How does a psychoanalysis begin? What goes on when analyst and prospective analysand meet for the first time, and what processes are activated to make the project for an analysis possible? This unique contribution to the surprisingly sparse literature on this most essential aspect of the psychoanalytical practitioner’s work, is the clinical companion to Initiating Psychoanalysis: Perspectives, also part of the ‘Teaching’ Series of the New Library of Psychoanalysis. Replete with clinical illustrations, this book is based on the findings of an ambitious research project on first interviews carried out from 2004 to 2016 by an international group of psychoanalysts, the Working Party on Initiating Psychoanalysis (WPIP) of the European Psychoanalytic Federation. The authors, all members of the Investigative Team, are senior psychoanalysts from member societies of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, all with extensive experience in the practice and teaching of psychoanalytic consultation. Psychoanalysts and analytic therapists, in particular those in training or setting up their practice, will find Beginning Analysis to be essential reading in deepening their understanding of how analysand and analyst arrive at the decision to begin analysis.

'Any Psychoanalyst must find his own way and come upon well-known and well-established theories through experiences of his own realisations.' So says W. R. Bion in his Commentary in Second Thoughts. In First Thoughts, Jayne Hankinson does just this. She presents a personal account of her own 'realisations' and discoveries during an attempt to give thought to 'beginnings'. She explores the meaning and relevance of creation myths, leading to a deep realisation of how they unconsciously represent and shape much of our lives, even today. This exploration meanders through the Garden of Eden, leaving with a realisation that there is an 'Adam' and 'Eve' aspect in dynamic tension within each of our minds. This serpentine journey becomes a 'hermeneutic loop' in which dissatisfaction with parts of psychoanalytic theory leads to an engagement in the phenomena of beginnings and a consequent reappraisal and reinterpretation, via a closer look at Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion to formulate an understanding of what their 'first thoughts' may be. The book ends with the author's own creation myth reshaped and a deeper awareness of how important 'beginnings' are.

Drawing on deep reserves of experience and theoretical and research knowledge, Nancy McWilliams presents a fresh perspective on psychodynamic supervision in this highly instructive work. McWilliams examines the role of the supervisor in developing the therapist's clinical skills, giving support, helping to formulate and monitor treatment goals, and providing input on ethical dilemmas. Filled with candid clinical examples, the book addresses both individual and group supervision. Special attention is given to navigating personality dynamics, power imbalances, and various dimensions of diversity in the supervisory dyad. McWilliams guides mentors and mentees alike to optimize this unique relationship as a resource for lifelong professional learning and growth.

What sets off the termination of analysis and psychodynamic therapy from the variety of endings that enter into all human relationships? So asks Herbert J. Schlesinger in Endings and Beginnings: On Terminating Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, a work of remarkable clarity, conceptual rigor, and ingratiating readability. Schlesinger situates termination - which he understands, variously, as a phase of treatment, a treatment process, and a state of mind - within the family of "beginnings and endings" that permeate one another throughout the course of therapy. For Schlesinger, therapeutic endings cannot be aligned with the final phase of treatment; ending-phase phenomena are ongoing accompaniments of therapeutic work. They occur whenever patients achieve some portion of their treatment goals and supervene when therapy stagnates. Small wonder that an assessment of the patient's relationship to time and capacity to end therapy are key aspects of diagnostic evaluation. By linking beginning and ending phases not to the chronology of treatment but to the patient’s experience of it, Schlesinger brings revivifying insight to a host of psychodynamic concepts. Nor does he shy away from a trenchant critique of the instrumental “medical model” of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic training, which militates against the therapeutic exploration of treatment endings. Schlesinger's exemplification of how to begin treatment from the point of view of ending; his sensitive delineation of the mid-treatment "ending" crises characteristic of "vulnerable patients"; his richly woven case vignettes illustrating various "ending" contingencies and permutations - these inquiries are gems of pragmatic clinical wisdom. Endings and Beginnings distills lessons learned over the course of a half century of practicing, teaching, and supervising psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and is a gift to the profession.

Initiating Psychoanalysis presents an international collection of papers addressing the specific clinical and technical issues involved in launching the processes that are at the core of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic treatment.

In this selection of her father's writings Anna Freud has defined and included the essential, irreducible elements of psycho-analysis.

The classic, in-depth history of psychoanalysis, presenting over a hundred years of thought and theories Sigmund Freud's concepts have become a part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. But psychoanalytic thinking has undergone an enormous expansion and transformation since Freud's death in 1939. With Freud and Beyond, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black make the full scope of twentieth century psychoanalytic thinking-from Harry Stack Sullivan to Jacques Lacan; D.W. Winnicott to Melanie Klein-available for the first time. Richly illustrated with case examples, this lively, jargon-free introduction makes modern psychoanalytic thought accessible at last.