The Analyst’s Vulnerability

The Analyst’s Vulnerability
Author: Karen J. Maroda
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2021-07-19
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000411451

This book closely examines the analyst’s early experiences and character traits, demonstrating the impact they have on theory building and technique. Arguing that choice of theory and interventions are unconsciously shaped by clinicians’ early experiences, this book argues for greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and open dialogue as a corrective. Linking the analyst’s early childhood experiences to ongoing vulnerabilities reflected in theory and practice, this book favors an approach that focuses on feedback and confrontation, as well as empathic understanding and acceptance. Essential to this task, and a thesis that runs through the book, are analysts’ motivations for doing treatment and the gratifications they naturally seek. Maroda asserts that an enduring blind spot arises from clinicians’ ongoing need to deny what they are personally seeking from the analytic process, including the need to rescue and be rescued. She equally seeks to remove the guilt and shame associated with these motivations, encouraging clinicians to embrace both their own humanity and their patients’, rather than seeking to transcend them. Providing a new perspective on how analysts work, this book explores the topics of enactment, mirror neurons, and therapeutic action through the lens of the analyst’s early experiences and resulting personality structure. Maroda confronts the analyst’s tendencies to favor harmony over conflict, passivity over active interventions, and viewing the patient as an infant rather than an adult. Exploring heretofore unexamined issues of the psychology of the analyst or therapist offers the opportunity to generate new theoretical and technical perspectives. As such, this book will be invaluable to experienced psychodynamic therapists and students and trainees alike, as well as teachers of theory and practice.

Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation

Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation
Author: Karen J. Maroda
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135060843

Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation demonstrates how interpersonal psychoanalysis obliges analysts to engage their patients with genuine emotional responsiveness, so that not only the patient but the analyst too is open to ongoing transformation through the analytic experience. In so doing, the analyst moves from the position of an "interpreting observer" to that of an "active participant and facilitator" whose affective communications enable the patient to acquire basic self-trust along with self-knowledge. Drawing on the current literature on affect, Maroda argues that psychological change occurs through affect-laden interpersonal processes. Given that most patients in psychotherapy have problems with affect management, the completing of cycles of affective communication between therapist and patient becomes a vitally important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise. Through emotionally open responses to their patients and careful use of patient-prompted self-disclosures, analysts can facilitate affect regulation responsibly and constructively, with the emphasis always remaining on the patients' experience. Moments of mutual surrender - the honest emotional giving over of patient to analyst and analyst to patient - epitomize the emotionally intense interpersonal experiences that lead to enduring intrapsychic change. Maroda's work is profoundly personal. She does not hesitate to share with the reader how her own personality affects her thinking and her work. Indeed, she believes her theoretical and clinical preferences are emblematic of the way in which the analyst's subjectivity necessarily shapes theory choice and practice preferences in general. Seduction, Surrender, and Transfomation is not only a powerful brief for emotional honesty in the analytic relationship but also a model of the personal openness that, according to Maroda, psychoanalysis demands of all its practitioners.

Vulnerable Systems

Vulnerable Systems
Author: Wolfgang Kröger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2011-06-22
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0857296558

The safe management of the complex distributed systems and critical infrastructures which constitute the backbone of modern industry and society entails identifying and quantifying their vulnerabilities to design adequate protection, mitigation, and emergency action against failure. In practice, there is no fail-safe solution to such problems and various frameworks are being proposed to effectively integrate different methods of complex systems analysis in a problem-driven approach to their solution. Vulnerable Systems reflects the current state of knowledge on the procedures which are being put forward for the risk and vulnerability analysis of critical infrastructures. Classical methods of reliability and risk analysis, as well as new paradigms based on network and systems theory, including simulation, are considered in a dynamic and holistic way. Readers of Vulnerable Systems will benefit from its structured presentation of the current knowledge base on this subject. It will enable graduate students, researchers and safety and risk analysts to understand the methods suitable for different phases of analysis and to identify their criticalities in application.

