In this unique and uplifting work, Dr. Claudia Luiz reveals why psychoanalysis is more relevant than ever, perhaps the only discipline currently suitable to help solve the mystery of our emotional challenges. In gripping stories about people struggling with depression, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and more, Luiz brings us right into each treatment where we discover how psychoanalysts today prepare their patient’s mind for self-discovery. Following each story, absorbing commentaries acquaint the reader with the theories of the mind that currently guide treatment, and the innovative clinical techniques that are revolutionizing the field, including how Luiz learned to integrate her own emotions as therapeutic instruments for diagnosis and cure. The Making of a Psychoanalyst is an ideal book for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training, mental health professionals working in social care, and students interested in the evolution of an undying discipline that embodies personal narrative. Anyone interested in knowing how two human beings interact with each other to effect profound change will want to read this book.

A long-time editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud offers a fresh look at the father of psychoanalysis.

He was the rising star of psychoanalysis, an intimate associate of Anna Freud and Kurt Eissler, a member of the Freudian "inner circle" with unrestricted access to the Freud Archives. And then Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson threw it all away because he dared to break the psychoanalytic community's deepest taboo: he told the truth in public. As he unmasks the pretensions and abuses of this elite profession, Masson invites us to eavesdrop on the shockingly unorthodox analysis he was subjected to in the course of his analytic training. But the more prestige Masson attained, the more he came to doubt not only the integrity of his colleagues, but the validity of their method. In the end, he blew the whistle-fully aware of the personal and professional consequences. With wit, wonder, and unflinching candor, Masson brilliantly exposes the cult of psychoanalysis and recounts his own self-propelled fall from grace. A sensation when it first appeared, Final Analysis is even more provocative and engrossing today. Written with passion and humor, this is the book that revealed a revered profession for what it was-and launched Masson on his true career.

Winner of the 2023 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize! Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis traces the emergence of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and demonstrates how the radical, cross-disciplinary dialogues that form its foundation are relevant to present-day social and cultural challenges. Psychoanalysts today are grappling with how to address a host of societal and political crises. In the 1930s, a similar set of crises led a group of progressive practitioners and scholars to engage in a radical, cross-disciplinary dialogue that became the foundation for Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. Pioneering psychoanalysts created a form of thought and practice that viewed human suffering through the wider lens of society and culture and provided a means to address the pervasive issues of racism, sexuality and politics in human experience. With contributions from leading psychoanalysts and scholars, and by making use of original sources, this book evidences the significance of this approach to understanding marginalisation today. Written in an open and accessible fashion, Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis demonstrates the importance of the early interpersonal-cultural school for the present moment. The book will appeal to a broad audience in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the history of medicine, and social and cultural theory.

Freud in Zion tells the story of psychoanalysis coming to Jewish Palestine/Israel. In this ground-breaking study psychoanalyst and historian Eran Rolnik explores the encounter between psychoanalysis, Judaism, Modern Hebrew culture and the Zionist revolution in a unique political and cultural context of war, immigration, ethnic tensions, colonial rule and nation building. Based on hundreds of hitherto unpublished documents, including many unpublished letters by Freud, this book integrates intellectual and social history to offer a moving and persuasive account of how psychoanalysis permeated popular and intellectual discourse in the emerging Jewish state.

Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) stood at the center of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic movement. After fleeing his native Vienna when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life. He became the most creative figure in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is now remembered as the founder of 'self psychology,' whose emphasis on empathy sought to make Freudian psychoanalysis less neutral. Kohut's life invited complexity. He obfuscated his identity as a Jew, negotiated a protean sexuality, and could be surprisingly secretive about his health and other matters. In this biography, Charles Strozier shows Kohut as a paradigmatic figure in American intellectual life: a charismatic man whose ideas embodied the hope and confusions of a country still in turmoil. Inherent in his life and formulated in his work were the core issues of modern America. The years after World War II were the halcyon days of American psychoanalysis, which thrived as one analyst after another expanded upon Freud's insights. The gradual erosion of the discipline's humanism, however, began to trouble clinicians and patients alike. Heinz Kohut took the lead in the creation of the first authentically home-grown psychoanalytic movement. It took an emigre be so distinctly American. Strozier brings to his telling of Kohut's life all the tools of a skillful analyst: intelligence, erudition, empathy, contrary insight, and a willingness to look far below the surface.

Winner of the 2009 Gradiva Award for Outstanding Psychoanalytic Publication! Within the title of her book, Making a Difference in Patients' Lives, Sandra Buechler echoes the hope of all clinicians. But, she counters, experience soon convinces most of us that insight, on its own, is often not powerful enough to have a significant impact on how a life is actually lived. Many clinicians and therapists have turned toward emotional experience, within and outside the treatment setting, as a resource. How can the immense power of lived emotional experience be harnessed in the service of helping patients live richer, more satisfying lives? Most patients come into treatment because they are too anxious, or depressed, or don’t seem to feel alive enough. Something is wrong with what they feel, or don’t feel. Given that the emotions operate as a system, with the intensity of each affecting the level of all the others, it makes sense that it would be an emotional experience that would have enough power to change what we feel. But, ironically, the wider culture, and even psychoanalysts, seem to favor "solutions" that aim to mute emotionality, rather than relying on one emotion to modify another. We turn to pharmaceutical, cognitive, or behavioral change to make a difference in how life feels. Because we are afraid of emotional intensity, we cut off our most powerful source of regulation. In clear, jargon-free prose that utilizes both clinical vignettes and excerpts from poetry, art, and literature, Buechler explores how the power to feel can become the power to change. Through an active empathic engagement with the patient and an awareness of the healing potential inherent in each of our fundamental emotions, the clinician can make a substantial difference in the patient’s capacity to embrace life.

Here, for the first time, is a book that submits the psychoanalytic training institute to deep anthropological scrutiny. It expertly uncovers the hidden institutional devices used to transform trainees into professionals. By attending closely to what trainees feel, do, and think as they struggle towards professional status, it exposes the often subtle but deeply penetrating effects psychoanalytic training has upon all who pass through it; effects that profoundly shape not only therapists (professionally and personally), but also the community itself. The author's fascinating and original data is culled from his extensive fieldwork, his case-studies of clinical work, and his interviews with teachers, senior practitioners and trainees. This book is written to be accessible to all those who have an interest in the therapeutic profession from the professional (whether psychotherapist or anthropologist) to the trainee and general reader.

In this update of Dr. Wachtel's seminal work, Psychoanalysis and Behavior Therapy, the author has developed a new integrative theory, cyclical psychodynamics, that has reworked traditional psychoanalytic concepts and proved capable of addressing observations and clinical experiences on which both psychoanalytic and behavioral theories are based. Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World carefully examines the implications of new developments in both psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches and significantly extends the cyclical psychodynamic model clinically and theoretically. The book addresses the increasingly powerful influence of cognitive perspectives in the thinking of behavior therapists and the emergence of a distinctive and integrative "relational" point of view in psychoanalysis. Both developments have been incorporated into the evolving cyclical psychodynamic model, as has increasing attention to the systemic point of view that guides the work of family therapists. In addition, this book introduces the reader to an innovative approach to the therapist's use of language. Dr. Wachtel considers in detail what the therapist says and how his or her choice of words can enhance or impede the therapeutic process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

Addresses unconscious repetition, a concept that is crucial to an understanding of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.