Library of Object Relations – serie

In this fine book, Dr. Steven A. Frankel paints the portraits of his collaborating patients vividly, graphically and with consummate compassion. Treatment for Frankel is never a discussion and surely not one filled with the therapist's abstinence; it is a vital, interactive and changing experience for both partners. He is no less skillful in engaging and educating the reader. His review of psychoanalytic theories and research is, in itself, a prodigious and productive education. It is tempting to suggest that this important contribution to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy is one illustration of theory finally catching up to sensitive and effective practice. Frankel closes his lovely book with thanks to the reader 'for coming on this part of my journey.' Shirley Cooper, LCSW

Dr. David Scharff explores the role of sexuality in human relationships by combining his extensive experience in individual, marital, family, and sex therapy with theoretical contributions from object relations theory and child development.

Passionate feelings of love and hate are stirred in psychotherapy. Paradoxically, these passions may either undermine the therapist catastrophically or serve as the crucible in which profound understanding is forged. Transferences and countertransferences of love and hate occur on a spectrum that includes unobjectionable negative and positive feelings, relatively benign forms of love and hate, and more malignant, intractable versions of love and hate that present formidable challenges to the therapist. Each of these variations is explored in different chapters of this book. Gender configurations, gender fluidity, adolescent transferences, the link between love and lust, and passive forms of hating are among the topics discussed. Most of all, the author, noted psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard, depicts what it is like to be in the eye of the hurricane when passions are aroused. He provides a practical yet theoretically sophisticated guide to the management of love and hate as they are experienced by both patient and therapist.

In their groundbreaking A Primer of Object Relations, Jill Savege Scharff and David E. Scharff answered readers' questions about this burgeoning field in remarkably clear and readable prose. It is difficult to imagine any other team of authors who could provide such a comprehensive survey of the broad applications of object relations theory and in the second edition of this authoritative work, the Scharffs draw from their years of clinical experience to create an inclusive and up-to-date manual for object relations theory that is certain to become a classic in the field.

The Scharffs draw from their object relations therapy with individuals, families, and couples recovering from trauma and abundance of relevant clinical examples described in tehir characteristically personal and vivid style. Their treatment approach, influenced by Fairbairn, Klein, and Winnicott, is respectful of the patient's experience. They advise avoiding premature interpretations tha impose their own reality on patients because this traumatizes them just as their abuser did. In order to work well with these traumatized people, the clinician must be able to tolerate ambiguity and sustain longterm therapy, for it takes the patience of waiting and wondering to recover deeply repressed memories, explore them thoroughly, and evaluate their meaning and importance for the patient. Object relations theory offers a bridge between individual and societal experiences of trauma and prepares the way for a less dissociated response to trauma issues among the mental health professions and their psychotherapy literature.

Presence and the Present: Relationship and Time in Contemporary Psychodynamic Therapy offers salient points learned from the author’s forty years of practice and teaching, and applies psychodynamic psychotherapy to the contemporary practice climate. Emphasizing the therapeutic relationship and the dimension of time, it grounds the discussion in clinical application. Including more than fifty vignettes and four extended case presentations, the author deconstructs successful interchanges as well as errors. Part I sets out central themes and components of this contemporary view of dynamic therapy while part II examines present-day applications. Part I begins with an overview of the core (the relationship) and the contours (characteristics) of therapy and some of the challenges therapists face today. The ten contours discussed are the frame, uniqueness, not knowing, different types of knowledge, mentalization, the therapist’s use of self, goals beyond symptom relief, integration with nondynamic approaches, integration with neuroscience and therapy outcome research, and, finally, the use of time and space. Following a discussion of these ten contours, the book summarizes evidence-based relationship elements in therapy and the robust empirical research demonstrating dynamic therapy’s effectiveness, while providing a theoretical overview for therapists not familiar with psychodynamic theory. The last two chapters of part I examine the complex relationships among time, life, and psychotherapy and continue the exploration of therapy duration, the present moment, transience, unending therapy, and termination. Part II of Presence and the Present begins with two chapters on the therapy of trauma. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the phenomena of trauma and include practical recommendations and frequent therapist countertransferences. Chapter 10 focuses on the organization of self experience through bodily sensations and offers a nuanced model to understand physical elements of transferences and countertransferences. The final three chapters explore therapy with couples who are struggling with disturbed adult or adolescent children, integrate cognitive-behavioral interventions with the dynamic approach, and examine the frequent and key affect of shame in psychotherapy.

