Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis gives a clear overview of the key tenets of classical Freudian psychoanalysis, and offers a guide to how these might be best understood and applied to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Covering such essential concepts as the Oedipal complex, narcissism and metapsychology, Fayek explores what Freud’s thinking has to offer psychoanalysts of all schools of thought today, and what key facets of his work can usefully be built on to develop future theory. The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, as well as teaching faculties and postgraduate students studying Freudian psychoanalysis.

The landscape of psychoanalysis has changed, at times dramatically, in the hundred or so years since Freud first began to think and write about it. Freudian theory and concepts have risen, fallen, evolved, mutated, and otherwise reworked themselves in the hands and minds of analysts the world over, leaving us with a theoretically pluralistic (yet threateningly multifarious) diffusion of psychoanalytic viewpoints. To help make sense of it all, Morris Eagle sets out to critically reevaluate fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of theory and practice in a topical manner. Beginning at the beginning, he reintroduces Freud's ideas in chapters on the mind, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment; he then approaches the same topics in terms of more contemporary psychoanalytic schools. In each chapter, however, there is an underlying emphasis on identification and integration of converging themes, which is reemphasized in the final chapter. Relevant empirical research findings are used throughout, thus basic concepts - such as repression - are reexamined in the light of more contemporary developments.

Although cognitive psychology and neuroscience have usurped the influential position once held by psychoanalysis, this volume seeks to reclaim the value of the unconscious as a methodological tool for the study of ancient texts by transforming our understanding of what it means, how it operates, and how it relates to textual hermeneutics.

Since Freud published the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and utilized Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to work through his developing ideas about the psycho-sexual development of children, it has been virtually impossible to think about psychoanalysis without reference to classical myth. Myth has the capacity to transcend the context of any particular retelling, continuing to transform our understanding of the present. Throughout the twentieth century, experts on the ancient world have turned to the insights of psychoanalytic criticism to supplement and inform their readings of classical myth and literature. This volume examines the inter-relationship of classical myth and psychoanalysis from the generation before Freud to the present day, engaging with debates about the role of classical myth in modernity, the importance of psychoanalytic ideas for cultural critique, and its ongoing relevance to ways of conceiving the self. The chapters trace the historical roots of terms in everyday usage, such as narcissism and the phallic symbol, in the reception of Classical Greece, and cover a variety of both classical and psychoanalytic texts.

Dissidence and controversy have been an integral part of the history of psychoanalysis, at times causing pain, disappointment, and shame to its adherents. The seemingly endless dissent has evoked derision and thrown doubt on the validity of the findings of psychoanalysis. Now, for the first time, a number of distinguished psychoanalysts have met to try and understand this phenomenon. This volume, the collected proceedings of a single landmark conference, is a major contribution to the understanding not only of the history and nature of psychoanalysis, but also to the history of the ideas that shaped the twentieth century. essay by Martin S. Bergmann, which brings together the significant ideas of major dissidents in the psychoanalytic movement. Bergmann's discussion of dissidence in a historical sequence results in a panoramic view of the interactions between mainstream psychoanalysis and its discontents that provides a comprehensive look at the movement across several decades. The second part of the book is comprised of written responses to Dr. Bergmann's essay by Andre Green, Otto Kernberg, Anton Kris, Harold Blum, Jill Savage Scharff, Robert Wallerstein, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. analysts named above as well as William Grossman, Peter Neubauer, Henry Nunberg, and Mortimer Ostow that touches on such wide-ranging topics as: the reasons for vehement disagreement among psychoanalytic schools, how dissidence should be taught in psychoanalytic training, the question of what is at the heart of psychoanalysis, the libido as pleasure-seeking and object-seeking, the limitations of psychoanalysis, the relationship between psychoanalysis and drug therapy, and psychoanalysis as science and as ideology. This singular volume illuminates issues that are some of the most troublesome and urgent among leading psychoanalysts today.

This acclaimed clinical guide and widely adopted text has filled a key need in the field since its original publication. Nancy McWilliams makes psychoanalytic personality theory and its implications for practice accessible to practitioners of all levels of experience. She explains major character types and demonstrates specific ways that understanding the patient's individual personality structure can influence the therapist's focus and style of intervention. Guidelines are provided for developing a systematic yet flexible diagnostic formulation and using it to inform treatment. Highly readable, the book features a wealth of illustrative clinical examples. New to This Edition *Reflects the ongoing development of the author's approach over nearly two decades. *Incorporates important advances in attachment theory, neuroscience, and the study of trauma. *Coverage of the contemporary relational movement in psychoanalysis. Winner--Canadian Psychological Association's Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis explores the idea of ‘the frame’ at a time when this concept is undergoing both systematic revival and widespread transformation. It has always been tempting to see the frame as a relatively static, finite and definable feature of psychoanalytic work. At its most basic, the frame establishes agreed upon conditions of undertaking psychoanalytic work. But as this book shows, the frame has taken on a protean quality. It is sometimes a source of stability and sometimes a site of ethical regulation or discipline. It can be a place of imaginative mobility, and in certain analytic hands, a device for psychic work on projections and disavowals. Beginning with a seminal essay on the frame by José Bleger, this book includes commentary on that work and proceeds to explorations of the frame across different psychoanalytic theories. The frame is perhaps one of the spots in psychoanalysis where psyche and world come into contact, a place where the psychoanalytic project is both protected and challenged. Inevitably, extra-transferential forces intrude onto the psychoanalytic frame, rendering it flexible and fluid. Psychoanalysts and analysands, supervisors and candidates are relying increasingly on virtual communication, a development that has effected significant revisions of the classical psychoanalytic frame. This book presents a dialogue among distinct and different voices. It re-examines the state and status of the frame, searching for its limits and sifting through its unexpected contents whilst expanding upon the meaning, purview and state of the frame. Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in how best to understand the frame and to use it most effectively in their clinical practice.