What, from a psychoanalytic point of view, constitute the facts of life ? What are the stories that our professional mentors tell us about the psychological equivalents of the birds and the bees ? How useful are these stories, and in what ways do they help those of us who work with couples understand and change the sexual difficulties that they present us with? Do these stories, indeed, have anything to say about sex, or might they, like the inventions of embarrassed parents, deflect our attention away from what we really need to know in relating to the sexual lives of our patients?This book explores sexuality in the contexts of couple relationships and psychotherapy. It presents a range of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives from which problematic sexual experience that is, sexual experience that has troubled couples sufficiently for them to seek outside help might be understood and worked with. Rooted in clinical practice the book assembles a rich diversity of approaches that will interest anyone wanting to learn more about the affective dimensions of sexual experience and seeking to apply this in their work with couples. The contributors are all closely associated with the Tavistock Centre of Couple Relationships, either as staff, neighbouring colleagues at the Tavistock and Portman Clinics, or through its professional association, the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists."

"Willy and Madeleine Baranger, analysts of French origin, who trained in Argentina, and who had a decisive role in the development of Uruguayan psychoanalysis, are two of the most creative and stimulating authors in Latin American psychoanalysis. Among their many contributions, I would like to mention two main concepts that can shed light on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Their concepts of the dynamic field and unconscious fantasy represent the convergence of various contemporary schools of thought, such as the ideas of Kurt Lewin, Gestalt psychology and elaborations of ideas first put forward by Klein, Isaacs, and Bion." -- Claudio Laks Eiznik, President of the IPA, from the Foreword"With Baranger s collected papers, the IPA] has the aim of publishing and expanding the Baranger s oeuvre to English language and, consequently, to a broader spectrum of readers. These contributions represent a pioneering and anticipatory work of great interest to the psychoanalytical world. Their proposals concerning the concept of psychoanalytic field, basic unconscious fantasy, bastion and insight, addresses the whole question of the analytic situation and anticipate current debates." -- Leticia Glocer Fiorini from the Series Foreword"

Contributors: Susan Coates, Claudio Laks Eizirik, Peter Fonagy, Richard C. Friedman, Andre E. Haynal, Rainer Krause, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Linda C. Mayes, Friedemann Pfafin, Anne-Marie Sandler, Sheila Spensley, Sverre Varvin, and Rudi Vermote."Sex has undoubtedly become more complex since Freud s original descriptions, yet in another way it has changed little. It is still there as the primary motor ensuring the survival of our species, the perpetuation of our genetic material. For all mammals the process of reproduction is at the centre of their behavioural systems. For mammals with minds, this is unlikely to be different. Sexual inhibition and dissatisfaction, conflicts and perversions, the sheer intensity of guilt, jealousy, and rage that sexuality entails, are indicators of how central sexual function remains for us. Psychoanalysis cannot shirk its traditional responsibility of casting light into the darkest recesses of our mental existence."--Peter Fonagy"All the contributors to this volume agree that understanding sexuality in its current manifestations, its normalities and pathologies, its relevance to illness and the process of recovery from trauma and failed developments within the therapeutic dyad and other relationships remains a central topic for future psychoanalytic research. Sexuality has to be rediscovered by psychoanalysis as its genuine field of research, which earns a high priority in our everyday clinical practice as well as in theorizing and research."--Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber"

Both melancholia and mourning are triggered by the same thing, that is, by loss. The distinction often made is that mourning occurs after the death of a loved one while in melancholia the object of love does not qualify as irretrievably lost. Melancholia is about a loss that is sometimes retrievable.

