Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis

Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Giuseppe Civitarese
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000604667
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Building on their long-lasting scientific partnership, Civitarese and Ferro offer an array of thought-provoking writings bolstered by extensive clinical material, attesting to their shared interpretation of psychoanalysis not only as a treatment for psychic suffering but also as inherently pleasurable and vitalizing. In chapters that reflect inclinations, fantasies and obsessions that are both shared and personal, and by engaging with topics various enough to include dreams, ethics, emotions and aesthetics, the authors demonstrate how the practice of psychoanalysis might no longer be an insidiously moralistic or ideological exercise but rather a practice aimed at opening up and liberating the mind. By providing detailed engagement with the work of Bion and Ogden, as well as insights from their own substantial expertise, the authors explore how the synonymous concepts of playing and vitality can meaningfully inform and change clinical psychoanalytic practice. With rich clinical material and a strong foundation in established theory, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic therapists and postgraduate students hoping to make more room in the psychoanalytic lexicon for words like pleasure, dreaming, creativity, hospitality and growth.

Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis

Playing and Vitality in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Giuseppe Civitarese
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000604667
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
Building on their long-lasting scientific partnership, Civitarese and Ferro offer an array of thought-provoking writings bolstered by extensive clinical material, attesting to their shared interpretation of psychoanalysis not only as a treatment for psychic suffering but also as inherently pleasurable and vitalizing. In chapters that reflect inclinations, fantasies and obsessions that are both shared and personal, and by engaging with topics various enough to include dreams, ethics, emotions and aesthetics, the authors demonstrate how the practice of psychoanalysis might no longer be an insidiously moralistic or ideological exercise but rather a practice aimed at opening up and liberating the mind. By providing detailed engagement with the work of Bion and Ogden, as well as insights from their own substantial expertise, the authors explore how the synonymous concepts of playing and vitality can meaningfully inform and change clinical psychoanalytic practice. With rich clinical material and a strong foundation in established theory, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic therapists and postgraduate students hoping to make more room in the psychoanalytic lexicon for words like pleasure, dreaming, creativity, hospitality and growth.

Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis

Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Steven H. Cooper
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000617785
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
Building on Winnicott’s theory of play, this book defines the concept of play from the perspective of clinical practice, elaborating on its application to clinical problems. Although Winnicott’s theory of play constitutes a radical understanding of the intersubjectivity of therapy, Cooper contends, there remains a need to explore the significance of play to the enactment of transference-countertransference. Among several ideas, this book considers how to help patients as they navigate debilitating internal object relations, supporting them to engage with "bad objects" in alternatively playful ways. In addition, throughout the book, Cooper develops an ethic of play that can support the analyst to find "ventilated spaces" of their own, whereby they can reflect on transference-countertransference. Rather than being hindered by the limits of the therapeutic setting, this book explores how possibilities for play can develop out of these very constraints, ultimately providing a fulsome exploration of the concept without eviscerating its magic. With a broad theoretical base, and a wide definition of play, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists wanting to understand how play functions within and can transform their clinical practice.

Vitalization in Psychoanalysis

Vitalization in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Amy Schwartz Cooney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100036075X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
In Vitalization in Psychoanalysis, Schwartz Cooney and Sopher develop and explore the concept of vitalization, generating new ways of approaching and conceptualizing the psychoanalytic project. Vitalization refers to the process between two people that ignites new experiences and brings withdrawn aspects of the self to life. This book focuses on how psychoanalysis can be a uniquely creative encounter that can aid this enlivening internal process, offering a vibrant new take on the psychotherapeutic project. There is a long tradition in psychoanalysis that addresses the ways that the unique subjectivities of each member of the therapeutic dyad contribute to the repetition of entrenched patterns of relating, and how the processing of enactments can be reparative. But this overlap in subjectivities can also bring to life undeveloped experiences. This focus on generativity and progressive action represents a significant, cutting-edge turn in psychoanalysis. Vitalization in Psychoanalysis represents a deep meditation on this transformational moment in the history of psychoanalytic thought. Pulling together work from major writers on vitalization from all the main psychoanalytic schools of thought, and covering development, theory and clinical practice, this book will be an invaluable guide for clinicians of all backgrounds, as well of students of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Being a Character

Being a Character PDF Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134967896
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Christopher Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are, and illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this foundation, he goes on to describe some very special forms of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and bathes and the demented ferocity of the facist state of mind. An original interpreter of classical theory and clinical issues, in Being a Character Christopher Bollas takes the reader into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process.