The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst

The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst
Author: Robert Grossmark
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 131748181X

Psychoanalysts increasingly find themselves working with patients and states that are not amenable to verbal and dialogic engagement. Such patients are challenging for a psychoanalytic approach that assumes that the patient relates in the verbal realm and is capable of reflective function. Both the classical stance of neutrality and abstinence and a contemporary relational approach that works with mutuality and intersubjectivity, can often ask too much of patients. The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst introduces a new psychoanalytic register for working with such patients and states, involving a present and engaged analyst who is unobtrusive to the unfolding of the patient’s inner world and the flow of mutual enactments. For the unobtrusive relational analyst, the world and idiom of the patient becomes the defining signature of the clinical interaction and process. Rather than seeking to bring patients into greater dialogic relatedness, the analyst companions the patient in the flow of enactive engagement and into the damaged and constrained landscapes of their inner worlds. Being known and companioned in these areas of deep pain, shame and fragmentation is the foundation on which psychoanalytic transformation and healing rests. In a series of illuminating chapters that include vivid examples drawn from his work with individuals and with groups, Robert Grossmark illustrates the work of the unobtrusive relational analyst. He reconfigures the role of action and enactment in psychoanalysis and group-analysis, and expands the understanding of the analyst’s subjectivity to embrace receptivity, surrender and companioning. Offering fresh concepts regarding therapeutic action and psychoanalytic engagement, The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis

Becoming a Person Through Psychoanalysis
Author: Neville Symington
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429897006

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.

Sexual Boundary Violations

Sexual Boundary Violations
Author: Andrea Celenza
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2011-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0765708531

This book addresses training, supervisory, and therapeutic issues related to the consequences from sexual boundary violations among mental health professionals and clergy. These problems are discussed on theoretical and practical levels aimed at understanding, recovery, rehabi...

Adolescent Risk and Vulnerability

Adolescent Risk and Vulnerability
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2001-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309170362

Adolescents obviously do not always act in ways that serve their own best interests, even as defined by them. Sometimes their perception of their own risks, even of survival to adulthood, is larger than the reality; in other cases, they underestimate the risks of particular actions or behaviors. It is possible, indeed likely, that some adolescents engage in risky behaviors because of a perception of invulnerabilityâ€"the current conventional wisdom of adults' views of adolescent behavior. Others, however, take risks because they feel vulnerable to a point approaching hopelessness. In either case, these perceptions can prompt adolescents to make poor decisions that can put them at risk and leave them vulnerable to physical or psychological harm that may have a negative impact on their long-term health and viability. A small planning group was formed to develop a workshop on reconceptualizing adolescent risk and vulnerability. With funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Workshop on Adolescent Risk and Vulnerability: Setting Priorities took place on March 13, 2001, in Washington, DC. The workshop's goal was to put into perspective the total burden of vulnerability that adolescents face, taking advantage of the growing societal concern for adolescents, the need to set priorities for meeting adolescents' needs, and the opportunity to apply decision-making perspectives to this critical area. This report summarizes the workshop.

Vulnerability to Psychosis

Vulnerability to Psychosis
Author: Franco De Masi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429923732

This book postulates that the trigger of the psychotic condition is located in the basic processes which structure the first emotional relations. It presents some of the reasons why patients succumb to the attraction of a course doomed to result in the permanent derangement of their minds.

Mutual Analysis

Mutual Analysis
Author: Peter L. Rudnytsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1315280116

Sándor Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn—the patient known as R.N. in the Clinical Diary—is one of the most controversial and consequential episodes in the history of psychoanalysis. In his latest groundbreaking work, Peter L. Rudnytsky draws on a trove of archival sources to provide a definitive scholarly account of this experiment, which constitutes a paradigm for relational psychoanalysis, as Freud’s self-analysis does for classical psychoanalysis. In Part 1, Rudnytsky tells the story of Severn’s life and traces the unfolding of her ideas, culminating in The Discovery of the Self. He shows how her book contains disguised case histories not only of Ferenczi and Severn herself—and thereby forms an indispensable companion volume to Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary—but also of Severn’s daughter Margaret, an internationally acclaimed dancer whose history of childhood sexual abuse uncannily replicated Severn’s own. Part 2 compares Severn to Clara Thompson and Izette de Forest as transmitters of Ferenczi’s legacy, sets the record straight about Ferenczi’s final illness, and reveals how Severn went beyond Freud and Groddeck in her capacity as Ferenczi’s analyst. Finally, in Part 3, Rudnytsky delineates the contrast between Freud and Ferenczi as men and thinkers and makes it clear why he agrees with Erich Fromm that Ferenczi’s example demonstrates how Freud’s attitude need not be that of all analysts. The first comprehensive study of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Severn, this book is a profound reexamination of Ferenczi’s relationship to Freud and an impassioned defense of Severn and Ferenczi’s views on the nature and treatment of trauma. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, especially to relational analysts, self psychologists, and trauma theorists.