"Insight" and "Change." The problematic relationship between these two concepts, to which the reality of psychoanalytic patients who fully understand maladaptive patterns without being able to change them attests, has dogged psychoanalysis for a century. Building on the integrative object relations model set forth in Transcending the Self (1999), Frank Summers turns to Winnicott's notion of "potential space" in order to elaborate a fresh clinical approach for transforming insight into new ways of being and relating. For Summers, understanding occurs within transference space, but the latter must be translated into potential space if insight is to give rise to change in the world outside the consulting room. Within potential space, Summers holds, the analyst's task shifts from understanding the present to aiding and abetting the patient in creating a new future. This means that the analyst must draw on her hard-won understanding of the patient to construct a vision of who the patient can become. Lasting therapeutic change grows out of the analyst's and patient's collaboration in developing new possibilities of being that draw on the patient's affective predispositions and buried aspects of self. In the second half of the book, Summers applies this model of therapeutic action to common clinical syndromes revolving around depression, narcissistic injuries, somatic symptoms, and internalized bad objects. Here we find vivid documentation of specific clinical strategies in which the therapeutic use of potential space gives rise to new ways of being and relating which, in turn, anchor the creation of a new sense of self.

Life as Art brings the resources of contemporary aesthetics since Nietzsche to bear on the problems of how one integrates the aesthetic emphases of meaning, liberation, and creativity into one’s daily life. By linking together the aesthetic and ethical accounts of critical theorists, phenomenologists, and existentialists into a coherent view on the artful life, Life as Art shows the ways in which much of contemporary Continental theory has been concerned with alternative ways of constructing one’s own life. Seen as a unified phenomenon, life as art signifies an active attempt to create a life which bears the resistance, openness, and creativity found in artworks.

Art and Self-Creation: The Roots of Creativity and Innovation proposes using the metaphor of the Complex Adaptive System to think about the human, embedded into environments that trigger change in that human. The nature of that change, however, is determined by the internal organization of the human; interconnected, interdependent, adaptable nodes that include Nothingness (as described by Sartre), Other People (as the condition where awareness begins), The World, Emotional Management, The Self, and Creative Visualization. As the human faces internal or environmental triggers for change, he or she experiences ambiguity, existential anxiety and emotional turmoil. In order to reorient him or herself in the new situation two sensemaking questions must be answered: What is happening here? And Who will I be in this situation? Artistic self-expression provides the ideal practice to lift the fog of emotional turmoil and to simultaneously create and discover identity constructive answers for those questions.

BLOOM is a collection of beautiful paint sketches created by the artist Ross Tran, most famously known as Ross Draws.

Franz Kafka and Michel Foucault: Power, Resistance, and the Art of Self-Creation engages with important themes such as power, language, subjectivity and the possibility of fully developed postmodern account of the subject, resistance to power, and an aesthetic interpretation of life.