Why are psychoanalysts fascinated with literature and other arts? And why do so many novels, plays, films, and television series feature therapy sessions? Transferences investigates the interdisciplinary attraction between psychoanalysis and the arts by exploring the therapeutic relationship as a recurring figure in psychoanalytic discourse, literature, theater, and television. In addition to close readings of psychoanalytic and critical texts, the book presents a new approach to examining psychoanalytic themes and formal devices in texts like Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Peter Shaffer's Equus, and the HBO series In Treatment. Transferences argues that psychoanalysts as well as writers and other artists are fascinated by the therapeutic relationship because it provides a unique site to negotiate the narrative and artistic underpinnings of psychoanalysis and reflect and reinvent the aesthetic and poetic potentiality of art.

How can therapists treat patients' primitive anxieties and overwhelming terrors that are not accessible to verbal interpretation or insight? In psychotherapy the traumas suffered in infancy are often reawakened, and reexperienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship. While they desperately seek attachment, their experience of connection is one of violation and humiliation. Their ways of attaching are at the center of what terrifies patients with early trauma and, in a successful therapy, they structure the development of the transference and come also to terrify the analyst. The therapist is confronted with humiliation and abuse from patients, who find behavioral ways to communicate their histories. These patients require a special connection, a new relational experience, before they can learn new relational paradigms. This book shows therapists how to understand the process of trauma re-creation, and move with the client through the reexperiencing of the early physical pain and psychological terror and the blaming of the therapist.

Filling a crucial gap in the clinical literature, this book provides a contemporary view of pathological narcissism and presents an innovative treatment approach. The preeminent authors explore the special challenges of treating patients--with narcissistic traits or narcissistic personality disorder--who retreat from reality into narcissistic grandiosity, thereby compromising their lives and relationships. Assessment procedures and therapeutic strategies have been adapted from transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), a manualized, evidence-based treatment for borderline personality disorder. Rich case material illustrates how TFP-N enables the clinician to engage patients more deeply in therapy and help them overcome relationship and behavioral problems at different levels of severity. The volume integrates psychodynamic theory and research with findings from social cognition, attachment, and neurobiology.

Erotic Transferences: A Contemporary Introduction offers a comprehensive introduction to this key, yet challenging aspect of the psychoanalytic process. Despite emerging frequently in the psychoanalytic process, Andrea Celenza highlights the sparseness of literature on erotic transferences and a tendency to desexualise psychoanalytic theorizing, which she posits is a result of the inherent threat erotic transferences can pose to the analyst. By providing a thorough overview of the topic, clarifying terminology, and providing vivid case examples, Celenza seeks to redress this omission. Throughout this volume, she discusses the interplay of power and gender, along with chapters on the temptation of disclosure and the disturbing prevalence of sexual boundary violations. Providing practitioners with the tools to deal with the intense feelings that inevitably arise with erotic transferences, this book is vital reading for all psychoanalysts at all levels of experience and seniority, psychodynamic practitioners, instructors, candidates, and trainees.

Clinical Approaches to the Erotic Transference and Countertransference brings together, for the first time, contemporary views on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about the erotic in therapeutic practice.

Discusses Luborsky's (psychiatry, U. of Pennsylvania) core-conflictual relationship theme (CCRT) method as a way of examining objectively the patient-therapist relationship during transference. Studies utilizing this technique are described and proposed as empirical evidence validating Freud's ideas regarding this key stage of therapy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship challenges the traditional belief that transference and countertransference are merely forms of resistance which jeopardize the therapeutic process. David Mann shows how the erotic feelings and fantasies experienced by clients and therapists can be used to bring about a positive transformation. Combining extensive clinical material with theoretical insights and new research on infants, the author traces erotic development back to the parent-child relationship, drawing parallels between this relationship and the therapist/client dyad. Individual chapters explore the function of the erotic within the unconscious, pre-Oedipal and Oedipal material, homoeroticism in therapy, sexual intercourse as a metaphor for psychological change, the primal scene and the difficulties of working with perversions.

Using the Transference in Psychotherapy centers around two dominant themes: the old vs. the new models of transference, and the role of transference in psychotherapy. As background the book provides an historical overview of transference, countertransference, and the therapeutic alliance. A number of detailed cases are provided, graphically demonstrating how transference is addressed in psychotherapy and briefly focusing on projective identification and enactment. This book is a must-read for both students and mental health professionals at the early stages of their careers, and a useful reference for more experienced professionals.