This is the most thorough, revealing, and illuminating account of the inner workings of psychoanalytic institutions that has ever been written. It comprises ground-breaking, in depth, recent political histories of the four leading psychoanalytic institutes in the United States—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles—based on the author's extensive field work. Kirsner also provides dramatic insights into what psychoanalysts and their institutions have contributed to what has gone wrong with psychoanalysis. The result is a fascinating series of portraits of these institutes—their organizations, their cultures, their ways of mediating conflict, and how they have survived. In addition to archival research, the book is built on scores of interviews with prominent psychoanalysts who were often protagonists in the stories of their institutes. Many themes emerge in Kirsner's gripping yet scholarly accounts. Most importantly, he demonstrates that issues surrounding the right to train are central to psychoanalytic disputes. Unfree Associations examines the problems of psychoanalysis, a humanistic discipline that has been touted as a science on the model of the natural sciences but has been organized institutionally as a religion. Interest in this book should not be confined to psychoanalysts. It is a rich set of case studies in the vicissitudes of group relations, with the ironic twist that the members of these organizations profess to have special insight into human nature and how people get along with one another.

Object Relations Brief Therapy combines practical techniques with the depth of object relations theory, the wisdom of previous brief therapy writers, and, most notably, an emphasis on the unique therapeutic relationship. Often, therapists despair of doing any meaningful work in brief therapy. To this, Michael Stadter suggests the following pragmatic approach, "think dynamically, address some underlying issue(s) and do what you can." Specifically, the book emphasizes the depth of understanding of human experience that comes from an object relations perspective; the insight and experiential vitality of attention to the therapeutic relationship including its real, transferential, and countertransferential elements; the impact of the psychodynamic techniques that have been carefully studied and delineated by brief therapy writers such as Davanloo, Horowitz, Malan, Strupp, and Binder; and the flexibility of an eclectic approach that thoughtfully and selectively incorporates non-psychodynamic interventions. Therapists do not have to "escape" managed care, according to Stadter. Rather, they need to learn how to deal with it in a way that preserves their integrity and enables them to practice the kind of healing psychotherapy they know how to do. In today's health care climate, Object Relations Brief Therapy is a much-needed guide for committed therapists.

In The Interpersonal Unconscious, the Scharffs explore the construction and expression of the unconscious in interpersonal interaction. The authors draw from individual analysis, conjoint psychotherapy with families and couples, and from the use of group process in teaching. They introduce chaos theory applied to dynamical systems and South American theories of the link and the analytic field, now available in English. Advances in development, neuroscience, ethology, and attachment theory all contribute to their expanded view of the unconscious mind and its relationships. In turn, the Scharffs' view of the interpersonal unconscious revises current views of development, clinical theory, and unconscious psychic organization.The unconscious is not individual as Freud thought: It is fundamentally interpersonal at the same time that it feels intensely our own. We live in an unconscious field. Each of us contributes to it, and each is structured and enriched by it. We are social creatures, not only in our behaviors and interactions, but in the deepest recesses of our minds. We can no longer conceive of the unconscious as an individual property according to Freud's original topographic and structural theories. Even though the individual unconscious is unique, paradoxically it is also shared in reciprocal interactions with intimate partners, work groups, and social groups. In this state of mutual influence, our unconscious minds are constantly under construction across the life cycle.

During the course of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with couples, the practicing clinician is commonly faced with problems and issues that at times can seem nearly insoluble. In Object Relations and Relationality in Couple Therapy: Exploring the Middle Ground, James L. Poulton, PhD, surveys those problems and offers practical suggestions for their resolution. Through the use of extensive clinical material from couple cases, each chapter presents a specific issue, reviews the theoretical background that is essential for understanding it, and offers detailed illustrations of effective clinical interventions.The issues addressed by this bookinclude the following: the influence of intergenerational trauma on the couple’s functioning; dynamics of violence and sacrifice within the couple; the narcissistic couple and disillusionment with the therapeutic process; intensification of emotional stress that results when both partners share unconscious anxieties; appropriate and inappropriate uses of the therapist’s self-disclosure; integration of cultural issues in couple therapy; negotiating individual and shared transferences in couple therapy;the place of truth and certainty in the couple’s capacity to heal.Object Relations and Relationality in Couple Therapy: Exploring the Middle Ground draws upon leading-edge innovations in both theory and technique to offer creative solutions to the common dilemmas in couple therapy. In current discussions of psychoanalytic treatment, two distinct but interrelated theoretical approaches predominate: object relations and relational theory. This book emphasizes the continuities and commonalities between these two approaches, particularly in their application to the treatment of couples, and argues that modern relational theories can be read as clinically useful elaborations of similar intuitions that have already been developing in the object relations oeuvre. The chapters in this bookillustrate that there is a firm middle ground in which ideas and techniques from both theories can be integrated into a consistent therapeutic approach that provides a broad foundation for conceptualizing couple interactions and for designing interventions that facilitate the couple’s growth.

