Building on their long-lasting scientific partnership, Civitarese and Ferro offer an array of thought-provoking writings bolstered by extensive clinical material, attesting to their shared interpretation of psychoanalysis not only as a treatment for psychic suffering but also as inherently pleasurable and vitalizing. In chapters that reflect inclinations, fantasies and obsessions that are both shared and personal, and by engaging with topics various enough to include dreams, ethics, emotions and aesthetics, the authors demonstrate how the practice of psychoanalysis might no longer be an insidiously moralistic or ideological exercise but rather a practice aimed at opening up and liberating the mind. By providing detailed engagement with the work of Bion and Ogden, as well as insights from their own substantial expertise, the authors explore how the synonymous concepts of playing and vitality can meaningfully inform and change clinical psychoanalytic practice. With rich clinical material and a strong foundation in established theory, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic therapists and postgraduate students hoping to make more room in the psychoanalytic lexicon for words like pleasure, dreaming, creativity, hospitality and growth.

In Vitalization in Psychoanalysis, Schwartz Cooney and Sopher develop and explore the concept of vitalization, generating new ways of approaching and conceptualizing the psychoanalytic project. Vitalization refers to the process between two people that ignites new experiences and brings withdrawn aspects of the self to life. This book focuses on how psychoanalysis can be a uniquely creative encounter that can aid this enlivening internal process, offering a vibrant new take on the psychotherapeutic project. There is a long tradition in psychoanalysis that addresses the ways that the unique subjectivities of each member of the therapeutic dyad contribute to the repetition of entrenched patterns of relating, and how the processing of enactments can be reparative. But this overlap in subjectivities can also bring to life undeveloped experiences. This focus on generativity and progressive action represents a significant, cutting-edge turn in psychoanalysis. Vitalization in Psychoanalysis represents a deep meditation on this transformational moment in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Pulling together work from major writers on vitalization from all the main psychoanalytic schools of thought, and covering development, theory and clinical practice, this book will be an invaluable guide for clinicians of all backgrounds, as well of students of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Christopher Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are, and illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this foundation, he goes on to describe some very special forms of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and bathes and the demented ferocity of the facist state of mind. An original interpreter of classical theory and clinical issues, in Being a Character Christopher Bollas takes the reader into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process.

What Neville Symington is attempting to do in this book is to trace the pathway along which he has travelled to become a person. This has run side by side with trying to become an analyst. The author has made landmark discoveries when reading philosophy, sociology, history, and literature. Learning to paint, learning to fly a plane, and also the study of art and of aviation theory have opened up new vistas. This account is only a sketch. The completed picture will never materialize. It is therefore autobiographical but only in a partial sense. It is always emphasized that one's own personal experience of being psychoanalysed is by far the most significant part of a psychoanalyst's education.

Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness. Cooper's task is challenging, given that the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives. The analysis of hope, then, implicates what Cooper sees as a central dialectic tension in psychoanalysis: that between psychic possibility and psychic limit. He argues that analysts have historically had difficulty integrating the concept of limit into a treatment modality so dedicated to the creation and augmentation of psychic possibility. And yet, it is only by accepting the realm of limit as a necessary counterpoise to the realm of possibility and clinically embracing the tension between the two realms that analysts can further their understanding of therapeutic process in the interest of better treatment outcomes. Cooper persuasively demonstrates how each psychoanalytic theory provides its own logic of hope; this logic, in turn, translates into a distinctive sense of what the analyst may hope for the patient, and what the patient is encouraged to hope for himself or herself. Objects of Hope brings ranging scholarship and refreshing candor to bear on the knotty issue of what can and cannot be achieved in the course of psychoanalytic therapy. It will be valued not only as an exemplary exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, but also as a thoughtful, original effort to place the vital issue of hope at the center of clinical concern.

In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper explores a subject matter previously applied more exclusively to patients, but rarely to psychoanalysts. Cooper probes the analyst’s experience of the depressive position in the analytic situation. These experiences include the pleasures and warmth of helping patients to bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences of limitation, incompleteness, repetition and disappointment as a vital part of clinical work. He describes a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is always trying to find and re-find a position from which he can help patients to work with these experiences. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position includes an exploration of the analyst’s participation and resistance to helping patients hold some of the most unsettling parts of their experience. Cooper draws some analogies between elements of theory about aesthetic experience in terms of how we bear new and old experience. He provides an examination of the patient as an artist of sorts and the analyst as a form of psychic boundary artist. Just as the creative act of art involves the capacity to transform pain and ruin into the depressive position, so does the co-creation of how we understand the patient’s mind through the mind of the analyst. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position explores a rich, provocative and long overdue topic relevant to psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamically oriented psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of both psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siecle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory.