Selma Kramer – författare

How does culture affect child-rearing practices? How do factors such as poverty, ethnic difference, racial minority status, and having immigrant parents alter the experience of a growing child? Are there culturally distinct sub-groups within the African-American population? How ubiquitous are psychoanalytically derived schedules of personality development? In what form and to what extent are transference and countertransference affected by such racial, ethnic, and economic issues? In this volume, eight distinguished psychoanalysts (including some belonging to ethnic and racial minorities) attempt to answer these questions. They provide illuminating details of child-rearing practices in African-American, Indian, and Japanese families. They interweave mythological legacies, historical background, ethnographic data, and clinical observations into a rich tapestry of knowledge, empathy, and understanding. They try to tease out the variables of socioeconomic class from the issue of race and the ambiguities consequent upon raising children in a new and unfamiliar land from the ordinary and inevitable conflicts between generations.

Sibling relationships and rivalry are as old as recorded history. This analysis explores that ambivalence between siblings casts its shadow throughout people's lifetimes and affects their choices of mates, relationships with their own children, and aversions to others.

Thicker Than Blood addresses in depth the impact of adoption on biological parents, adoptive parents, adopted children, and siblings.

Offers an exploration of the nonverbal elements in psychotherapy. This book argues that decoding nonverbal communication can lead to a deeper understanding of patients' problems.

Has there been an actual increase in the occurrence of incest? Or is the seemingly, greater frequency due to our increased awareness of incest and more careful listening to our patients? The psychoanalysts contributing to this volume take the latter position. They discuss various aspects of incest, the occurrence of which they agree is always traumatic to its victim. Incest occurs in dysfunctional families and often in the setting of multiple traumatic factors. In cases of parent-child incest, one parent is the perpetrator and the other, by silence or absence, unwittingly colludes with the former. While an individual with early sexual trauma may have a certain self-reliance, ambition, perseverance, and tenacious pursuit of self-knowledge, the fact remains that incest is inimical to normal, healthy development. It leads to profoundly deleterious effects, including lifelong guilt, sadomasochistic tendencies, defects of self-esteem, sexual dysfunction, and vulnerability to psychosomatic phenomena, accidents, injuries, depression, and even suicide.It is therefore extremely important to be able to recognize the phenomenological and psychodynamic configurations suggesting that incest has occurred in the individual's past. Such knowledge enables therapist to be more alert to the nuances of transference and countertransference, leading to be heightened empathy and to more precise and helpful interpretations. The contributors to this book highlight, with the help of detailed clinical illustrations, various cues of incest-related psychopathology. They discuss the transference manifestations of such patients and, in an extremely helpful manner, clarify the subtleties in treatment technique. By so addressing the phenomenon of incest, this book makes an important inroad into the prevention and amelioration of the profound psychic trauma - the trauma of transgression - caused by the use of a child's body for the sexual gratification of the parent.

Aims to clarify the similarities/differences in the ideas of Margaret Mahler and Heinz Kohut with regard to the mutuality and complexity of the interaction between the parents and the child in the development context. The book also examines the therapeutic encounter between analyst and analysand.

Fidelity: from cannibalism to imperialism & beyond/intimacy & individuation/egocentricity.