Treating Severe Depressive and Persecutory Anxiety States

Robert Waska MFT, PhD is a graduate of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies and has a private psychoanalytic practice for individuals and couples in San Francisco and Marin County. Dr. Waska has taught and presented in the Bay Area as well as internationally. He is the author of ten published textbooks on psychoanalytic theory and technique, is a contributing author for both 'The Handbook of Contemporary Psychotherapy' and 'The Handbook of Hate', and has published over eighty articles in professional journals. Dr. Waska's work focuses on various contemporary Kleinian topics including projective identification, loss, borderline and psychotic states, the practical realities of psychoanalytic practice in the modern world, and the establishment of analytic contact with difficult, hard to reach patients. He emphasizes the moment-to-moment understanding of transference and phantasy as the vehicle for gradual integration and mastery of unconscious conflict between self and other.

• Preface -- Introduction -- Combined Persecutory and Depressive Trauma -- Psychoanalysis as defined by the clinical situation: Establishing analytic contact with acutely troubled patients -- When suffering never ends: The internal experience of the paranoid and the depressive world colliding -- When patients face the dual threat of depressive and paranoid phantasies -- Unresolved depressive and paranoid phantasies: Certain clinical difficulties -- Longing for the disappointing object and dreading its return -- Analytic Contact in Untraditional Clinical Situations -- Low-frequency Kleinian psychoanalysis: Establishing analytic contact with a new case -- A Kleinian view of psychoanalytic couples therapy -- Clinical issues in couples treatment -- Optimism as a way to save the self and the object -- Why won't the voices leave me alone: Patients who live in a world of persecutory anxiety -- Counter-Transference and the Establishment of Analytic Contact -- Using the counter-transference: Analytic contact, projective identification, and transference phantasy states -- The counter-transference and analytic contact -- Summary