The shifting prevalence of conflict in psychoanalytic literature: A brief report of a corpus-based text analysis.
Several scholars have suggested that with the growing pluralism in psychoanalytic thinking, the classical concept of psychic conflict is on the decline in the analytic literature, displaced by a growing emphasis on alternative conceptions of psychopathology, including deficit models, attachment theory, and relational perspectives. The present study utilized a corpus-based analysis to a sample of the psychoanalytic literature to test the assumption that conflict theory is in decline. Based on the literature, the authors explored (a) whether the use of conflict and related terms has in fact declined in recent decades and (b)...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 18, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Assessing mentalization: Development and preliminary validation of the Modes of Mentalization Scale.
This study offers preliminary evidence for the validity and reliability of the MMS, which demonstrated promising psychometric properties. Further studies need to compare the MMS to a validated scale for the assessment of mentalization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology)
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 14, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Patients’ unconscious testing activity in psychotherapy: A theoretical and empirical overview.
The aim of this paper is to present a theoretical and empirical overview of the hypothesis that patients’ behavior in psychotherapy can be understood as an expression of their efforts to disprove their pathogenic beliefs by testing them in the therapeutic relationship. According to Control–Mastery Theory (CMT; Gazzillo, 2016; Silberschatz, 2005; Weiss, 1986, 1994), psychopathology stems from unconscious pathogenic beliefs developed in response to early traumas. Pathogenic beliefs associate the achievement of healthy goals with a variety of unconsciously perceived dangers. Thanks to the inborn human motivation to adapt ...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 14, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
States of self-surrender.
This article describes a continuum of states of consciousness involving self-surrender or the surrender of agency. Some endogenous and some environmental factors that encourage such surrender are considered in the article, including the possible effects of the social and political environment. Using these states as an example, I suggest that in good health there is a relatively seamless pattern of alternation between states that are appropriate to the situation at hand, but that trauma disturbs this freedom of oscillation, freezing it or introducing inappropriate states. In a larger context, it appears that we are one of t...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 14, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Saving talk therapy: How health insurers, big pharma, and slanted science are ruining good mental health care.
Reviews the book, Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science Are Ruining Good Mental Health Care by Enrico Gnaulati (see record 2018-00141-000). In this book, Gnaulati argues that good mental health care is reflected in the psychodynamic and humanistic traditions of psychotherapy but that these forms of treatment have been diminished in their availability due to a number of social and economic forces that are not focused on what is best for people with mental health problems but what is best for generating profits at pharmaceutical companies, increasing the revenue of insurance companies, and...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - February 11, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Teenage suicide notes: An ethnography of self-harm.
Reviews the book, Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm by Terry Williams (2017). Each chapter in this book profiles a different teenager who has, in one way or another, been affected by suicide. Williams’s interview subjects are primarily individuals whom he encountered during prior research endeavors over the past 20 years. In each chapter, narrative excerpts from interviews or diary entries are interlaced with Williams’s own commentary. While the book is framed as a descriptive account, the majority of the text consists of Williams’s own evolving internal struggle to understand how suicidality and sel...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 7, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Chimeras and other writings: Selected papers of Sheldon Bach.
Reviews the book, Chimeras and Other Writings: Selected Papers of Sheldon Bach by Sheldon Bach (2016). This book offers a timely selection of the writings of Sheldon Bach, an eminent psychoanalyst whose work spans and reflects the history of contemporary Freudian theory. This invaluable volume charts the development of Bach’s distinctive perspective, from the theoretically intricate early papers to more recent contributions that offer a refined distillation of what, in retrospect, always occupied the core of Bach’s sensibility: the crucial importance of the analyst’s willingness to enter into and to tolerate the expe...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 7, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of The new analyst’s guide to the galaxy: Questions about contemporary psychoanalysis.
