Fictional Clinical Narratives in Relational Psychoanalysis explores the therapeutic space between the patient and therapist in psychoanalysis and the transformative effect of the therapeutic relationship through a collection of twenty-two short stories beginning at a moment of trauma in adolescence. Christina Moutsou illustrates both contemporary clinical issues as well as the relational and intersubjective nature of the therapy relationship. First, six teenagers narrate in the first person their experience of battling with sexual abuse, eating disorder, body image, the first sexual awakening, loss of a parent and the intricacies of teenage friendship. The stories then unravel years later as adults in the consulting rooms of Ellie and Jake, two middle-aged therapists working in London. The reader is offered an intimate look at how the therapists work through their personal losses and past wounds, while facing their patients’ conflicts and dilemmas including adoption, bereavement, pregnancy loss, lack of intimacy in the couple relationship and a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. What distinguishes this collection of fictional clinical narratives is the focus on an internal point of view, where the reader is invited to experience first-hand the tribulations of the psychoanalytic dialogue and the enduring marks that trauma and loss leave on each member of the therapeutic dyad. The focus here is on how narratives are constructed and deconstructed through the intersubjective dance between the therapist and the patient. Both are transformed in the process. The fictional nature of the stories also allows for the exploration of sensitive issues that are difficult or awkward to explore adequately using direct case studies from real-life examples. This fascinating and unusual work provides an innovative method of exploring everyday clinical dilemmas, using an accessible, easy to follow narrative path. It is written from a broadly relational perspective but will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Dialogues between Psychoanalysis and Architecture explores the multisensory space of therapy, real or virtual, and how important it is in providing the container for the therapeutic relationship and process. This book is highly original in bringing psychoanalysis and architecture together and highlighting how both disciplines strive to achieve transformation of our psychic space. It brings together contributions that comprise three parts: the first explores the space of the consulting room through the senses to examine issues such as smell and its link with memory and belonging, hearing out the Other, the psychoanalytic couch, the medical therapy room and the so-called sixth sense; secondly, the book questions how the consulting room can represent or be redesigned to reflect the philosophy that underlies the therapy process, foregrounding an architectural point of view; and thirdly, the book attends to the significance of the consulting room as a virtual space, as it emerged during the pandemic of COVID-19 and beyond. Architectural, psychotherapeutic and interdisciplinary perspectives allow for an important new dimension on the psychological use of space, and will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic and integrative psychotherapists, art therapists, students of psychotherapy, as well as architects and designers.

Across the years, four people, caught up in the maelstrom of a family secret, attempt to come to terms with its aftermath. From London to Athens, from Thessaloniki to Paris, their various trajectories form an intricate story like the many layers of a sumptuous cake. An inner journey and at the same time a kaleidoscope of perspectives, which has at its heart the never-ending search for redemption. An enthralling portrayal of complex emotional turmoil. I marvelled at the bold handling of time. Not only does it make the reader poignantly feel they are transcending time and space, it makes a kind of spellbinding music out of the juxtapositions and leitmotifs lyrically woven throughout the narrative. Dr Graham Frankland, academic translator and editor, author of Freud’s Literary Culture Christina Moutsou is a Cambridge graduate in social anthropology and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice in London. Her collection of short stories has been published by Routledge in September 2018 with the title Fictional clinical narratives in relational psychoanalysis: Stories from adolescence to the consulting room. Layers has been translated into Greek and published by Archetypo in March 2018 with the title, Black Cake.

This book is of and about psychoanalytic stories. It describes the personal, theoretical, and cultural stories that patients and analysts bring, create, and modify in analytic work. It shows how the joint creation of new life narratives over time results in transformed senses of self and relationship. Flowing from the tradition of narrative theory, these stories seek to recast the creation of analytic narratives in social contexts and contemporary relational theories. They depict ongoing therapeutic process and heightened interactive events and moments that together expand personal scope and change life directions for both partners in the analytic dyad. Its stories illuminate sometimes difficult and arcane analytic theory, bringing the meanings and utility of theory into living action. They also show how familiar emotions such as love, hate, envy, and loneliness, and active human values such as empathy, generosity, and good faith function in psychoanalytic interaction. In short, these analytic stories are useful teaching tools. The narrative tales in this book address a wide range of history and emotions in both patients and analyst. The patients, fictionalized characters from a lifetime of analytic practice, are protagonists with backgrounds of trauma, loss, relational and geographical dislocation, but also successful adaptations and struggle toward self-development. Some of their stories describe intense short-term work and others long-term analytic relationships. The subjective experience and responses of the analyst are also central parts of the analytic fictions. The book will be invaluable to readers curious about psychoanalysis, for therapists, and especially for teachers of therapeutic issues and process.

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, Relational Psychoanalysis continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, Volume 5 carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at the progress in therapeutic process. Included here are chapters on transference and countertransference, engagement, dissociation and self-states, analytic impasses, privacy and disclosure, enactments, improvisation, development, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Lewis Aron, Anthony Bass, Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Steven Cooper, Jody Messler Davies, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dianne Elise, Glen Gabbard, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Steven Knoblauch, Thomas Ogden, Spyros Orfanos, Stuart Pizer, Philip Ringstrom, Jill Salberg, Stephen Seligman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Paul Wachtel.

Relational psychoanalysis has revivified psychoanalytic discourse by attesting to the analyst's multidimensional subjectivity and then showing how this subjectivity opens to deeper insights about the experience of analysis. Volume 3 of the Relational Psychoanalysis Book Series enlarges this ongoing project in significant ways. Here, leading relational theorists explore the cultural, racial, class-conscious, gendered, and even traumatized anlagen of the self as pathways to clinical understanding. Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices is especially a forum for new relational voices and new idioms of relational discourse. Established writers, Muriel Dimen, Sue Grand, and Ruth Stein among them, utilize aspects of their own subjectivity to illuminate heretofore neglected dimensions of cultural experience, of trauma, and of clinical stalemate. A host of new voices applies relational thinking to aspects of race, class, and politics as they emerge in the clinical situation. The contributors to Relational Psychoanalysis: New Voices are boldly unconventional – in their topics, in their modes of discourse, and in their innovative and often courageous uses of self. Collectively, they convey the ever widening scope of the relational sensibility. The "relational turn" keeps turning.

The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine articulates the ideas, methods, and practices of narrative medicine. Written by the originators of the field, this book provides the authoritative starting place for any clinicians or scholars committed to learning of and eventually teaching or practicing narrative medicine.