Shaddock makes sense of intersubjectivity, the functional paradigm shift in highbrow psychotherapy, as both a way of thinking about our psychological lives and a way of doing clinical work. Applying it to relational systems means investigating the experience of each partner/ member from inside his/her perspective and without judgment.The book illustrates how that approach lowers defenses and lets in insights, mutual understanding, and renewed hope; it demonstrates that treatment built on empathic awareness of contexts and connections can actually also lead to individual transformation.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet's imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2,000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.

An experienced couples counselor identifies the unconscious factors that influence the way we feel and behave in intimate relationships--the invisible needs that create and sustain our dysfunctional patterns of relating. Whereas the conventional focus on changing our marital scripts bypasses excavation of their roots in our deepest childhood fears--of abandonment, intrusion, shame--David Shaddock weaves contemporary thinking about the individual into the family systems approach to therapy. Effortlessly, and with gentle authority, he introduces concepts that professional and popular readers alike can adopt to begin to decode symbolic issues and, in turn, generate the understanding that builds empathy between partners.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet's imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2,000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.