Reviews the book, The New Analyst's Guide to the Galaxy: Questions About Contemporary Psychoanalysis by Antonio Ferro and Luca Nicoli (2017). This book is wonderfully engaging and thought provoking. The format is an interesting one that probably should be repeated by other analysts. The young analyst, Luca Nicoli, formulates the questions that he believes would be of interest to many young analysts. Ferro answers the questions in a surprisingly candid and open way so that the reader will have little doubt as to how he feels and thinks about various clinical issues. The questions largely center on clinical subjects; questio...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 7, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Patient attachment and therapist countertransference in psychodynamic psychotherapy.
This study explored patterns in the relationship between therapist countertransference and patient attachment in two ways: (a) by studying cross sectional associations between patient-reported attachment and therapist-reported countertransference at 3 months into treatment, and (b) by studying if changes in patient-reported attachment over the course of psychotherapy are associated with changes in therapist-reported countertransference. In a sample of 101 therapy dyads, patients completed self-report attachment domains and therapists completed self-report countertransference measures 3 months following initiation of psycho...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - January 7, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Changes in object relations in psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients: Commentary on Carsky and Rand (2018).
In this discussion of Carsky and Rand (2018), I respond to Ms. B’s moving depiction of her struggles to emerge from, control, and understand a chronic psychotic disorder while at the same time struggling to go on with her own educational and psychosocial development. Her moving account brings up two major issues in treating psychotic patients. First, as Bion (1957) has said, there is a psychotic and nonpsychotic aspect to the personality, and the therapist who works with psychotic patients must not only treat both dimensions or sectors, but also keep them both in mind as crucial aspects of the patient’s mental life, if...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - October 4, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Fetishism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy: The iridescent thing.
Reviews the book, Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: The Iridescent Thing by Alan Bass (see record 2018-00450-000). Bass’s book is about fetishistic objects in the broadest sense— those that get worshiped, those seen functioning sexually, and those that constitute, in Marx’s thinking, the fetishization of commodities. Bass builds his argument on the foundation of two of Freud’s late-appearing assertions/theories. Bass ties fetishization to concrete thinking by noting that both involve a failure to appreciate the difference—there is that word again—between the indicator (sign, symbol, call it what you ma...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - September 3, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Relationships in development: Infancy, intersubjectivity, and attachment.
Reviews the book, Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, and Attachment by Stephen Seligman (see record 2017-56323-000). This book proceeds by synthesizing the insights of a socially conscious intersubjective orientation with the laboratorytested observations of infancy and attachment research to arrive at a position that is genuinely breathtaking in the scope and depth of its scholarship. Part 1 begins with an engaging portrayal of the author’s own personal and professional development intertwined with an informed narrative account of the development of the professional field. Having asserted the prim...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - July 30, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Stories from child and adolescent psychotherapy: A curious space.
Reviews the book, Stories from Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy: A Curious Space by Henry Kronengold (see record 2017-15834-000). In this small volume of case studies (Kronengold prefers to call them short stories) Kronengold teaches the art of child and adolescent therapy. All child and adolescent therapists, of every theoretical orientation, should read this book. It should be read by beginning child therapists early in their training and by experienced therapists, when our creativity needs to be renewed and when we need to reflect again on the many roles we come to play in the lives of our child and adolescent patient...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - July 26, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Review of Political freud: A history.
Reviews the book, Political Freud: A History by Eli Zaretsky (see record 2015-55332-000). This book is a fascinating creative treatise on Sigmund Freud’s complex and profound political influence on human culture, economics, radical leftist movements, and lifestyle in America and the world. The book reads like a sweeping historical drama beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and moves us through major Kuhnian shifts in psycho-cultural paradigms as it illuminates Freud’s seminal impact in an articulate, intelligent style. While reflecting a broad knowledge of psychoanalysis, history, anthropology, sociology, and...
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - July 26, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A concluding commentary on the special issue on the PDM-2: Celebration and future hopes (plus a few anxieties).
My commentary reflects on the contributions from a conference about the 2nd edition of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM-2). I emphasize the distinctiveness of the PDM-2 as a diagnostic manual and discuss future directions for its use, development, and success. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology)
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - July 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