Objects of Hope

Objects of Hope PDF Author: Steven H. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134898940
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Despite the importance of the concept of hope in human affairs, psychoanalysts have long had difficulty accepting responsibility for the manner in which their various interpretive orientations and explanations of therapeutic action express their own hopes for their patients. In Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper remedies this longstanding lacuna in the literature, and, in the process, provides a thorough comparative analysis of contemporary psychoanalytic models with respect to issues of hope and hopefulness. Cooper's task is challenging, given that the most hopeful aspects of human growth frequently entail acceptance of the destructive elements of our inner lives. The analysis of hope, then, implicates what Cooper sees as a central dialectic tension in psychoanalysis: that between psychic possibility and psychic limit. He argues that analysts have historically had difficulty integrating the concept of limit into a treatment modality so dedicated to the creation and augmentation of psychic possibility. And yet, it is only by accepting the realm of limit as a necessary counterpoise to the realm of possibility and clinically embracing the tension between the two realms that analysts can further their understanding of therapeutic process in the interest of better treatment outcomes. Cooper persuasively demonstrates how each psychoanalytic theory provides its own logic of hope; this logic, in turn, translates into a distinctive sense of what the analyst may hope for the patient, and what the patient is encouraged to hope for himself or herself. Objects of Hope brings ranging scholarship and refreshing candor to bear on the knotty issue of what can and cannot be achieved in the course of psychoanalytic therapy. It will be valued not only as an exemplary exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, but also as a thoughtful, original effort to place the vital issue of hope at the center of clinical concern.

Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis

Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Neville Symington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429897006
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
What Neville Symington is attempting to do in this book is to trace the pathway along which he has travelled to become a person. This has run side by side with trying to become an analyst. The author has made landmark discoveries when reading philosophy, sociology, history, and literature. Learning to paint, learning to fly a plane, and also the study of art and of aviation theory have opened up new vistas. This account is only a sketch. The completed picture will never materialize. It is therefore autobiographical but only in a partial sense. It is always emphasized that one's own personal experience of being psychoanalysed is by far the most significant part of a psychoanalyst's education.

The Analyst's Experience of the Depressive Position

The Analyst's Experience of the Depressive Position PDF Author: Steven H. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317549511
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position: The Melancholic Errand of Psychoanalysis, Steven Cooper explores a subject matter previously applied more exclusively to patients, but rarely to psychoanalysts. Cooper probes the analyst’s experience of the depressive position in the analytic situation. These experiences include the pleasures and warmth of helping patients to bear what appears unbearable, as well as the poignant experiences of limitation, incompleteness, repetition and disappointment as a vital part of clinical work. He describes a seam in clinical work in which the analyst is always trying to find and re-find a position from which he can help patients to work with these experiences. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position includes an exploration of the analyst’s participation and resistance to helping patients hold some of the most unsettling parts of their experience. Cooper draws some analogies between elements of theory about aesthetic experience in terms of how we bear new and old experience. He provides an examination of the patient as an artist of sorts and the analyst as a form of psychic boundary artist. Just as the creative act of art involves the capacity to transform pain and ruin into the depressive position, so does the co-creation of how we understand the patient’s mind through the mind of the analyst. The Analyst’s Experience of the Depressive Position explores a rich, provocative and long overdue topic relevant to psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamically oriented psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of both psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Play: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Survival and Human Development