Contributors: Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri, Colette Chiland, Domenico Di Ceglie, Eulalia Torras de Bea, Estela V. Welldon"From time to time we listen to some curious views on psychoanalysis as an old fashioned and useless discipline, more important from an historical perspective than as a tool for understanding human life in its normal and pathological dimensions, as well as an effective therapeutic instrument. This book on transsexualism and transvestism shows exactly how psychoanalysis can reflect, discuss, dialogue and formulate useful insights on one of the most challenging situations that nowadays confront all members of the mental health community. Giovanna Ambrosio assembled this group of distinguished analytic thinkers, all of them with deep experience in the field of human sexuality, and asked them to contribute both to the attempt of understanding these relatively new forms of expression of human sexuality and what kind of interrelations psychoanalysis can offer. My own experience in the supervision of analytic psychotherapy with these patients shows me how simultaneously difficult and fascinating is the journey of each analyst or therapist who attempts to treat those patients. All the main areas are highlighted in this most useful and thoughtful book which I strongly recommend and which shows once again the extraordinary work carried out by the IPA s Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis."--Claudio Laks Eizirik, President, International Psychoanalytical Association"

This publication is the new volume of the "Contemporary Freud Series" published by the IPA and now in association with Karnac Books.The book describes the developments of the concept of splitting both in the metapsychological and the clinical perspectives emphasizing the great importance of this topic for contemporary psychoanalysis.Starting with the history of the concept, the book covers the French, English and Latin American recent theorizations on the theme. In regard to the clinical approaches the volume will present in the different chapters the relationship between the splitting and complex clinical cases as borderline, perverse and psychosomatic conditions.The volume also includes aspects of splitting and the virtual reality as well as in traumatic situations, factors so important in contemporary life. The idea of this edition was to invite authors from different regions and orientations to promote a fruitful debate on the theme, thus enriching this seminal concept of Sigmund Freud."

Teaching the World to Sleep provides a complete, science-based overview of sleep and sleep problems, from environmental, legal and technological factors to assessment and treatment options. David R. Lee introduces the basic scientific concepts involved in sleep and provides a clear description of insomnias and the parasomnias. Teaching the World to Sleep discusses NICE recommended Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi) and the REST (R) programme and outlines considerations for at-risk groups, sleep and the law, and the application of dreams and dreaming in psychotherapy. This second edition includes a full update on research conducted since the publication of the first edition and includes new information on sleep in the legal setting, the rise of sleep apps and trackers and their impact on our sleep. Lee also considers neurodiversity, sleep in long Covid, rare and unusual sleep disorders and the delivery of treatment using the NHS recommended stepped-care approach. Teaching the World to Sleep will be essential reading for psychotherapists, occupational therapists, and other professionals working with clients with sleep problems. It will also provide an accessible introduction to the science of sleep to readers looking to understand their own sleep problems.

1. This is the first book length study of Klein's work with an adult analysis 2. The content covers the 16 years Klein worked with Mr B and includes extensive excerpts from her original notes, as well as images of her notebook 3. Including annotations from English, the careful research and compilation of Klein's notes are an invaluable resource to those interested in psychoanalytic technique and its theoretical underpinnings as well as to researchers interested in the history of psychoanalysis

Provides an original approach to the elaborate and complex world of Lacan. Places Lacanian thought in historical context. Presents basic Lacanian concepts and ideas, defines them in a simple, concise manner and places them in a logical easy-to-follow developmental context.

This book offers a new perspective on conscience as an as yet unrealized human potential, but a potential toward which human beings are naturally driven. A distinction is made between a "mature" or "healthy" conscience - a "conscience capable of maturation" - and the classical notion of the superego; it also postulates that the two may represent two separate lines of development. Conscience is seen to be inseparable from consciousness; the development of a mature conscience is seen to have its foundation in the development of a true or authentic self, while the classical notion of the superego is viewed as an often pathological manifestation of this natural mental potential. Theological ideas are relevant to any discussion of morality, conscience and guilt. Freud's and Bion's perspectives on religion are closely examined, revealing fundamental differences in their views of the mind. The author incorporates the metaphysical perspective central to Bion's concept of "O" as fundamental to an understanding of the development of a healthy conscience.

