Psychoanalysis The Self And The World

This book takes psychoanalysis into the 21st century, examining issues of existentialism, postphenomenology, social media, and death and death anxiety that have gone largely ignored in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic literature. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, Leffert explains that it is impossible to close the door of the consulting room. The therapeutic relationship is invaded by the outside world and its relationships for both patient and therapist and cannot be isolated from these influences. Drawing on richly detailed case studies, Leffert demonstrates how the internet, social media, and the metaverse have changed and expanded the self in ways that could not have been imagined in the last century. In turn, Leffert acknowledges recent advances in the neurosciences, and addresses the lack of engagement with their implications for theories and practices of therapeutic action. Finally, the ways in which death and death anxiety impinge on the self, which have also gone mostly undealt with in psychoanalytic literature, become an important focus of this book. As a novel exploration of interdisciplinary connections, this book will be of use to both scholars and practitioners of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, social network theory, philosophy, and neuroscience.

David Levine and Mathew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most commonly in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world. Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation.

Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective – intersubjective-systems theory – is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important psychological bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma.

This book takes psychoanalysis into the 21st century, examining issues of existentialism, postphenomenology, social media, and death and death anxiety that have gone largely ignored in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic literature. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, Leffert explains that it is impossible to close the door of the consulting room. The therapeutic relationship is invaded by the outside world and its relationships for both patient and therapist and cannot be isolated from these influences. Drawing on richly detailed case studies, Leffert demonstrates how the internet, social media, and the metaverse have changed and expanded the self in ways that could not have been imagined in the last century. In turn, Leffert acknowledges recent advances in the neurosciences, and addresses the lack of engagement with their implications for theories and practices of therapeutic action. Finally, the ways in which death and death anxiety impinge on the self, which have also gone mostly undealt with in psychoanalytic literature, become an important focus of this book. As a novel exploration of interdisciplinary connections, this book will be of use to both scholars and practitioners of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, social network theory, philosophy, and neuroscience.

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines—European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience—Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.

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)

Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called “the art of living.”

Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self articulates in new ways the essential features and most recent extensions of Paul Wachtel's powerfully integrative theory of cyclical psychodynamics. Wachtel is widely regarded as the leading advocate for integrative thinking in personality theory and the theory and practice of psychotherapy. He is a contributor to cutting edge thought in the realm of relational psychoanalysis and to highlighting the ways in which the relational point of view provides especially fertile ground for integrating psychoanalytic insights with the ideas and methods of other theoretical and therapeutic orientations. In this book, Wachtel extends his integration of psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, systemic, and experiential viewpoints to examine closely the nature of the inner world of subjectivity, its relation to the transactional world of daily life experiences, and the impact on both the larger social and cultural forces that both shape and are shaped by individual experience. Here, he discusses in a uniquely comprehensive fashiong the subtleties of the clinical interaction, the findings of systematic research, and the role of social, economic, and historical forces in our lives. The chapters in this book help to transcend the tunnel vision that can lead therapists of different orientations to ignore the important discoveries and innovations from competing approaches. Explicating the pervasive role of vicious circles and self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives, Cyclical Psychodynamics and the Contextual Self shows how deeply intertwined the subjective, the intersubjective, and the cultural realms are, and points to new pathways to therapeutic and social change. Both a theoretical tour de force and an immensely practical guide to clinical practice, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students of human behavior of all backgrounds and theoretical orientations.

In Self and Other, Robert Rogers presents a powerful argument for the adoption of a theory of object relations, combining the best features of traditional psychoanalytic theory with contemporary views on attachment behavior and intersubjectivity. Rogers discusses theory in relation both to actual psychoanalytic case histories and imagined selves found in literature, and provides a critical rereading of the case histories of Freud, Winnicott, Lichtenstein, Sechehaye, and Bettelheim. At once scientific and humanistic, Self and Other engagingly draws from theoretical, clinical, and literary traditions. It will appeal to psychoanalysts as well as to literary scholars interested in the application of psychoanalysis to literature.