Containing Rage, Terror, and Despair presents Jeffrey Seinfeld's object relations approach to treating various common and debilitating mental disorders. Clinicians are often perplexed and discouraged at seeing their patients suffer even more intensely as they face the defenses, conflicts, and deficits that have impeded their growth and development. Often at the center of this increased suffering is an intense fear of giving up internalized bad objects. When there has been a lack of good enough supportive relationships throughout life, this letting go of bad objects threatens the patient with an unraveling of his or her core psychic structure.The process of internalizing the therapist as a good object is a long and arduous one, during which these patients test to the limit the therapist's capacity for survival and concern. Dr. Seinfeld describes the specific internalized object relations configurations of schizophrenic, schizoid, borderline, depressive, substance abusing, and traumatized patients. Using abundant clinical material, he offers individualized interventions that address each disorder, describing how the therapist can contain the patient's rage, despair, and terror that are evoked as the patient begins to face and release his or her dreaded inner demons.

Adoption is a transformational process bringing parenthood to those who long for but cannot bear children and giving stranded children home, family, and their place in the world. But every adoption is preceded and followed by its story and when these stories are told in the offices of psychotherapists we begin to understand the impact of adoption in all its complexity. We learn from parents how their quest to have and raise a child has played out in real life, and what shadows might have fallen between the dream and the reality. And we learn from the children the many ways that being adopted shaped their development, their sense of identity; what went wrong along the way and how we may help. Clinical work with parents and children as well as with adults who were adopted is the focus of Understanding Adoption. Because adoption has become widely practiced, accepted, and accessible, and because it has greatly changed the composition of families, it is a timely subject for study. The authors of this book undertake exploration of this important terrain of loss and connection, and of the fragility and resilience of human bonds.

Adoption is a transformational process bringing parenthood to those who long for but cannot bear children and giving stranded children home, family, and their place in the world. But every adoption is preceded and followed by its story and when these stories are told in the offices of psychotherapists we begin to understand the impact of adoption in all its complexity. We learn from parents how their quest to have and raise a child has played out in real life, and what shadows might have fallen between the dream and the reality. And we learn from the children the many ways that being adopted shaped their development, their sense of identity; what went wrong along the way and how we may help. Clinical work with parents and children as well as with adults who were adopted is the focus of Understanding Adoption. Because adoption has become widely practiced, accepted, and accessible, and because it has greatly changed the composition of families, it is a timely subject for study. The authors of this book undertake exploration of this important terrain of loss and connection, and of the fragility and resilience of human bonds.