that excludes and establishes norms to demonstrate how one is right in leaving no room for other ideas and creates research projects, which cannot be refuted. The author s intention in this book is to study and shed light on these phenomena that have been considered a taboo because of the secrecy surrounding them."-- from the Foreword by Dr Gunther Perdigao"

Pierre Janet (1859 - 1947) is considered to be one of the founders of psychology, and pioneered research in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy and psychotherapy. Janet's most crucial research, particularly in the subjects of 'dissociation' and 'subconscious' - terms coined by him - is explored in this book, first published in 1952. As Janet did not publish much in English, these notes provide guidance on such areas of study as hysteria and hypnosis, obsessive thinking and the psychology of adaption. Elton Mayo's comprehensive collection is an important guide for any student with an interest in the history of psychology, psychopathology and social study, and Janet's revolutionary work in the field.