Psychoanalytic Case Studies from an Interpersonal-Relational Perspective contains reports of long-term treatments, including many dialogues and dreams, with commentaries following each one. Drawing from theories that have been developed since Freud, the analysts focus on problems in living as opposed to diagnoses and repressed sexual and aggressive urges. They also express their own feelings towards patients and even their own dreams. The cases themselves include sexual abuse, a man whose father killed his mother, a change in sexual orientation, as well as those of depression, physical problems, and difficulties relating interpersonally, such as fear of rejection and rejecting help. Actual dialogues of sessions are featured, so that readers can see what takes place in psychoanalysis. The analysts here draw from theories of Sullivan, Fromm, Horney, and Fromm-Reichmann, Kohut, Winnicott, and more recently Levenson, Mitchell, Bromberg, Donnell Stern, and Aron, to name a few. Most contemporary case reports come from short-term therapies and many rely on techniques of changing conscious cognitions and encouraging new behaviors. The treatments in this book, while often including such interventions, explore more in-depth processes that may be unconscious and related to transferential expectations from previous relationships, encouraging new experiences and not simply explanations. Psychoanalytic Case Studies from an Interpersonal-Relational Perspective will be of great interest to interpersonal and relational psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in clinical practice.

Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing is both a personal analytic credo and a multidimensional approach to thinking about clinical interaction. The book’s central theme is that of analytic needed relationships—the science and art of co-creating unique, evolving relational experiences fitted to each patient’s implicit therapeutic aims and needs. Steven Stern argues that, while we need psychoanalytic theories to "grow the receptors and processors" necessary to sense, understand, and connect with our patients, these often tend to frame the therapist’s participation in terms of theoretical and technical categories rather than offering a more holistic view of the relationship in all of its human complexity. Stern believes that a new set of higher order constructs is needed to counteract this tendency. In addition to his own concept of needed relationships, he invokes principles from the work of renowned developmental researcher and theorist, Louis Sander: especially his concept of relational fittedness. Stern draws on the work of Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Kohut, and a broad spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic authors, in fleshing out the therapeutic implications of Sander’s (and Stern’s own) vision. The result is a rich, humane, and accessible narrative. Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing offers diverse clinical examples in which you will find Stern engaging with each of his patients in idiomatic, spontaneous ways as he attempts to contour interventions to the evolving analytic situation. This case material will inspire therapist-readers to feel freer to find their own creative voices and idioms of participation, as they seek to meet each patient within the psychoanalytic space. The book is intended for psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists at all levels of experience, including those in training.

Stephen A. Mitchell has been at the forefront of the broad paradigmatic shift in contemporary psychoanalysis from the traditional one-person model to a two-person, interactive, relational perspective. In Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, Mitchell provides a critical, comparative framework for exploring the broad array of concepts newly developed for understanding interactive processes between analysand and analyst. Drawing on the broad traditions of Kleinian theory and interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as object relations and progressive Freudian thought, he considers in depth the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, anachronistic ideals like anonymity and neutrality, the nature of analytic knowledge and authority, and the problems of gender and sexual orientation in the age of postmodernism. The problem of influence guides his discussion of these and other topics. How, Mitchell asks, can analytic clinicians best protect the patient’s autonomy and integrity in the context of our growing appreciation of the enormous personal impact of the analyst on the process? Although Mitchell explores many facets of the complexity of the psychoanalytic process, he presents his ideas in his customarily lucid, jargon-free style, making this book appealing not only to clinicians with various backgrounds and degrees of experience, but also to lay readers interested in the achievements of, and challenges before, contemporary psychoanalysis. A splendid effort to relate parallel lines of theorizing and derivative changes in clinical practice and informed by mature clinical judgment and broad scholarship into the history of psychoanalytic ideas, Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis takes a well-deserved place alongside Mitchell’s previous books. It is a brilliant synthesis of converging insights that have transformed psychoanalysis in our time, and a touchstone for enlightened dialogue as psychoanalysis approaches the millennium.

Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis provides a concise and clearly presented handbook for those who wish to study, practice, and teach the core competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis, offering primary skills in a straightforward and useable format. Roy E. Barsness offers his own research on technique and grounds these methods with superb contributions from several master clinicians, expanding the seven primary competencies: therapeutic intent, therapeutic stance/attitude; analytic listening/attunement; working within the relational dynamic, the use of patterning and linking; the importance of working through the inevitable enactments and ruptures inherent in the work; and the use of courageous speech through disciplined spontaneity. In addition, this book presents a history of Relational Psychoanalysis, offers a study on the efficacy of Relational Psychoanalysis, proposes a new relational ethic and attends to the the importance of self-care in working within the intensity of such a model. A critique of the model is offered, issues of race and culture and gender and sexuality are addressed, as well as current research on neurobiology and its impact in the development of the model. The reader will find the writings easy to understand and accessible, and immediately applicable within the therapeutic setting. The practical emphasis of this text will also offer non-analytic clinicians a window into the mind of the analyst, while increasing the settings and populations in which this model can be applied and facilitate integration with other therapeutic orientations. Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis is inspired by Barsness’ students; he was motivated to create a primary text that could assist them in understanding the often complex and abstract models of Relational Psychoanalysis. Relevant for graduate students and novice therapists as well as experienced clinicians, supervisors, and professors, this textbook offers a foundational curriculum for the study of Relational Psychoanalysis, presents analytic technique with as clear a frame and purpose as evidenced based models, and serves as a gateway into further study in Relational Psychoanalyses.

There are more psychoanalytic theories today than anyone knows what to do with, and the heterogeneity and complexity of the entire body of psychoanalytic though have become staggering. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Stephen A. Mitchell weaves strands from the principal relational-model traditions (interpersonal psychoanalysis, British school object-relations theories, self psychology, and existential psychoanalysis) into a comprehensive approach to many of the knottiest problems and controversies in theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis. Mitchell’s earlier book, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, co-authored with Jay Greenberg, set the stage for this current integration by providing a broad comparative analysis of important thinking on the nature of human relationships. In that classic study Greenberg and Mitchell distinguished between two basic paradigms: the drive model, in which relations with others are generated and shaped by the need for drive gratifications, and various relational models, in which relations themselves are taken as primary and irreducible. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Mitchell argues that the drive model has since outlived its usefulness. The relational model, on the other hand, has been developed piecemeal by different authors who rarely acknowledge and explore the commonality of their assumptions or the rich complementarity of their perspectives. In this bold effort at integrative theorizing, Mitchell draws together major lines of relational-model traditions into a unified framework for psychoanalytic thought, more economical than the anachronistic drive model and more inclusive than any of the singular relational approaches to the core significance of sexuality, the impact of early experience, the relation of the past to the present, the interpenetration of illusion and actuality, the centrality of the will, the repetition of painful experience, the nature of analytic situation, and the process of analytic change. As such, his book will be required reading for psychoanalytic scholars, practitioners, candidates in psychoanalysis, and students in the field.

Empathy—our capacity to cognitively or affectively connect with other people’s thoughts and feelings—is a concept whose definition and meaning varies widely within philosophy and other disciplines. Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy advances research on the nature and function of empathy by exploring and challenging different theoretical approaches to this phenomenon. The first section of the book explores empathy as a historiographical method, presenting a number of rich and interesting arguments that have influenced the debate from the Nineteenth Century to the present day. The next group of essays broadly accepts the centrality of perspective-taking in empathy. Here the authors attempt to refine and improve this particular conception of empathy by clarifying the intentionality of the perspective taker’s emotion, the perspective taker’s meta-cognitive capacities, and the nature of central imagining itself. Finally, the concluding section argues for the re-evaluation, or even rejection, of empathy. These essays advance alternative theories that are relevant to current debates, such as narrative engagement and competence, attunement or the sharing of mental states, and the "second-person" model of empathy. This book features a wide range of perspectives on empathy written by experts across several different areas of philosophy. It will be of interest to researchers and upper-level students working on the philosophy of emotions across ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and the history of philosophy.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.