Irwin Hirsch – författare

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.

This book is a unique volume that brings a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives to the study of sport. It highlights the importance of sports for different individuals and how the function and use of sports can be brought into the consulting room. Passionate interest in actively engaging in sports is a universal phenomenon. It is striking that this aspect of human life, prior to this volume, has received little attention in the literature of psychoanalysis. This edited volume is comprised largely of psychoanalysts who are themselves avidly involved with sports. It is suggested that intense involvement in sports prioritizes commitment and active engagement over passivity and that such involvement provides an emotionally tinged distraction from the various misfortunes of life. Indeed, the ups and downs in mood related to athletic victory or defeat often supplant, temporarily, matters in life that may be more personally urgent. Engaging in sports or rooting for teams provides a feeling of community and a sense of identification with like-minded others, even among those who are part of other communities and have sufficient communal identifications.This book offers a better psychoanalytic understanding of sports to help us discover more about ourselves, our patients and our culture, and will be of great interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, or anyone with an interest in sport and its link to psychoanalysis and mental health.

This book is a unique volume that brings a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives to the study of sport. It highlights the importance of sports for different individuals and how the function and use of sports can be brought into the consulting room. Passionate interest in actively engaging in sports is a universal phenomenon. It is striking that this aspect of human life, prior to this volume, has received little attention in the literature of psychoanalysis. This edited volume is comprised largely of psychoanalysts who are themselves avidly involved with sports. It is suggested that intense involvement in sports prioritizes commitment and active engagement over passivity and that such involvement provides an emotionally tinged distraction from the various misfortunes of life. Indeed, the ups and downs in mood related to athletic victory or defeat often supplant, temporarily, matters in life that may be more personally urgent. Engaging in sports or rooting for teams provides a feeling of community and a sense of identification with like-minded others, even among those who are part of other communities and have sufficient communal identifications.This book offers a better psychoanalytic understanding of sports to help us discover more about ourselves, our patients and our culture, and will be of great interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, or anyone with an interest in sport and its link to psychoanalysis and mental health.

North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context. During the time span covered in this book, interpersonal psychoanalysis was most concerned with revising the understanding of the analytic relationship—transference and countertransference-and how to work with it. Most of the works collected here center on this theme. The interpersonal perspective introduced the view that the analyst is always and unavoidably a particular, "real" person, and that transference and countertransference need to be reconceptualized to take the analyst’s individual humanity into account. The relationship needs to be grasped as one taking place between two very particular people. Many of the papers are by writers well known in the broader psychoanalytic world, such as Bromberg, Greenberg, Levenson, and Mitchell. But also included are those by writers who, while not as widely recognized beyond the interpersonal literature, have been highly influential among interpersonalists, including Barnett, Schecter, Singer, and Wolstein. Donnel B. Stern and Irwin Hirsch, prominent interpersonalists themselves, present each piece with a prologue that contextualizes the author and their work in the interpersonal literature. An introductory essay also reviews the history of interpersonal psychoanalysis, explaining why interpersonal thinking remains a coherent clinical and theoretical perspective in contemporary psychoanalysis. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to know more about interpersonal theory and practice than can be learned from current sources.

Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s-2010s is the second collection of selected classic articles of the modern era by psychoanalysts identified with the interpersonal perspective. The first, The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s presented articles by second and third generation interpersonalists. This book contains those written by the third and fourth generation of interpersonal psychoanalysts. The articles selected by the Editors for this second book extend the theme of transference and countertransference that was the throughline of the first book, lending even greater significance in clinical practice to the analyst’s subjectivity and its relation to the patient’s mind. One chapter after another in this book reveal ways that the analyst’s experience can lead to a greater appreciation of the patient’s unconscious experience. It is because of papers such as these that interpersonal psychoanalysis has been described as the origin, at least in North America, of the contemporary clinical interest in psychoanalytic subjectivity. As in the first, the articles in this second book include classic contributions from Bromberg, Greenberg, Hirsch, Mitchell, Levenson, Stern, and Wolstein; these writers are joined here by Blechner, Bonovitz, Buechler, Fiscalini, Held-Weiss, Kuriloff, and White. North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. Along with its companion work, this book provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context.

