Perversions Psychodynamic And Psychotherapy

"This important book offers the reader a concise account of the major progress being made in the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of perversions. Seventeen eminent psychoanalysts combine their extensive experience and research in this highly authoritative volume. This is the first time that some of the most significant facts in the field have been available in book form"--Dust jacket flap.

Contributing Authors Franz Alexander, Michael Balint, William Gillespie, And Others.

Understanding Perversion in Clinical Practice is a volume in the eagerly anticipated clinical practice monograph series from the Society of Analytical Psychology. Aimed primarily at trainees on the psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling courses, those compact editions will be invaluable to all who wish to learn the basics of major psychoanalytic theories from an integrated viewpoint. The authors are Jungian analysts trained at the SAP, highly experienced in both theory and practice. Perversion is a concept that defies simplistic classification. This monograph provides a comprehensive study of the nature of perversion and the therapeutic relationship needed for treatment. Case studies are used throughout to illustrate aspects of perversion and notable psychoanalytic theories are detailed for greater understanding of what perversion is and how it can be treated. Female perversion is explored in a separate chapter as the symptoms and underlying reasons are quite different from those in male perversion.This is a helpful and succinct exploration of perversion in its numerous manifestations that provides a firm foundation in the subject.

The author brings together a generous selection derived from her many literary gems, in which she illustrates her groundbreaking-and sometimes explosive-studies of female sexuality and perversions, perverse transference, malignant bonding, perverse motherhood, and the impact upon children of viewing domestic violence. Along with these are vivid descriptions of group analytic psychotherapy with forensic patients and, uniquely, of the joint group treatment of incest survivors and perpetrators. She also outlines the development of forensic psychotherapy as a new field of clinical and academic endeavour and her involvement in this. In a series of interviews with Brett Kahr she describes her professional journey, from being trained by Horacio Etchegoyen in her native Argentina, followed by an eye-opening period at the Menninger Clinic, then eventually to London and a distinguished career at the Portman Clinic.

In this important new book, Dr. Otto F. Kernberg, one of the world's foremost psychoanalysts, explores the role of aggression in severe personality disorders and in normal and perverse sexuality, integrating new developments in psychoanalytic theory with findings from clinical work with severely regressed patients. The book also integrates Dr. Kernberg's recent studies of the descriptive, structural, and psychodynamic features of problems stemming from pathological aggression with the vicissitudes of their psychoanalytic treatment. Finally, Dr. Kernberg demonstrates the importance of differential diagnosis for effective psychoanalytically inspired treatment of these disorders, providing a rich variety of clinical illustrations. The book begins by relating the dual-drive theory of libido and aggression to contemporary developments in affect theory. Dr. Kernberg then applies this general theory of affects to aggression, which in its pathological form centers on the affect of hatred. He analyzes sado-masochistic, hysterical-hysteroid, and narcissistic-antisocial spectrums of personality disorders, emphasizing how aggression is structured in each group. Dr. Kernberg next describes and updates the theoretical frame underlying his approach to the treatment of these disorders, outlines their clinical manifestations, and illustrates their diagnosis and treatment, ranging from standard psychoanalysis with infantile personalities, to psychoanalytic psychotherapy with borderline personalities, to the psychotherapeutic approach to the treatment of psychosis and hospital milieu treatment in the management of highly regressed patients. In the final section, Dr. Kernberg links the findings from psychoanalytic approaches to personality disorders with those from the psychoanalytic study of sexual perversions.

In this volume contemporary staff describe their thinking and clinical work. Theoretical underpinnings for the understanding of perversion and violence, questions of risk and ethics and the institutional difficulties which emerge in the care of these patients are presented alongside chapters on clinical work, with adults and adolescents, including chapters on paedophilia, the compulsive use of internet pornography and transsexuality. This volume is of relevance to all those working with people with a range of personality disorders and those working with individuals who present with these types of problems in the mental health services and in private practice. The Portman Clinic has been applying a psychoanalytic framework to the understanding and treatment of violent, perverse, criminal and delinquent patients since its foundations in the early 1930's. All Portman Clinic patients have crossed the boundary from fantasy and impulse to action - action which defies legal and moral boundaries but which also breaches the body boundary of the victims.

The book offers an overview of how to work with some of the most damaged members of society - children and adults with intellectual disabilities who abuse others. Drawing on insight from two decades of clinical work, the author examines how to assess risk and danger in the forensic disability patient, ways of working therapeutically with patients at all ends of the disability spectrum, and how to support members of the patient's network. Combining psychoanalytic, creative, forensic and systemic thinking, the book provides a template for assessing, managing, containing and treating those who present with multiple diagnoses, including cognitive and physical disabilities, mutism, psychiatric disorders and autism. Both group and individual approaches are examined. As our awareness of the incidence of forensic patients who also have disabilities increases, this work is a timely placing of the forensic disability patient onto the clinical agenda, and has a wide application, being of use to clinicians in the private consulting room, the community, the secure setting and the prison.

This book bridges psychoanalytic thought and sexual science. It brings sexuality back to the center of psychoanalysis and shows how important it is for students of human sexuality to understand motives that are often irrational and unconscious. The authors present a new perspective about male and female development, emphasizing the ways in which sexual orientation and homophobia appear early in life. The clinical section of the book focuses on the psychodynamics and treatment of homophobia and internalized homophobia.