Psychoanalytic Collisions

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Psychoanalytic Collisions

Psychoanalytic Collisions Second Edition wrestles with a theme that confronts every psychotherapist: the gap between illusions and realities about the professional self. Joyce Slochower closely examines situations in which the therapist’s professional and personal wishes collide with the actuality of everyday clinical work. The book unpacks the dynamics of these collisions on both beginning and seasoned therapists, offering ways of sustaining a professional ideal while also exploring the mixed impact of that ideal on clinical work. In examining how illusions and ideals affect the therapeutic encounter for both better and worse, Psychoanalytic Collisions invites the reader into the consulting room. This Second Edition has been substantially revised. It includes updated clinical and theoretical material as well as a new chapter about mutual idealizations that coalesce between patient and analyst. Slochower argues that psychoanalytic collisions can be productively engaged, even if they often cannot be fully resolved.The very act of engagement—whether by establishing new grounds for collaboration in the wake of real-world catastrophe, wrestling with clinical impasses that arise from the divergent expectations of analyst and patient, or owning up to and addressing the analyst’s "secret delinquencies"—reveals how therapeutic hopefulness can coexist with an acceptance of the analyst’s all-too-human fallibility. Psychoanalytic Collisions shows how idealization is intrinsic both to forging an analytic identity and practicing across a lifetime. Slochower’s work challenges readers to confront their own vulnerabilities and limits while also embracing a professional ideal that is at once human and inspiring. The book is an essential resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, pastoral counselors, and readers interested in the practice of psychotherapy today.
Psychoanalytic Collisions

In this beautiful work of reflection and self-reflection, Joyce Slochower wrestles with a seldom acknowledged dimension of being a psychoanalyst - the dialectic between illusions and less ideal realities that complicate the analyst's sense of who she is and of how best to meet her clinical obligations. Psychoanalytic Collisions details the various ways in which the analyst's wishes (both professional and personal) collide with the less-than-perfect actualities of everyday clinical work. The collisions in question are often rooted in the analyst's own illusions: illusions of therapeutic possibility in the face of ordinary human existence or illusions of therapeutic selflessness in the face of one's own "immutably self-centered humanity." Such collisions may complicate nonclinical professional activities such as writing, in which the analyst's desire to develop a personal idiom collides with self doubt and the imagined rebuff of teachers and colleagues. Other collisions coalesce dyadically in the consulting room. They may reflect sharp dissonance between what the patient needs the analyst to feel and what the latter actually feels, as in discrepant experiences of erotic desire. They may grow out of colliding idealizations of analyst and patient, each of the other. And they may arise in the wake of traumatizing life events that destroy the shared illusions on which treatment has rested. In finely wrought examinations of these eventualities, Slochower is guided by the belief that collisions are intrinsic both to forging an analytic identity and to practicing in a manner consonant with that identity. Psychoanalytic collisions, she enjoins, often cannot be resolved, but they can usually be productively engaged. And the very act of engagement - be it establishing new grounds for collaboration in the wake of real-world catastrophe, or wrestling with clinical impasse grounded in the radically divergent expectations of analyst and patient, or owning up to what Slochower terms "secret delinquencies" - can provide the basis for a vision of the "good enough" analyst in which therapeutic hopefulness coexists with acceptance of the analyst's all-to-human fallibility.
Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung

Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung delves into the mysteries of scandalous behavior- behavior that can seem shocking, unfathomable, or self-destructive - that is outrageous and offensive on the one hand, yet fascinating and exciting on the other. In the process, this anthology asks fundamental questions about the self: what the self is allowed to be and do, what must be disallowed, and what remains unknown. Clinicians strive to know their patients’ selves, and their own, as fully as possible, while also facing the inevitable riddles these selves present. Covering topics ranging from trauma, politics, the analyst’s subjectivity, and eating disorders and the body, to self-revelation, secrets, evil, and boundary issues, a distinguished group of authors bring the theory, practice, and application of contemporary psychoanalysis to life. In doing so, they use psychoanalytic perspectives not only to illuminate struggles that afflict patients seeking treatment, but to shed light, more broadly, on contemporary human dilemmas. This collection offers not a unified voice, but rather the sound of many, each in its own way trying to articulate the indescribable, the unwanted, and the off limits. It is a book that raises more questions than can be answered, complicates as much as clarifies, and contains the essential paradox of trying to talk about aspects of clinical and human experience that can never be fully seen or known. Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung offers invaluable reading to interested mental health professionals as well as to anyone intrigued by the secrets of the self.