Personality disorder: the definitive reader

2020

This is an innovative, interesting and creative way of exploring key psychoanalytic concepts. This most significant book offers a number of short presentations from prestigious analysts who explore and illustrate fundamental psychoanalytic concepts from a contemporary perspective. Clinical examples illustrate the different theoretical approaches that the authors follow, how they think and practise. Rooted on Freudian thinking, the reader will encounter different perspectives on concepts such as the presence of the analyst, transference, listening and interpretation, figures and forms, the frame and setting, the role of the drives, of trauma, sexualities and otherness among many other fundamental concepts. This book will be of great value to both psychoanalysts and to a wider interested readership alike." Catalina Bronstein, Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London "This is a great profoundly psychoanalytic contribution. Parsimonious, deep, insightful and introducing me to lots of things I halfknew or hadn't thought about. Good to keep by and browse at random. Will repay hours of attention." David Tuckett, formerly president of the European Psychoanalytic Federation,

The Psychoanalytic Review 94 (4) (August 2007): 553-576. Reprinted in Atterton, Peter and Calarco, Matthew (eds), Radicalizing Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).

My aim in this paper is primarily to present a view of the nature of the psychoanalytic setting. I shall begin by reviewing briefly the idea of the psychoanalytic setting as invented by Freud, which is largely unchanged in the current practice of psychoanalysis with adults; then I shall discuss in some detail an attempt by the Argentinian psychoanalyst José Bleger to elaborate this idea in his 1967 paper, and his use of concepts developed a few years earlier by his colleagues Willy & Madeleine Baranger; I shall then go on to consider the idea of the 'internal setting' in the mind of the analyst or therapist; finally, I want to try to open a discussion about the relevance of these ideas for child psychotherapy, by considering a case which has been described recently by Brian Truckle.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1997

This paper examines the contradiction between the advances of psychoanalysis over the near century since Freud invented it, and its apparent divergence from the procedures of the other sciences. It argues that developments in the sociology and history of science since the 1960s enable the different dimensions of scientific activity to be more objectively identified. The work of Bruno Latour is discussed, focusing on his account of the laboratory as the key site of scientific discovery, and leading to a comparison between the laboratory and the psychoanalytic consulting room. However, significant differences between laboratory-based science and psychoanalysis are also pointed out. The most important of these is the degree to which the control of the outside world routinely sought by normal sciences is made impossible and undesirable for psychoanalysis by its distinctive commitment to the autonomy of its human subjects. This article argues that psychoanalysis has developed since its`revolutionary' invention in the form of a`normal science' (Kuhn 1962). It argues that, through the routinized procedures of its clinical consulting room, psychoanalysis has been fertile in developing new theories and techniques. This model of how psychoanalysis works, grounded in the sociology of science, is illustrated with examples of some key discoveries within the British psychoanalytical tradition. The linked article which follows, by Susan Reid, offers examples of some contemporary new developments in the psychoanalytic understanding of autism. These ideas, like the earlier examples given, are based on the evidence of the clinical consulting room, but also on another setting, infant observation, which is proposed as an additional site for empirical psychoanalytic study. There is a disjunction between the remarkable success of psychoanalysis as an intellectual and professional practice, since its invention by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century, and its lack of legitimation by the conventional canons of scientific method. How can a form of investigation and clinical practice which is, according to its critics, so deeply flawed have not only survived, but grown to assume the appearance of a mature scientific inquiry? Has this been merely a giant deception practised on a gullible and needy public? (The recurrent attacks on Freud's intellectual honesty, e.g. Crews et al. (1995) , display this suspicion.) Or is it, as Ernest Gellner (1985) has suggested, an instance of the attraction of non-rational forms of thinking in a world being transformed by`modernizing' forces-not a form of science but part of a reaction

2017

Psychotherapy in Australia, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2010

Psychoanalysis has long been caricatured as the site where a patient presents profoundly personal material to an analyst who, in turn, says almost nothing. This nearly silent analyst serves as a receptacle for the patient who is expected to vocalize any and all memories, thoughts and desires, "Whatever comes to mind." Though a caricature, Freud and classical psychoanalysis are rightly credited for this kind of weird, modern relationship that has no parallel: the consulting room as uniquely intimate space and the therapeutic bond as one that cannot be trespassed, entirely confidential, unconditional, and without "legs" to the outside world. In that space, the patient offers all that he or she cares to or is able. All of this is fostered by an analyst who establishes a fee and sessions on an on-going and regularized basis and by helping to create a conversation unique to each therapeutic couple. Efforts are made by the analyst to create a safe and secure environment, characterized by features that make both the analyst and the setting predictable, stable, reliable, accessible and inviting. At the same time and despite the intimacy fostered, professional distance is maintained so that genuine "real" intimacy between the two participants never develops. Modern therapy, of nearly every stripe, struggles to achieve some form of this impossible aspiration. Not surprisingly, the challenge to maintain appropriate legal, moral and ethical boundaries and prevent professional breaches-the problems of self-disclosure, mutual analysis, various forms of boundary crossings, personal, out-of-office, and sexual contact -have also been on-going professional pre-occupations. Breaches occur more often than the profession cares to admit.

International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2018

Psychoanalysis, Culture &# 38; Society, 2004