This book demonstrates the use of psychoanalytic thinking in front-line mental health settings and aims to make an approach to working with emotional and mental disturbance available to a wide range of clinicians within psychiatric and other mental health settings. Rooted in the author's extensive clinical experiences, the approach explored in this book applies psychoanalytic thinking and discusses this in relation to the mental health conditions regularly encountered in psychiatric settings, such as Schizophrenia, Manic Depression, Psychotic Depression, Anorexia, Deliberate Self Harm, and Personality Disorder. The book therefore provides valuable and practical ways of working with these difficult, complex, and problematic conditions. It further makes sense of the relationships and emotions encountered when working in these settings and introduces possibilities for more effective and rewarding ways of working, including a model of support through supervision, reflective practice, and clinical discussion. Illustrated by clinical examples from more than four decades of experience in the field, this book is ideal for the interested mental health practitioner.

James Grotstein describes in detail how to understand and to interpret in an analytic session. Clinical sessions are described in stenographic detail and display complete sessions. The author goes to great lengths to detail his private observations, reveries, and countertransferences as well as his thinking about how, when, and what should be interpreted.

"Vulnerablity to Psychosis" provides the clinician with important perspectives on the origins and development of delusions in psychosis and offers a new perspective regarding the radical differences between delusional and normal or neurotic thought, and how these differences come about.Franco De Masi addresses the human vulnerability to psychosis. He invites the reader into a thoughtful, systematic exploration of many aspects of the complex problems associated with psychotic illnesses: its ontogenesis and the emotional crises that lead to the dominance of psychotic thinking, the function of psychosis with regard to reality, its eruption or progression (depending upon the type of psychosis involved) and, crucially, the difficult and painstaking task of treatment.

Since the 1990s, the social sciences have begun to change. Traditional models of human rationality which opposed reason to passion are being challenged. The familiar split between individual and society, psychology and sociology, is now recognized as unhelpful to the study of both. And, as ways have been sought to overcome such splits, psychoanalysis has increasingly appeared in the breach. Drawing also on some aspects of discourse psychology, continental philosophy and anthropological and neuro-scientific understandings of the emotions, psycho-social studies has emerged as an embryonic new paradigm in the human sciences in the UK. Psycho-social studies uses psychoanalytic concepts and principles to illuminate core issues within the social sciences. Psycho-social studies is also informing the development of new methodologies in the social sciences including the use of free association and biographical interview methods, the application of infant observation methodologies to social observation, the development of psychoanalytic ethnography/fieldwork and attention to transference/countertransference dynamics in the research process.This book examines some of these methodological developments and draws upon the experiences of a group of researchers and doctoral students based around the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at the University of the West of England.

The ways in which we imagine and experience time are changing dramatically. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended. How do we now 'take care' of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? And what can quotidian experiences of suspended time - waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating - tell us about the survival of social bonds? Enduring Time responds to the question of the relationship between time and care through a paradoxical engagement with time's suspension. Working with an eclectic archive of cultural, political and artistic objects, it aims to reestablish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of. A strikingly original philosophy of time, this book also provides a detailed survey of contemporary theories of the topic; it is an indispensable read for those attempting to live meaningfully in the current age.

For decades, psychoanalysis has had a monopoly for the unconscious. In the 1980s, however, Cognitive Orientation began focus on consciousness, and that was followed by the boom of study of the unconscious. The unconscious has now been studied in the scope of several empirical settings, and under a variety of concepts implicit memory, implicit knowledge, procedural knowledge, semantic activation without conscious identification, and tacit knowledge.Talvitie and the contributors show how the psychoanalysts answer might be seen in terms of the cognitivists ones it has created an approach, through which phenomena found by psychoanalysts can be studied in the framework of cognitive neuroscience. The approach takes seriously both the clinical data gathered in the scope of clinical practice of psychoanalysis during the past 110 years, and the empirical and theoretical achievements of the present-day cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary theory."