Keeping Couples in Treatment: Working from Surface to Depth is written for the beginning or seasoned therapist who wants to learn a powerful and effective in-depth approach for keeping couples in treatment. The book focuses on the problems that present themselves when the therapist lacking in-depth knowledge of couple treatment loses empathy and curiosity, resulting in a feeling that couple therapy presents an overwhelming task. Therapists who embark on couple work need practice theory for making meaningful contact with the couple’s internal conflicts. In the surface to depth approach the treatment field consists of two spouses, their unconscious relationship, and the therapist. Therapists may micro-manage couple emotions because they cannot conceive ways to deal with couple anxieties because their own anxieties run so high. This book illustrates the therapist’s use of self and the theory behind this powerful treatment approach that can help therapists more effectively manage treatment anxieties. For the beginning couple therapist, this book offers an object relations rationale for treatment and an expansion of the technical shifts from individual therapy to couples. The book guides the inexperienced therapist through the couple’s pain, rage, and attacks on the frame when in deeply distressing situations. For the experienced therapist the book emphasizes the couple as an unconscious and conscious system best treated using an in-depth understanding of intrapsychic-interpsychic communications. Couple situations demonstrate a treatment that experienced therapists will find liberating. Throughout the book the therapist’s countertransference and use of self as a therapeutic instrument is examined. Divorce, infidelity, dreams, and disorders of the self are detailed in the case materials. The cases represent a variety of problems difficult to treat at any level of therapist experience. The book studies the therapist’s personal feelings and countertransference throughout treatment that enables the reader to hone his or her capacity to deal with difficult couples.

Keeping Couples in Treatment: Working from Surface to Depth is written for the beginning or seasoned therapist who wants to learn a powerful and effective in-depth approach for keeping couples in treatment. The book focuses on the problems that present themselves when the therapist lacking in-depth knowledge of couple treatment loses empathy and curiosity, resulting in a feeling that couple therapy presents an overwhelming task. Therapists who embark on couple work need practice theory for making meaningful contact with the couple’s internal conflicts. In the surface to depth approach the treatment field consists of two spouses, their unconscious relationship, and the therapist. Therapists may micro-manage couple emotions because they cannot conceive ways to deal with couple anxieties because their own anxieties run so high. This book illustrates the therapist’s use of self and the theory behind this powerful treatment approach that can help therapists more effectively manage treatment anxieties. For the beginning couple therapist, this book offers an object relations rationale for treatment and an expansion of the technical shifts from individual therapy to couples. The book guides the inexperienced therapist through the couple’s pain, rage, and attacks on the frame when in deeply distressing situations. For the experienced therapist the book emphasizes the couple as an unconscious and conscious system best treated using an in-depth understanding of intrapsychic-interpsychic communications. Couple situations demonstrate a treatment that experienced therapists will find liberating. Throughout the book the therapist’s countertransference and use of self as a therapeutic instrument is examined. Divorce, infidelity, dreams, and disorders of the self are detailed in the case materials. The cases represent a variety of problems difficult to treat at any level of therapist experience. The book studies the therapist’s personal feelings and countertransference throughout treatment that enables the reader to hone his or her capacity to deal with difficult couples.

The traditional view of the therapeutic interaction fails to capture the heart of the process when it pictures the therapist as disinterested and distanced agent of change. Growing interest in the helpful use of countertransference reflects a shift toward a two-person view of treatment. There has been surprisingly little effort, however, to explore systematically the full potential of such a model for making sense of the therapeutic process. Emphasis on the relational aspect of treatment has too often been derisively equated with the idea that cure occurs through a sophisticated form of parental caring with the role of interpretation being essentially incidental. The fear of being discredited in this way has kept therapists from trying to conceptualize the ways in which a two-person process in fact underlies the patient's and therapist's search for meaning.Contrasts a One-person and a Two-person Analysis of an Initial InterviewIn Close Encounters, Dr. Robert Winer takes on this quest. He begins by dramatizing the differences through contrasting a one-person and a two-person analysis of an initial interview. Having demonstrated the problem he then reviews the ways in which both American and British authors have introduced relational considerations and shows how the intrapsychic and interpersonal views of man complement each other. Throughout the book, Dr. Winer illustrates his reasoning with clinical accounts in which he offers a frank and vivid description of his own participation.Marriage Can be Usefully Taken as a Metaphor for TherapyDr. Winer explores the two-person view from a variety of vantage points. He suggests that the implicit model of therapy as a parent-child endeavor can be usefully revised by taking marriage as the metaphor. From another perspective, he suggests that the contemporary interest in narratives makes more sense when the storytelling is conceptualized as a two-person endeavor. Freud's account of his treatment of the Wolf Man is offered as a cautionary tale to illustr

