Author: John Steiner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000063011
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis explores and develops the role of illusion and daydream in everyday life, and in psychoanalysis. Using both clinical examples and literary works, idealised illusions and the inevitable disillusion that is met when reality makes an impact, are carefully explored. Idealised phantasies which involve a timeless universe inevitably lead to disillusion in the face of reality which introduces an awareness of time, ageing, and eventually death. If the illusions are recognised as phantasy rather than treated as fact, the ideal can be internalised as a symbol and serve as a measure of excellence. Steiner shows that the cruelty of truth needs to be recognised, as well as the deceptive nature of illusion, and that relinquishing omnipotence is a critical and difficult developmental task that is relived in analysis. Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis will be of great use to the psychoanalyst or psychotherapist seeking to understand the patient’s withdrawal into a phantasy world, and the struggle to allow the impact of reality.
Author: John Steiner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134858027
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Essentially clinical in its approach, Psychic Retreats discusses the problem of patients who are 'stuck' and with whom it is difficult to make meaningful contact. John Steiner, an experienced psychoanalyst, uses new developments in Kleinian theory to explain how this happens. He examines the way object relationships and defences can be organized into complex structures which lead to a personality and an analysis becoming rigid and stuck, with little opportunity for development or change. These systems of defences are pathological organisations of the personality: John Steiner describes them as 'psychic retreats', into which the patient can withdraw to avoid contact both with the analyst and with reality. To provide a background to these original and controversial concepts, the author builds on more established ideas such as Klein's distinction between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and briefly reviews previous work on pathological organizations of the personality. He illustrates his discussion with detailed clinical material, with examples of the way psychic retreats operate to provide a respite from both paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties. He looks at the way such organizations function as a defence against unbearable guilt and describes the mechanism by which fragmentation of the personality can be reversed so the lost parts of the self can be regained and reintegrated in to the personality. Psychic Retreats is written with the practising psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in mind. The emphasis is therefore clinical throughout the book, which concludes with a chapter on the technical problems which arise in the treatment of such severely ill patients.
Author: George Hagman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136896538
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
For the past century psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists and aesthetic experience. This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists. The Artist’s Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include: developmental sources of the aesthetic sense psychological functions of creativity and art psychology of beauty, ugliness and the Sublime. co-evolution of the modern self, modernism and art. cultural context of creativity, artistic identify and aesthetic experience. Through the examination of great artists’ lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art.
Author: Kay Long
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429832583
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 594
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Book Description
Melanie Klein's extension of Freud's ideas - in particular her explorations into the world of the infant and her emphasis on the complex interactions between the infant's internal world of powerful primitive emotions of love and hate and the mothering that the infant receives - were greeted with skepticism but are now widely accepted as providing an invaluable way of understanding human cognitive and emotional development. Klein's insights shed light on persecuted states, guilt, the drive to create and to repair; they also provide the clinician with a theory of technique. Klein's work has inspired the work of psychoanalysts around the world. Her concept of projective identification with its implications for the understanding of countertransference made a significant impact on her followers and on psychoanalysts in other countries and from other schools of thought. Further exploration of these ideas has led to greater understanding of how change occurs in psychoanalysis and has inspired a large literature with a particular focus on technique.
Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315437597
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud’s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character. During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts. Aspects of the unthought known --the primary repressed unconscious --will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought -- an experience that has enormous transformative potential. Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker.
Author: John Steiner
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 113665478X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
This book examines the themes that surface when considering clinical situations where patients feel stuck and where a failure to develop impedes the progress of analysis.
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542216
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.
Author: Lou Andreas-Salomé
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412846250
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
Originally published as: Die erotik. Frankfurt am Main: Literarische anstalt R'utten & Loening, 1910.
Author: Lena Theodorou Ehrlich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000089959
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
In the face of considerable scepticism over the function and effectiveness of psychoanalysis, Lena Ehrlich demonstrates how analysis is unique in its potential to transform patients at an emotionally cellular level by helping them access and process long-standing conflicts and traumatic experiences. Using detailed clinical vignettes, the author illustrates that when analysts practice from the inside out, i.e. consider that external obstacles to initiating and deepening an analysis inevitably reflect analysts’ fears of their internal world and of intimacy, they become better able to speak to patients’ long-term suffering. This book, free from psychoanalytic jargon, stands out in its ability to help readers feel more effective, confident, and optimistic about practicing psychoanalysis by providing insights and recommendations about beginning and deepening analysis and sustaining oneself as an analyst over time. It will appeal to both beginners and experienced analysts, as well as supervisors, educators, and those interested in the workings of their minds and in building more intimate relationships.
Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.
