The Analyst’s Vulnerability

2021-07-19 Psychology

Author : Karen J. Maroda
Release : 2021-07-19
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 451/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Analyst’s Vulnerability by : Karen J. Maroda

Download or read book The Analyst’s Vulnerability written by Karen J. Maroda. This book was released on 2021-07-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book closely examines the analyst’s early experiences and character traits, demonstrating the impact they have on theory building and technique. Arguing that choice of theory and interventions are unconsciously shaped by clinicians’ early experiences, this book argues for greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and open dialogue as a corrective. Linking the analyst’s early childhood experiences to ongoing vulnerabilities reflected in theory and practice, this book favors an approach that focuses on feedback and confrontation, as well as empathic understanding and acceptance. Essential to this task, and a thesis that runs through the book, are analysts’ motivations for doing treatment and the gratifications they naturally seek. Maroda asserts that an enduring blind spot arises from clinicians’ ongoing need to deny what they are personally seeking from the analytic process, including the need to rescue and be rescued. She equally seeks to remove the guilt and shame associated with these motivations, encouraging clinicians to embrace both their own humanity and their patients’, rather than seeking to transcend them. Providing a new perspective on how analysts work, this book explores the topics of enactment, mirror neurons, and therapeutic action through the lens of the analyst’s early experiences and resulting personality structure. Maroda confronts the analyst’s tendencies to favor harmony over conflict, passivity over active interventions, and viewing the patient as an infant rather than an adult. Exploring heretofore unexamined issues of the psychology of the analyst or therapist offers the opportunity to generate new theoretical and technical perspectives. As such, this book will be invaluable to experienced psychodynamic therapists and students and trainees alike, as well as teachers of theory and practice.

Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation

2013-06-17 Psychology

Author : Karen J. Maroda
Release : 2013-06-17
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 843/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation by : Karen J. Maroda

Download or read book Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation written by Karen J. Maroda. This book was released on 2013-06-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation demonstrates how interpersonal psychoanalysis obliges analysts to engage their patients with genuine emotional responsiveness, so that not only the patient but the analyst too is open to ongoing transformation through the analytic experience. In so doing, the analyst moves from the position of an "interpreting observer" to that of an "active participant and facilitator" whose affective communications enable the patient to acquire basic self-trust along with self-knowledge. Drawing on the current literature on affect, Maroda argues that psychological change occurs through affect-laden interpersonal processes. Given that most patients in psychotherapy have problems with affect management, the completing of cycles of affective communication between therapist and patient becomes a vitally important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise. Through emotionally open responses to their patients and careful use of patient-prompted self-disclosures, analysts can facilitate affect regulation responsibly and constructively, with the emphasis always remaining on the patients' experience. Moments of mutual surrender - the honest emotional giving over of patient to analyst and analyst to patient - epitomize the emotionally intense interpersonal experiences that lead to enduring intrapsychic change. Maroda's work is profoundly personal. She does not hesitate to share with the reader how her own personality affects her thinking and her work. Indeed, she believes her theoretical and clinical preferences are emblematic of the way in which the analyst's subjectivity necessarily shapes theory choice and practice preferences in general. Seduction, Surrender, and Transfomation is not only a powerful brief for emotional honesty in the analytic relationship but also a model of the personal openness that, according to Maroda, psychoanalysis demands of all its practitioners.

Coasting in the Countertransference

2011-02-25 Psychology

Author : Irwin Hirsch
Release : 2011-02-25
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 431/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Coasting in the Countertransference by : Irwin Hirsch

Download or read book Coasting in the Countertransference written by Irwin Hirsch. This book was released on 2011-02-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2009 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship! Irwin Hirsch, author of Coasting in the Countertransference, asserts that countertransference experience always has the potential to be used productively to benefit patients. However, he also observes that it is not unusual for analysts to 'coast' in their countertransferences, and to not use this experience to help treatment progress toward reaching patients' and analysts' stated analytic goals. He believes that it is quite common that analysts who have some conscious awareness of a problematic aspect of countertransference participation, or of a mutual enactment, nevertheless do nothing to change that participation and to use their awareness to move the therapy forward. Instead, analysts may prefer to maintain what has developed into perhaps a mutually comfortable equilibrium in the treatment, possibly rationalizing that the patient is not yet ready to deal with any potential disruption that a more active use of countertransference might precipitate. This 'coasting' is emblematic of what Hirsch believes to be an ever present (and rarely addressed) conflict between analysts’ self-interest and pursuit of comfortable equilibrium, and what may be ideal for patients’ achievement of analytic aims. The acknowledgment of the power of analysts’ self-interest further highlights the contemporary view of a truly two-person psychology conception of psychoanalytic praxis. Analysts’ embrace of their selfish pursuit of comfortable equilibrium reflects both an acknowledgment of the analyst as a flawed other, and a potential willingness to abandon elements of self-interest for the greater good of the therapeutic project.

A Meeting of Minds

2013-06-17 Psychology

Author : Lewis Aron
Release : 2013-06-17
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 041/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis A Meeting of Minds by : Lewis Aron

Download or read book A Meeting of Minds written by Lewis Aron. This book was released on 2013-06-17. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this richly nuanced assessment of the various dimensions of mutuality in psychoanalysis, Aron shows that the relational approach to psychoanalysis is a powerful guide to issues of technique and therapeutic strategy. From his reappraisal of the concepts of interaction and enactment, to his examination of the issue of analyst self-disclosure, to his concluding remarks on the relational import of the analyst's ethics and values, Aron squarely accepts the clinical responsibilities attendant to a postmodern critique of psychoanalytic foundations.

Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty

2011-04-12 Psychology

Author : Doris Brothers
Release : 2011-04-12
Genre : Psychology
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 024/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty by : Doris Brothers

Download or read book Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty written by Doris Brothers. This book was released on 2011-04-12. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since trauma is a thoroughly relational phenomenon, it is highly unpredictable, and cannot be made to fit within the scientific framework Freud so admired. In Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis, Doris Brothers urges a return to a trauma-centered psychoanalysis. Making use of relational systems theory, she shows that experiences of uncertainty are continually transformed by the regulatory processes of everyday life such as feeling, knowing, forming categories, making decisions, using language, creating narratives, sensing time, remembering, forgetting, and fantasizing. Insofar as trauma destroys the certainties that organize psychological life, it plunges our relational systems into chaos and sets the stage for the emergence of rigid, life-constricting relational patterns. These trauma-generated patterns, which often involve denial of sameness and difference, the creation of complexity-reducing dualities, and the transformation of certainty into certitude, figure prominently in virtually all of the complaints for which patients seek analytic treatment. Analysts, she claims, are no more strangers to trauma than are their patients. Using in-depth clinical illustrations, Dr. Brothers demonstrates how a mutual desire to heal and to be healed from trauma draws patients and analysts into their analytic relationships. She recommends the reconceptualization of what has heretofore been considered transference and countertransference in terms of the transformation of experienced uncertainty. In her view the increased ability of both analytic partners to live with uncertainty is the mark of a successful treatment. Dr. Brothers’ perspective sheds fresh light on a variety of topics of great general interest to analysts as well as many of their patients, such as gender, the acceptance of death, faith, cult-like training programs, and burnout. Her discussions of these topics are enlivened by references to contemporary cinema and theatre.

Popular eBooks

The Analyst’s Vulnerability

Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation

Coasting in the Countertransference

A Meeting of Minds

Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty

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