Couples therapy is greatly enhanced when both the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms can be utilized. Object relations theory allows linkages between the spouses' subjective realities and their relationship in a way that allows the two worlds to be mutually informing. In Repairing Intimacy the theories of the American object relations theorists are applied to couple dynamics. The representational world is used to explain how primitive defense mechanisms and other intrapsychic phenomena contribute to marital conflict. The structure, function, and content of the representational world all contribute to spousal expectations and the couple's capacity for intimacy. Esteem, soothing, and the propensity of splitting strongly affect the ways in which spouses interact. Projective identifications similarly provide explanations of the couple's interaction, internalized conflicts, and relationships with earlier objects. This book explains how object relations concepts can be used in assessment and in planning treatment goals. Treatment can provide stability or help the couple relate to each other with deepened understanding. Object relations dynamics can help therapists assess which treatment objectives and goals are most applicable to the couples they treat. The beginning and middle phases of couples treatment are given special consideration and include issues such as assessing the couple's commitment to each other and the importance of empathic listening. Other treatment topics include analysis of projective identification and the use of countertransference. Planned and unplanned terminations are also explored. In each treatment section case material is provided to explicate the therapist's role. The book also examines common therapy issues from an object relations perspective. These include the consequences and advantages of conjoint, concurrent, and collateral treatment approaches. Consideration is also given to the choice of focusing on the couple when the initial presenting problem is the family or an individual. Individual psychotherapy and family therapy can no longer be viewed as competing and disparate treatment approaches. This book creates an integrated approach so that couples can be understood in their totality. A Jason Aronson Book

Offers an indepth and thoughtful exploration of the relevance of psychoanalysis to family therapy.

In this landmark work on object relations, Dr. Jill Savage Scharff addresses the psychological processes of projective and introjective identification and countertransference. She carefully traces the debates about projective identification_the neurotic versus psychotic arguments and the intrapsychic versus interpersonal views. She holds that disagreements stem from unrecognized shifts in meaning of the term identification and unacknowledged differences of opinion as to where the identification takes place. For her, projective identification is an umbrella term for phenomena that can affect the self, the object inside the self, and the external object.Dr. Scharff brings fresh insight to the neglected concept of introjective identification and a new understanding of the therapeutic action of projective and introjective identification.The book's unique distinction is in the author's integration of object relations theory and practice, particularly with regard to the handling of countertransference. The clinical material is written in the vivid and personally candid style that is a hallmark of her work.Dr. Scharff demonstrates how to understand and utilize projective and introjective identification, making this work indispensable for every dynamically oriented therapist.

Offers an indepth and thoughtful exploration of the relevance of psychoanalysis to family therapy.

How We Became Human: A Challenge to Psychoanalysis tackles the question of what distinguishes human beings from other animals. By interweaving psychoanalysis, biology, physics, anthropology, and philosophy, Julio Moreno advances a novel thesis: human beings are faulty animals in their understanding of the world around them. This quality renders humans capable of connecting with inconsistencies, those events or phenomena that their logic cannot understand. The ability to go beyond consistency is humans’ distinctive trait. It is the source of their creativity and of their ability to modify the environment they inhabit. On the basis of this connective-associative interplay, Moreno proposes a new approach to the links human beings create amongst themselves and with the world around them. This theory focuses on a key question: What is the difference between human beings and the other animals? From this perspective, Moreno seeks to reformulate many of the classic psychoanalytic, psychological, and anthropological postulates on childhood, links, and psychic change.

Karl König and Wulf-Volker Lindner have distilled their many years of research, rich clinical experience, and extensive theoretical knowledge of analytic group psychotherapy. Now, for the first time in English, they present their Gottingen model of group therapy, a welcome addition to the literature that greatly extends our understanding of the complex processes of groups and their ability to promote growth and healing. Informed by Freudian, Foulkesian, and object relations approaches to individual and group analytic therapy, Konig and Lindner's extensive theoretical understanding of groups and individuals is saturated with a flexible common sense that moves comfortably between theory and practical application. They are at their best in explaining the transition between the therapist's essential human experience and his role in the group when they discuss such matters as the understanding of neutrality as a dynamic concept, the situations that trigger transference, and the functioning of the therapist as a model of openness. It is the transitional areas and forces that are the most in focus for the authors: those between individual and group, between group and therapist, between inside and outside, and between the learning of the therapist and the growth of group members. It is a testament to the authors' skill that they are able to explore these areas at the same time as they outline practical approaches to a full range of topics that need to be considered in the conduct of group therapy.

