Human Goodness: Origins, Manifestations, and Clinical Implications focuses on the positive attributes that exist in each human heart. In this volume eight distinguished clinicians elucidate the notion of human goodness and devote their attention to subjects including altruism, kindness, concern, gratitude, and forgiveness. The origins of these valuable traits in the crucible of childhood experience are fleshed out and the therapeutic relevance of these ideas is illustrated with numerous clinical vignettes. As a result, this exceptional, tightly edited book is replete with material leading mental health professionals to see their clients in fresh and increasingly helpful ways.

This book is devoted to the developmental substrate of regret and of its vicissitudes over the life span. It deals with fiction, poetry, and movies pertaining to regret. The book elucidates the psychopathological dimension of ego restriction associated with regret.

How can one overcome deeply-held resentment so as to resume or establish a bond with a traumatizing person, mindful that the experience of the self is rooted in the very intimate relationships from which such trauma arose? This book centres on the challenge of forgiveness and recovery from trauma in intimate relationships as viewed psychodynamically in the clinical context. Traumas inflicted by intimates, especially by parents, differ from transgressions and betrayals-however legitimately traumatizing-committed in less psychically-rooted relationships. While some betrayals are in fact not forgivable, what is at issue when parents or other intimates betray is the inevitable yearning for reunion: a wish whose potential fulfillment raises the spectre of re-traumatization and humiliation and is thus fraught with risk.

How can one overcome deeply-held resentment so as to resume or establish a bond with a traumatizing person, mindful that the experience of the self is rooted in the very intimate relationships from which such trauma arose? This book centers on the challenge of forgiveness and recovery from trauma in intimate relationships as viewed psychodynamically in the clinical context.Traumas inflicted by intimates, especially by parents, differ from transgressions and betrayals however legitimately traumatizing committed in less psychically-rooted relationships. While some betrayals are in fact not forgivable, what is at issue when parents or other intimates betray is the inevitable yearning for reunion: a wish whose potential fulfillment raises the specter of re-traumatization and humiliation and is thus fraught with risk.Dr. Siassi focuses on the analytic situation as the rightful arena for true forgiveness; one in which the ongoing process of translating experience into words and creating meaning through narrative often in the transference allows a victim s wish (as opposed to his/her will) to re-establish a meaningful bond with the offender, to unfold. Dr. Siassi argues that this transformative process, first of letting go of resentment, and second of reestablishing a bond that is not superficial with the intimate other, is precisely what allows individuals to transcend the past without erasing it, freeing themselves to fully engage with their world in the present. This is what is meant simply by forgiveness, a formidable challenge for psychoanalytic work."

This book is devoted to the developmental substrate of regret and of its vicissitudes over the life span. It deals with fiction, poetry, and movies pertaining to regret. The book elucidates the psychopathological dimension of ego restriction associated with regret.