Play: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Survival and Human Development PDF Author: Emilia Perroni
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135933642
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Is play only a children’s activity? How is the spontaneous play of adults expressed? What is the difference between “play” and “game”? What function does play have during war? Play:Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Survival and Human Development explores the importance of play in the life of the individual and in society. Most people associate psychoanalysis with hidden and “negative” instincts, like sexuality and aggressiveness, very seldom with “positive urges” like the importance of love and empathy, and almost never with play. Play, which occupies a special place in our mental life, is not merely a children’s activity. Both in children and adults, the lack of play or the incapacity to play almost always has a traumatic cause – this book also shows the crucial importance of play in relation to the survival in warfare and during traumatic times. In this book Emilia Perroni argues that whether we regard play as a spontaneous creation or whether we see it as an enjoyable activity with defined rules (a game), that it is impossible to conceive human existence and civilization without it. The papers collected in this book are the results of the research offered on the subject of play by several Israeli therapists from different psychoanalytic schools Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Winnicottian and Self-Psychology. Other contributions are from Israeli researchers and academics from various fields such as literature, music, art, theatre and cinema, contemporary psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Play: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Survival and Human Development offers new ways to think about, and understand, play as a search for meaning, and as a way of becoming oneself. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, researchers, therapists, parents, teachers and students who are interested in the application of psychoanalytic theory to their fields including students of cultural studies, art, music, philosophy. Emilia Perroni is a clinical psychologist, supervisor at the School of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the University of Tel Aviv and the Bar Ilan University. She has a private practice in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv. She is a member of the Israeli Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, the Israeli Association of Psychotherapy, she is an Associated-Member of the Israeli Institute of Jungian Psychology, and Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

From Sign to Symbol

From Sign to Symbol PDF Author: Joseph Newirth
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498576850
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In From Sign to Symbol: Transformational Processes in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Psychology, Joseph Newirth describes the evolution of the unconscious from the psychoanalytic concept that reflected Freud’s positivist focus on symptoms and repressed memories to the contemporary structure that uses symbols and metaphors to create meaning within intimate, intersubjective relationships. Newirth integrates psychoanalytic theory with cognitive, developmental, and neuropsychological theories, and he differentiates two broad therapeutic strategies: an asymmetrical strategy that utilizes the logic of consciousness and emphasizes the differentiation of person, place, time, and causality in the world of objects, and a symmetrical strategy that utilizes the logic of the unconscious in the world of emotional, intersubjective experience. He presents multiple approaches to the use of these symmetrical therapeutic strategies, including the use of humor, dreams, metaphors, and implicit procedural learning, in transforming concrete symptoms and signs into the symbolic organizations of meaning. Examples from both psychotherapeutic practice and supervision are presented to illustrate the development of the capacity for symbolic thought or mentalization.

A Disturbance in the Field

A Disturbance in the Field PDF Author: Steven H. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135231850
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The field, as Steven Cooper describes it, is comprised of the inextricably related worlds of internalized object relations and interpersonal interaction. Furthermore, the analytic dyad is neither static nor smooth sailing. Eventually, the rigorous work of psychoanalysis will offer a fraught opportunity to work through the most disturbing elements of a patient's inner life as expressed and experienced by the analyst - indeed, a disturbance in the field. How best to proceed when such tricky yet altogether common therapeutic situations arise, and what aspects of transference/countertransference should be explored in the service of continued, productive analysis? These are two of the questions that Steven Cooper explores in this far-ranging collection of essays on potentially thorny areas of the craft. His essays try to locate some of the most ineffable types of situations for the analyst to take up with patients, such as the underlying grandiosity of self-criticism; the problems of too much congruence between what patients fantasize about and analysts wish to provide; and the importance of analyzing hostile and aggressive aspects of erotic transference. He also tries to turn inside-out the complexity of hostile transference and countertransference phenomena to find out more about what our patients are looking for and repudiating. Finally, Cooper raises questions about some of our conventional definitions of what constitutes the psychoanalytic process. Provocatively, he takes up the analyst's countertransference to the psychoanalytic method itself, including his responsibility and sources of gratification in the work. It is at once a deeply clinical book and one that takes a post-tribal approach to psychoanalytic theory - relational, contemporary Kleinian, and contemporary Freudian analysts alike will find much to think about and debate here.