By viewing psychoanalysis through the lens of embodiment, Brothers and Sletvold suggest a shift away from traditional concept-based theory and offer new ways to understand traumatic experiences, to describe the therapeutic exchange and to enhance the supervisory process. Since traditional psychoanalytic language does not readily lend itself to embodied experience, the authors place particular emphasis on the words I, you, we and world, to describe the flow of human attention. Offering new insights into trauma, this book demonstrates how traumatic experiences and efforts to regain certainty in one’s psychological life involve profound disruptions of this flow. With a new understanding of transference, resistance and interpretation, the authors ultimately show how much can be gained from viewing the analytic exchange as a meeting between foreign bodies. Grounded in detailed case material, this book will change the way therapists from all disciplines understand the therapeutic process and how viewing it in terms of talking bodies enhances their efforts to heal.

This book offers an in-depth explanation of the concepts of self psychology and pragmatic steps for recognizing and using these concepts in clinical work, helping clinicians move from theory to practice. Both early and contemporary concepts in self psychology and intersubjectivity theory are discussed in successive chapters of the book, with illustrative examples drawn from the author’s experience working in diverse settings with a wide range of mental health practitioners. Individual chapters shed light on brief treatment, supervision, interpretation, development, agency and nuances of empathic communication, among other topics. In addressing these topics, specific tools for conceptualizing clinical data and guidelines for intervention are also described. The emphasis on helping people via a sustained focus on their internal, subjective experience and creating a new selfobject bond with the therapist unifies the chapters in this volume. With its rich clinical vignettes and accessible language, Self Psychology: Moving from Theory to Practice is also a valuable resource for supervisors and teachers of self psychology, whether in analytic training institutes, graduate schools of psychology, counseling and social work or continuing education programs.

Trauma, Pedagogy, and the College Mental Health Crisis argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice offers a solution to the large increase in students seeking mental health services. Robert Samuels returns to the roots of psychoanalysis, drawing from Freud’s and Lacan’s conceptions of hysteria and narcissism. This book examines the idea that the repression of psychoanalysis has resulted in a situation where students are being misdiagnosed and mistreated as the underlying structures shaping narcissism and hysteria are misrecognized. Samuels suggests that the more people are trained to focus on their own thoughts and feelings, the more they take on self-destructive thoughts and behaviors in a neurotic way and that psychoanalysis offers a solution. Trauma, Pedagogy, and the College Mental Health Crisis will be of interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as mental health professionals working with adolescents and professionals working in higher education. It will also be relevant to readers interested in adolescent mental health, higher education, parenting, and politics.

2015 Gradiva Award Winner The Embodied Analyst brings together the history of embodied analysis found in the work of Freud and Reich and contemporary relational analysis, particularly as influenced by infant research. By integrating the ‘old’ embodied and the ‘new’ relational traditions, the book contributes to a new clinical perspective focusing on form and process rather than content and structure – the ‘how’, rather than the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. This perspective is characterised by a focus on movement, emotional interaction and the therapists own bodily experience in the analytic encounter. Jon Sletvold presents a user-friendly approach to embodied experience, providing the history, theory, training and practice of embodied experience and expression as a way of expanding clinical attention. Starting with a Spinozan view of the embodied mind, Part One: History of Embodied Psychoanalysis presents an overview of the history of the field in the works of Freud and Reich as well as a look at the Norwegian Character Analytic tradition . Part Two: Conceptual Framework and Clinical Guidelines explains how clinical interaction can be navigated based on the embodied concepts of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and reflexivity. Part Three: Embodied Training and Supervision presents innovative approaches to training in emotional communication inspired by the performing arts. The book ends with a consideration of the embodied analyst in the 21st century consulting room. Capturing key aspects of a transitional movement in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, The Embodied Analyst is ideal for those working and training in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Since trauma is a thoroughly relational phenomenon, it is highly unpredictable, and cannot be made to fit within the scientific framework Freud so admired. In Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis, Doris Brothers urges a return to a trauma-centered psychoanalysis. Making use of relational systems theory, she shows that experiences of uncertainty are continually transformed by the regulatory processes of everyday life such as feeling, knowing, forming categories, making decisions, using language, creating narratives, sensing time, remembering, forgetting, and fantasizing. Insofar as trauma destroys the certainties that organize psychological life, it plunges our relational systems into chaos and sets the stage for the emergence of rigid, life-constricting relational patterns. These trauma-generated patterns, which often involve denial of sameness and difference, the creation of complexity-reducing dualities, and the transformation of certainty into certitude, figure prominently in virtually all of the complaints for which patients seek analytic treatment. Analysts, she claims, are no more strangers to trauma than are their patients. Using in-depth clinical illustrations, Dr. Brothers demonstrates how a mutual desire to heal and to be healed from trauma draws patients and analysts into their analytic relationships. She recommends the reconceptualization of what has heretofore been considered transference and countertransference in terms of the transformation of experienced uncertainty. In her view the increased ability of both analytic partners to live with uncertainty is the mark of a successful treatment. Dr. Brothers’ perspective sheds fresh light on a variety of topics of great general interest to analysts as well as many of their patients, such as gender, the acceptance of death, faith, cult-like training programs, and burnout. Her discussions of these topics are enlivened by references to contemporary cinema and theatre.

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer is a detailed account of a particularly demanding analysis which Donald Meltzer closely supervised over twelve years. This will enable the reader to closely follow the internal life of a long-term, trying analysis. The reader can see how Meltzer’s thoughts had crucially guided the course of this analysis in many of its most challenging moments, often redirecting it. By watching things happening, the reader is enabled to get a deeper insight into Meltzer's highly complex, though outstanding thought. On many particularly important points, the author invited Meltzer to give his thoughts and interpretations in his own words as if he himself was the analyst. This provides the reader with a unique opportunity to ‘listen’ to Meltzer verbatim. Long-Term Psychoanalytic Supervision with Donald Meltzer demonstrates the often overwhelming yet fascinating complexities of mental life and will speak to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as those interested in the philosophy of the mind.

"Ladany and Bradley's sophisticated, comprehensive compilation of contemporary models of supervision is sure to serve as the new 'handbook' in the field. This exceptional volume will inspire supervisors from all theoretical orientations to do more effective work with their supervisees."--Lisa Wallner Samstag, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Long Island University.