Desire, Self, Mind, and the Psychotherapies

R. Coleman Curtis is a professor at Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University.

In this exceptionally readable and engaging book, Rebecca Curtis explains and integrates the clinically most useful and scientifically most tenable insights from relational psychoanalysis, cognitive and social psychology, and affective neuroscience. Much of existing psychoanalytic writing is words about words, speculative theories about prior speculative theories–bad poetry that meshes poorly with the growing body of empirical evidence in psychology and neuroscience. Curtis adroitly sidesteps or cuts through the accumulated verbiage and, without bias or rancor, offers a thoughtful, very wide-ranging, deeply anchored, and refreshingly realistic conception of desire, self, mind, and psychological transformation. The book will be extremely useful to both clinicians and researchers.

• Chapter 1 PrefaceChapter 2 1. Heteroclitics and PsychologyChapter 3 2. Desire (and Its Discontents)Chapter 4 3. The Charioteer and the Two Horses: The Self and Its RepresentationsChapter 5 4. The Boogie-Woogie Rumble of Unconscious Processes: The Mind in Psychoanalysis and PsychologyChapter 6 5. Big Bad Blinks: What Happens to Threatening Information and What is Selected for Conscious ProcessingChapter 7 6. Abandonment of the Interpretation-Insight Model and the Tsunami of the New Experiences Model of ChangeChapter 8 7. Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes: Focusing on the Experiencing SelfChapter 9 8. Towards Psychointegration: Going to AfricaChapter 10 9. The Affective Revolution and the Creative Unconscious: Two Areas of ConvergenceChapter 11 10. Summary: Toward a Psychoanalytically-Informed Psychological ScienceChapter 12 Epilogue