Failure is a theme of great importance in most clinical conditions, and in everyday life, from birth until death. Its impact can be destabilizing, even disastrous. In spite of these facts, there has been no comprehensive psychoanalytic exploration of this topic. Understanding and Coping with Failure: Psychoanalytic Perspectives fills this gap by examining failure from many perspectives. It goes a long way toward increasing understanding of the numerous issues involved, and provides many valuable insights into ways of coping with these challenging experiences and several chapters discuss positive aspects of failure - what can be learned from what would otherwise simply be regrettable experiences. Brent Willock, Rebecca Coleman Curtis and Lori C. Bohm bring together a rich diversity of topics explored in thoughtful ways by an international group of authors from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States of America. Failed therapies (which have been examined in the literature) are but one element freshly explored in this comprehensive exploration of the topic. The book is divided into sections covering the following topics: Failing and Forgiving; Society-Wide Failure; Failure in the Family; Therapeutic Failure; Professional Failure in the Consulting Room and on the Career Path; Integrity versus Despair: Facing Failure in the Final Phase of the Life Cycle; Metaphoric Bridges and Creativity; The Long Shadow of Childhood Relational Trauma. Understanding and Coping with Failure will be eagerly welcomed by all those trying to increase their awareness, understanding, and capacity to work with the many ramifications of this important issue. Because of the uniqueness of this broad, detailed exploration of the complexities of the failure experience, it will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and students in these disciplines. It will also appeal to a wider audience interested in the psychoanalytic perspective.

Failure is a theme of great importance in most clinical conditions, and in everyday life, from birth until death. Its impact can be destabilizing, even disastrous. In spite of these facts, there has been no comprehensive psychoanalytic exploration of this topic. Understanding and Coping with Failure: Psychoanalytic Perspectives fills this gap by examining failure from many perspectives. It goes a long way toward increasing understanding of the numerous issues involved, and provides many valuable insights into ways of coping with these challenging experiences and several chapters discuss positive aspects of failure - what can be learned from what would otherwise simply be regrettable experiences. Brent Willock, Rebecca Coleman Curtis and Lori C. Bohm bring together a rich diversity of topics explored in thoughtful ways by an international group of authors from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States of America. Failed therapies (which have been examined in the literature) are but one element freshly explored in this comprehensive exploration of the topic. The book is divided into sections covering the following topics: Failing and Forgiving; Society-Wide Failure; Failure in the Family; Therapeutic Failure; Professional Failure in the Consulting Room and on the Career Path; Integrity versus Despair: Facing Failure in the Final Phase of the Life Cycle; Metaphoric Bridges and Creativity; The Long Shadow of Childhood Relational Trauma. Understanding and Coping with Failure will be eagerly welcomed by all those trying to increase their awareness, understanding, and capacity to work with the many ramifications of this important issue. Because of the uniqueness of this broad, detailed exploration of the complexities of the failure experience, it will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors, and students in these disciplines. It will also appeal to a wider audience interested in the psychoanalytic perspective.

The importance of knowing and being known is at the heart of the human experience and has always been the core of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Freud named his central Oedipal construct after Sophocles’ great play that dramatically encapsulated the desire, difficulty, and dangers involved in knowing and being known. Psychoanalysis’ founder developed a methodology to facilitate unconscious material becoming conscious, that is, making the unknown known to help us better understand ourselves and our relational lives, including psychic trauma, and multigenerational histories. This book will stimulate readers to contemplate knowing and being known from multiple perspectives. It bursts with thought-provoking ideas and intriguing cases illuminated by penetrating reflections from diverse theoretical perspectives. It will sensitize readers to this theme’s omnipresent, varied importance in the clinical setting and throughout life. Accomplished contributors discuss a wide variety of fascinating topics, illustrated by rich clinical material. Their contributions are grouped under these headings: Knowing through dreams; Knowing through appearances; Dreading and longing to be known; The analyst’s ways of knowing and communicating; Knowing in the contemporary sociocultural context; The known analyst; and No longer known. Readers will find each section deeply informative, stimulating thought, insights, and ideas for clinical practice. Psychoanalytic Explorations in Knowing and Being Known will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, counselors, students in these disciplines, and members of related scholarly communities.

The Temporal Dimension in Counselling and Psychotherapy looks at time as an intangible phenomenon that is culturally created, historically framed, but only individually understood. Examining our relationship to time as well as what it means in terms of our mortality, it integrates historical, cultural and psychotherapeutic perspectives to shine a light on our experience of time from our current identity to past trauma, both in the consulting room and beyond. Divided into three parts, the book explores those time-related issues that emerge in psychotherapy, it initially focuses on our existence as individuals in time, with chapters discussing how we develop a sense of self as a being-in-time, how our relationship to time is coloured by the world we live in today, and our attachment relationships and past traumas. In part two, the focus narrows to the consulting room itself; the practical aspects of the time-frame and how these can be managed. The third part of the book concerns the impact of trauma and other crises on our existence in time, as well as our experience of it. Exploring time-related issues as people navigate different stages in the life-cycle, as well as for people affected by illness, trauma and bereavement, this insightful and thought-provoking book will provide insights for counsellors and therapists about what time means both to themselves and their clients.

Couple psychotherapy extends the work of the psychotherapist to the patient’s most significant committed adult relationship, yet the therapy is difficult both conceptually and technically. One major reason for this difficulty is that in every couple’s treatment there is a confusing array of psychological defenses as well as regressive and nonregressive couple object relations-as distinct from the object relations that each individual member brings to the couple. Further, many of these processes are occurring outside consciousness and at the very same time. This book is an attempt to clarify all the confusing issues by presenting a three-factor model of couple psychotherapy within a psychodynamic framework. This model has been found to be very effective with many different kinds of couples. The book suggests that there are three powerful couple dynamics that shape every couple’s treatment: (A) the quality and quantity of the couple’s projective identifications; (B) the level of their “couple object relations”; and (C) the presence or absence of the defense of omnipotent control. These three variables are the most important factors in the therapy; they determine the success or failure of every therapy with every couple. These dynamics also determine quite a bit about how to conduct a couple therapy with regard to the therapist’s level of activity, tone, the way of sorting the material in his or her head, and even the kinds of interventions he/she chooses (whether or not, for example, the therapist will use certain resistance techniques). Understanding these three variables and how they interact is key to the success of the therapy.

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.

Watching people protest, one hypothesis is that underlying these actions for specific justifiable causes is a sense of wishing to belong, of wishing not to be alone. Recent knowledge from patients and empirical research shows the importance of belonging to groups to both psychological and physical well-being. The problems of many students, minority group members, immigrants, terrorists, and lonely people are linked to an insufficient sense of belonging. Whereas psychoanalytic theory has focused on the need for a secure attachment to a primary caretaker, it has failed to note the importance of a sense of belonging to the family group, a friendship group, a community, a religious group, a nation-state, etc. This book demonstrates the difficulties faced by those who immigrate, those who never feel a sense of their true selves as belonging in a family or a cohesive professional group, and the difficulties of psychoanalysts themselves in knowing where they belong in patients’ lives. The problems of breaking up marital and professional relationships as well as our relationship with the Earth are also discussed. Freudian theory rejected the idea of a sense of "oneness" with humanity as being infantile. Recent developments regarding the similarities between meditational practices and psychoanalysis have questioned Freud’s idea. This book shows the importance of an interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis focusing on real relationships and not simply one that examines inner conflicts. It will be useful to psychologists, other mental health practitioners, social scientists, and anyone with normal struggles in life.