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.

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

What is hatred? How does it differ from rage? What are its origins? Is hatred ever rational? Why are some people unable to let go of it while others are completely incapable of feeling it? Eight distinguished psychoanalysts provide the answers to these and other related questions in this tightly organized volume. With the help of clinical vignettes and literary portrayals, these experienced therapists address the emergence of hatred in the clinical situation. They highlight the various purposes served by the patient's hatred including drive discharge, projective identification, defense against dependence, anchoring of identity, and self holding. They also present a rich understanding of the hatred felt by the therapist vis-…-vis hateful and chronically self-destructive individuals. Finally, they discuss the technical implications of these concepts and delineate useful interventions to contain, manage, and interpret the patient's intense hatred. The matters discussed in this book are diverse and include infant observation, gender differences, child abuse, severe character pathology, multiple personality, countertransference difficulties, literary characters, racial prejudice, ethnic hatred, and war. The focus of the book, however, remains clinical. Its ultimate aim is to enhance the clinician's ability to deal with the hatred felt by the patient, and, at times, by the therapist.

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.