Object relations theory has caused a fundamental reorientation of psychodynamic thought. In Object Relations Theory and Practice, Dr. David E. Scharff acclimates readers to the language and culture of this therapeutic perspective and provides carefully selected excerpts from seminal theorists as well as explanations of their thinking and clinical experience. He offers readers an unparalleled resource for understanding object relations psychotherapy and theory and applying it to the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The book's sequence establishes the centrality of relationships in this theory: the internalization of experience with parents, splitting, projective identification, the role of the relationship between mother and young child in development, and transference and countertransference in the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. This book will introduce students to the basics, to the widening scope of object relations theory, and to its application to psychoanalysis and individual, group, and family psychotherapy.

In this landmark book, David Scharff and Jill Savege Scharff, both psychoanalysts, develop a way of thinking about and working with the couple as a small group of two, held together as a tightly knit system by a commitment that is powerfully reinforced by the bond of mutual sexual pleasure.

Object Relations Brief Therapy combines practical techniques with the depth of object relations theory, the wisdom of previous brief therapy writers, and, most notably, an emphasis on the unique therapeutic relationship. Often, therapists despair of doing any meaningful work in brief therapy. To this, Michael Stadter suggests the following pragmatic approach, "think dynamically, address some underlying issue(s) and do what you can." Specifically, the book emphasizes the depth of understanding of human experience that comes from an object relations perspective; the insight and experiential vitality of attention to the therapeutic relationship including its real, transferential, and countertransferential elements; the impact of the psychodynamic techniques that have been carefully studied and delineated by brief therapy writers such as Davanloo, Horowitz, Malan, Strupp, and Binder; and the flexibility of an eclectic approach that thoughtfully and selectively incorporates non-psychodynamic interventions. Therapists do not have to "escape" managed care, according to Stadter. Rather, they need to learn how to deal with it in a way that preserves their integrity and enables them to practice the kind of healing psychotherapy they know how to do. In today's health care climate, Object Relations Brief Therapy is a much-needed guide for committed therapists.

Passionate feelings of love and hate are stirred in psychotherapy. Paradoxically, these passions may either undermine the therapist catastrophically or serve as the crucible in which profound understanding is forged. Transferences and countertransferences of love and hate occur on a spectrum that includes unobjectionable negative and positive feelings, relatively benign forms of love and hate, and more malignant, intractable versions of love and hate that present formidable challenges to the therapist. Each of these variations is explored in different chapters of this book. Gender configurations, gender fluidity, adolescent transferences, the link between love and lust, and passive forms of hating are among the topics discussed. Most of all, the author, noted psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard, depicts what it is like to be in the eye of the hurricane when passions are aroused. He provides a practical yet theoretically sophisticated guide to the management of love and hate as they are experienced by both patient and therapist.

Couples therapy is greatly enhanced when both the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms can be utilized. Object relations theory allows linkages between the spouses' subjective realities and their relationship in a way that allows the two worlds to be mutually informing. In Repairing Intimacy the theories of the American object relations theorists are applied to couple dynamics. The representational world is used to explain how primitive defense mechanisms and other intrapsychic phenomena contribute to marital conflict. The structure, function, and content of the representational world all contribute to spousal expectations and the couple's capacity for intimacy. Esteem, soothing, and the propensity of splitting strongly affect the ways in which spouses interact. Projective identifications similarly provide explanations of the couple's interaction, internalized conflicts, and relationships with earlier objects. This book explains how object relations concepts can be used in assessment and in planning treatment goals. Treatment can provide stability or help the couple relate to each other with deepened understanding. Object relations dynamics can help therapists assess which treatment objectives and goals are most applicable to the couples they treat. The beginning and middle phases of couples treatment are given special consideration and include issues such as assessing the couple's commitment to each other and the importance of empathic listening. Other treatment topics include analysis of projective identification and the use of countertransference. Planned and unplanned terminations are also explored. In each treatment section case material is provided to explicate the therapist's role. The book also examines common therapy issues from an object relations perspective. These include the consequences and advantages of conjoint, concurrent, and collateral treatment approaches. Consideration is also given to the choice of focusing on the couple when the initial presenting problem is the family or an individual. Individual psychotherapy and family therapy can no longer be viewed as competing and disparate treatment approaches. This book creates an integrated approach so that couples can be understood in their totality. A Jason Aronson Book