In The Interpersonal Tradition: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity, Irwin Hirsch offers an overview of psychoanalytic history and in particular the evolution of Interpersonal thinking, which has become central to much contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. This book of Hirsch’s selected papers provides an overview of his work on the topic over a thirty year period (1984-2014), with a new introductory chapter and a brief updating prologue to each subsequent chapter.Hirsch offers an original perspective on clinical psychoanalytic process, comparative psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, particularly explicating the many ways in which Interpersonal thinking is absolutely central to contemporary theory and practice. Each chapter is filled with theoretical explication and clinical examples that illustrate the degree to which the idiosyncratic person of each psychoanalyst inevitably plays a significant role in both analytic praxis and analytic theorizing. Key to this perspective is the recognition that each unique individual analyst is an inherently subjective co-participant in all aspects of analytic process, underscoring the importance that analysts maintain an acute sensitivity to the participation of both parties in the transference-countertransference matrix. Overall, the book argues that the Interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition, more than any other, is responsible for the post-modern and Relational turn in contemporary psychoanalysis.Based on a range of seminal papers that outline how the Interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition is integral to understanding much of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, this book will be essential reading for practitioners and students of psychoanalysis.

In The Interpersonal Tradition: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity, Irwin Hirsch offers an overview of psychoanalytic history and in particular the evolution of Interpersonal thinking, which has become central to much contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. This book of Hirsch’s selected papers provides an overview of his work on the topic over a thirty year period (1984-2014), with a new introductory chapter and a brief updating prologue to each subsequent chapter.Hirsch offers an original perspective on clinical psychoanalytic process, comparative psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, particularly explicating the many ways in which Interpersonal thinking is absolutely central to contemporary theory and practice. Each chapter is filled with theoretical explication and clinical examples that illustrate the degree to which the idiosyncratic person of each psychoanalyst inevitably plays a significant role in both analytic praxis and analytic theorizing. Key to this perspective is the recognition that each unique individual analyst is an inherently subjective co-participant in all aspects of analytic process, underscoring the importance that analysts maintain an acute sensitivity to the participation of both parties in the transference-countertransference matrix. Overall, the book argues that the Interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition, more than any other, is responsible for the post-modern and Relational turn in contemporary psychoanalysis.Based on a range of seminal papers that outline how the Interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition is integral to understanding much of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, this book will be essential reading for practitioners and students of psychoanalysis.

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.

North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context. During the time span covered in this book, interpersonal psychoanalysis was most concerned with revising the understanding of the analytic relationship—transference and countertransference-and how to work with it. Most of the works collected here center on this theme. The interpersonal perspective introduced the view that the analyst is always and unavoidably a particular, "real" person, and that transference and countertransference need to be reconceptualized to take the analyst’s individual humanity into account. The relationship needs to be grasped as one taking place between two very particular people. Many of the papers are by writers well known in the broader psychoanalytic world, such as Bromberg, Greenberg, Levenson, and Mitchell. But also included are those by writers who, while not as widely recognized beyond the interpersonal literature, have been highly influential among interpersonalists, including Barnett, Schecter, Singer, and Wolstein. Donnel B. Stern and Irwin Hirsch, prominent interpersonalists themselves, present each piece with a prologue that contextualizes the author and their work in the interpersonal literature. An introductory essay also reviews the history of interpersonal psychoanalysis, explaining why interpersonal thinking remains a coherent clinical and theoretical perspective in contemporary psychoanalysis. The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s–1990s will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to know more about interpersonal theory and practice than can be learned from current sources.

Further Developments in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, 1980s-2010s is the second collection of selected classic articles of the modern era by psychoanalysts identified with the interpersonal perspective. The first, The Interpersonal Perspective in Psychoanalysis, 1960s-1990s presented articles by second and third generation interpersonalists. This book contains those written by the third and fourth generation of interpersonal psychoanalysts. The articles selected by the Editors for this second book extend the theme of transference and countertransference that was the throughline of the first book, lending even greater significance in clinical practice to the analyst’s subjectivity and its relation to the patient’s mind. One chapter after another in this book reveal ways that the analyst’s experience can lead to a greater appreciation of the patient’s unconscious experience. It is because of papers such as these that interpersonal psychoanalysis has been described as the origin, at least in North America, of the contemporary clinical interest in psychoanalytic subjectivity. As in the first, the articles in this second book include classic contributions from Bromberg, Greenberg, Hirsch, Mitchell, Levenson, Stern, and Wolstein; these writers are joined here by Blechner, Bonovitz, Buechler, Fiscalini, Held-Weiss, Kuriloff, and White. North American psychoanalysis has long been deeply influenced and substantially changed by clinical and theoretical perspectives first introduced by interpersonal psychoanalysis. Yet even today, despite its origin in the 1930s, many otherwise well-read psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are not well informed about the field. Along with its companion work, this book provides a superb starting point for those who are not as familiar with interpersonal psychoanalysis as they might be. For those who already know the literature, the book will be useful in placing a selection of classic interpersonal articles and their writers in key historical context.