Revenge: Narcissistic Injury, Rage, and Retaliation addresses the ubiquitous human wish to take revenge and settle scores. Featuring the contributions of eleven distinguished mental health professionals, it offers a panoramic and yet deep perspective on the real or imagined narcissistic injury that often underlies fantasies of revenge and the behavioral trait of vindictiveness. It describes various types of revenge and introduces the concept of a 'good-enough revenge.' Deftly blending psychoanalysis, ethology, religious studies, literary criticism, and clinical experience, the book goes a long way to enhance empathy with patients struggling with hurt, pain, and desires to get even with their tormentors. This volume is of great clinical value indeed!

From childhood onwards, humans use their environment's responses to construct models or schemata to link feelings and impulses with actions and effects. If the environment during those formative years is unreliable, frustrating, or violating, the construction of those internal models can be disrupted and create a disjointed perception of the world, where violence is the only way to feel strong or good about oneself. Before and After Violence explores the complex network of experiences and relationships that contribute to both the origins and consequences of violence, starting in the early stages of life and compounding over time. The contributors to this collection examine the different settings in which violence takes place, look at the variables that propel its occurrence in local and global instances, and depict how each can be traced back to profound feelings of betrayal, helplessness, and anger that manifest in the physical discharges of aggression towards a single person or a whole group. Through a psychoanalytic lens, the contributors analyze and explain violence in its many forms, delve into its myriad of causes, as well as offer a variety of solutions that can be applied to various instances of violence whether it be physical or mental, self-directed or other-directed.

Revenge: Narcissistic Injury, Rage, and Retaliation addresses the ubiquitous human wish to take revenge and settle scores. Featuring the contributions of eleven distinguished mental health professionals, it offers a panoramic and yet deep perspective on the real or imagined narcissistic injury that often underlies fantasies of revenge and the behavioral trait of vindictiveness. It describes various types of revenge and introduces the concept of a 'good-enough revenge.' Deftly blending psychoanalysis, ethology, religious studies, literary criticism, and clinical experience, the book goes a long way to enhance empathy with patients struggling with hurt, pain, and desires to get even with their tormentors. This volume is of great clinical value indeed!

Psychotherapy in the Wake of War presents the ways in which differing views of various psychoanalytic schools and traditions spanning developments for more than one hundred years may affect theoretical and technical issues in psychoanalytic treatments. Colleagues representing different traditions of psychoanalytic thinking comment on a selection of nine cases and suggest ways of managing these both technically and theoretically. They have a variety of theoretical structures and axioms in their minds, a range of understandings of the symptoms of patients and of which type of interventions to make. This is based on their own internal reflective processes, their trainings and their personal development within their particular schools over time. These different approaches reflect the evolution and divergences of psychoanalytic thinking. Some of the writers write in the language of their school, while others have developed their own style. Still others show that there can be issues that arise in clinical work which cannot be easily and fully conceptualized within the confines of one single and particular theoretical orientation. Interesting convergences and divergences are demonstrated in the comments of the practitioners in this present book. Clinical experience may be approached in different ways, as the commentators say, and unexpected ideas thought previously to be incompatible may converge.

Using data from infant observation, and child, adolescent, and adult analyses, the Novicks explicate a multidimensional, developmental theory of sadomasochism that has been recognized as a major innovation. According to the Novicks, each phase of development contributes to the clinical manifestations of sadomasochism. Painful experiences in infancy are transformed into a mode of attachment, then into an embraced marker of specialness and unlimited destructive power, then into a conviction of equality with oedipal parents, and, finally, into an omnipotent capacity to gratify infantile wishes through the coercion of others. By school age, these children have established a magic omnipotent system of thought which undermines alternate means of competent interactions with reality. In adolescence and adulthood it becomes increasingly hard for them to deny, avoid, or distort reality without resorting to escalating self-destructive behaviors. Sadomasochistic phenomena are the source of severe resistances and counterreactions in all phases of therapy. This book helps clinicians recognize and overcome these blocks to treatment progress and success. Here can be found an introduction to the Novicks' reformulation of the therapeutic alliance, and their distinctive contributions to the transformations of memory and the termination of treatment.

Today more pediatric therapists are centering their work on the parent-child relationship and are turning to parents as a primary modality in solving children's problems. Parent-Focused Child Therapy: Attachment, Identification, and Reflective Functions is an edited collection, drawing from leading psychotherapists with specialties in family therapy. Carrol Wachs and Linda Jacobs tap into the current literature on the efficacy of working with parents in therapy situations. The collected essays in this book, from renowned psychotherapists, focus on identifying and evaluating a variety of approaches and their effects on standard questions of attachment, identity, and reflection in dealing with children in therapy. Parent-Focused Child Therapy is especially attractive given its currency, integrating relational theory, attachment theory and infant research.

Life is full of comings and goings, helloes and goodbyes, meetings and partings. Good Goodbyes highlights the crucial importance of how the end of therapy is structured and experienced. Bad endings can destroy good therapies. Good endings can consolidate the work accomplished, transform relationships, and foster growth in both patient and therapist. Within the framework of the therapeutic relationship and a clearly articulated set of goals for therapy, Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly Novick describe how to recognize and respond to termination themes from the very beginning of treatment. Each phase of treatment brings its own challenges, as well as the risk of premature ending by patient or therapist. Each chapter in this book addresses specific danger signals to look out for and helpful techniques to support treatment. With vivid clinical examples from all diagnostic groups and all stages of development, the Novicks demonstrate how to engage each patient in building the "emotional muscle" needed to master life's challenges, transform early losses, and integrate new experiences of joy and sadness into the personality.

Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work demonstrates the crucial role of parent work in child and adolescent therapy. The Novicks suggest that restoring the parent-child relationship contributes to long-lasting therapeutic change in children and adolescents. With a multitude of vivid clinical examples, the authors provide a practical guide to clinical techniques for integrating parent work with individual child and adolescent treatment. Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work demonstrates that parents and therapists can form a strong alliance to support the child's healthy development. Kerry and Jack Novick apply their revised models of the therapeutic alliance and two systems of self-regulation to help parents from evaluation to termination and beyond. The book covers a wide range of situations, for instance, work with fathers, addressing problems of divorce and diverse family structures, and many modes of communicating with parents. Family secrets and loyalty conflicts; what happens when parents are troubled; the importance of parents in the lives of teenagers-these are all discussed in detail. Privacy and secrecy are defined and differentiated to clarify the meaning and importance of genuine confidentiality.

Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work demonstrates the crucial role of parent work in child and adolescent therapy. The Novicks suggest that restoring the parent-child relationship contributes to long-lasting therapeutic change in children and adolescents. With a multitude of vivid clinical examples, the authors provide a practical guide to clinical techniques for integrating parent work with individual child and adolescent treatment. Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work demonstrates that parents and therapists can form a strong alliance to support the child's healthy development. Kerry and Jack Novick apply their revised models of the therapeutic alliance and two systems of self-regulation to help parents from evaluation to termination and beyond. The book covers a wide range of situations, for instance, work with fathers, addressing problems of divorce and diverse family structures, and many modes of communicating with parents. Family secrets and loyalty conflicts; what happens when parents are troubled; the importance of parents in the lives of teenagers-these are all discussed in detail. Privacy and secrecy are defined and differentiated to clarify the meaning and importance of genuine confidentiality.