In this book a widely recognized authority on religion and psychoanalysis takes a fascinating journey into Freud's past to examine the roots of his atheism. Dr. Ana-Maria Rizzuto reviews and reorganizes data about Freud's development and life circumstances to provide a psychodynamic interpretation of his rejection of God. She argues that Freud's early life and family relationships made it psychically impossible for him to believe in a provident and caring divine being. The book traces significant aspects of Freud's relationship with his father and mother, his childhood nanny, and other relatives and outlines his religious evolution from somewhat conventional beliefs as a young boy to adult unbelief. Dr. Rizzuto presents significant new details about the Philippson Bible-a copy of which Freud's father presented to Sigmund on his thirty-fifth birthday-and shows how the illustrations in that edition related to Freud's passion for collecting antiquities. The book brings to light critical aspects of Freud's early and late object relations and their lasting impact on his rejection of God.

A Framework for the Imaginary is an extraordinary depiction of one analyst's efforts to receive and respond to the vivid impressions of her patients' raw and sometimes even "unmentalized" experiences as they are highlighted in the transference-countertransference connection. Dr. Mitrani attempts to feel, suffer, mentally transform, and, finally, verbally construct - for and with the patient - possible meanings for those immediate versions of life's earliest experiences as they are reenacted in the therapeutic relationship. She uses insights from this therapeutic work to contribute to the metapsychology of British and American object relations as well as to the psychoanalytic theory of technique. In these eleven essays, four of which are printed here for the first time, Dr. Mitrani masterfully integrates the work of Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Tustin as she leads us on an expedition through primitive emotional territories. She clears the way toward detecting and understanding the survival function of certain pathological maneuvers deployed by patients when confronted by unthinkable anxieties. In her vivid accounts of numerous clinical cases, she provides and demonstrates the tools needed to effect a transformation of unmentalized experiences within the context of the therapeutic relationship. Throughout her writings, she warns of some of the pitfalls we may encounter along the way.

"Having spent a considerable portion of my working life dealing with psychoanalytic literature, I started reading biographies and autobiographies of major figures in this sphere when I retired. It must be said that psychoanalysts autobiographies are pretty thin on the ground. The names which stood out most were Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein. It is well known that Bion wrote several volumes which may be broadly defined as autobiography, whereas we have to rely on Robert Rodman s and Brett Kahr s biographies in order to learn of Winnicott s life. There are, of course, many articles scattered through the literature of personal memories of him by Harry Guntrip, Margaret Little, Renata Gaddini, Masud Khan, etc. There are at least two biographies of Klein and many instances of reference to her life in articles and parts of books. These will be the subject of a further book to be researched.On trying to find what material actually existed, it struck me that there were vast amounts of material relevant to the lives, work and ideas of both men in the form of reviews, articles and books. There did not, however appear to be compilations of such work other than limited lists appearing on various web pages via the Internet.With considerable renewed interest in Bion s contribution to various disciplines beyond the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic, I hope that this work will be of use to practitioners, researchers and students. The list of secondary sources is by no means exhaustive and it is unlikely that it ever will be due to the constantly growing interest in Bion s ideas and contributions to various fields." -- Harry Karnac from the Introduction"

The condition of the human subject demands that he acquire his existence at the price of a real passion. And what indeed could inspire more passion than this ambiguous being, constantly trying to balance dynamically where nature and culture intersect? The psychoanalytical approach launched by Freud a century ago has constantly posited as a structural fact the precarious position of human subjectivity. It conceives the latter as knocked off center, even torn apart, by the different logics emanating from the instances that make up the psychical apparatus.This book does not conceive of the subject as supposed to represent the human person as a whole, nor as the narcissistic image the latter can have of him/herself, still less as the reflexive notion of self which tends to designate an overall self-referential ( self-centered ) function. The subject the author is trying to define psychoanalytically is not characterized by plenitude or naturalness, but seems rather to define itself as a precarious function, resulting from the human newborn s condition of prematuration, and therefore from the earliest drive transactions between the baby and its mother, including the mother s verbal and gestural responses. Working as a psychoanalyst to help a patient establish better bonds between the different registers of his psyche does not imply giving in to unifying, globalizing, simplifying, or isolating illusions, but rather requires that we never lose sight of the heterogeneity (including the irremediable differentiation of the sexes) which is just what Freud s metapsychology introduced. Thus the ordeal of otherness with regard to the sex we don t have, the language we don t speak, the means we don t possess is indispensable in affirming a subjectivity."

The Freudian Matrix of Andre Green presents seven papers, never previously published in English, that will allow readers to more closely follow and more fully understand the development of Green's unique psychoanalytic thinking. The chapters in this book provide valuable insight into Green's response to a perceived crisis in psychoanalysis. His thinking synthesizes the work of Lacan, Winnicott, Bion and other post-Freudian authors with his own extensive clinical experience, and results in a much needed extension of psychoanalytic theory and practice to non-neurotic patients. Green's focus on drives, affect and the work of the negative and his introduction and exploration of the Dead Mother complex, narcissism, negative hallucination and the Death Instinct constitute a vital expansion of Freudian metapsychology and its application to the clinical setting. The Freudian Matrix of Andre Green will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for any reader looking to understand more about the enormity of his contribution.

New Clinical Realms, Dr. Akhtar's latest book, raises intriguing questions about man's subjective experience and his relationship with the world around him. What exactly is mental pain? How does forgiveness occur? What is the proper psychosocial role of a mentor? And, even more provocatively, what is man's inner relationship with animals? How do inanimate objects sustain and facilitate psychic development throughout the life span? Do the physical objects in the clinical setting actually affect the patient's mind? How does simplicity lead to contradiction and at what stage does contradiction yield to paradox? With the help of illuminating clinical vignettes and a solid anchor in the contemporary diversity of psychoanalytic theorizing, Akhtar's book offers clinicians a rare glimpse into both the dark corners of psychopathology and the fresh arenas of healthy mental functioning. As a result, the readers find their capacity for empathy deepened and their therapeutic skills sharpened. A Jason Aronson Book

This book provides an up-to-date, accessible introduction to the relationship between families, prisons and penal policies in the United Kingdom. It explores current debates in relation to prisoners and their families, and introduces the reader to relevant theoretical approaches. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book incorporates perspectives drawn from criminology, sociology, social work and law. The book includes: a current exploration of key aspects of the consequences of imprisonment for prisoners and their families an assessment of the role of current prison policies and practices in promoting and maintaining family relationships a summary of the current law in relation to prisoners and their families, with reference to the relevant legislation and recent case law.

Contemporary psychodynamic theory profoundly impacts our understanding of the development of psychopathology in children and adolescents. This book creates new concepts derived from contemporary psychodynamic theory that necessitate a revision to the principles underlying our understanding of and approach to young patients in psychotherapy. Moreover, this book reviews recent contributions from contemporary two-person relational psychodynamic theory and makes use of detailed case examples to bring to life this theory's practical applications in child and adolescent psychotherapy. Psychotherapists and students of psychotherapy will find this book a valuable source of information on contemporary psychodynamic theory and a useful resource for introducing a contemporary style into their practice, co-constructing with the patient a narrative to achieve the desired goals.

This book provides an up-to-date, accessible introduction to the relationship between families, prisons and penal policies in the United Kingdom. It explores current debates in relation to prisoners and their families, and introduces the reader to relevant theoretical approaches. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book incorporates perspectives drawn from criminology, sociology, social work and law. The book includes: a current exploration of key aspects of the consequences of imprisonment for prisoners and their families an assessment of the role of current prison policies and practices in promoting and maintaining family relationships a summary of the current law in relation to prisoners and their families, with reference to the relevant legislation and recent case law.