Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis

Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis
Author: Volney P. Gay
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2001-09-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780791450994

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Shows how literature can aid psychoanalysts in the understanding of psychological conflicts.

Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis

Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis
Author: Volney P. Gay
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2001-08-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0791489957

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For more than a hundred years, psychoanalysts have applied their theories of neurosis to objects of culture, including literature. In this book, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and scholar of religion Volney P. Gay reverses field and uses literature to reevaluate psychoanalysis. Arguing that neurosis occurs when we cannot recollect joy, Gay focuses upon the nature of joy as articulated in drama and literature. It is the absence of joy, he suggests, that evokes in children a lifelong quest for repair and restitution, usually through the stories they tell themselves. Therefore, Gay argues, literary accounts of joy are essential to contemporary psychoanalysts because they illuminate the nature of an "object" that, when absent, produces the form of human suffering that Freud named "neurosis." Throughout the book, case studies are juxtaposed with analyses of works by Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Wharton, and others in order to explore the notion that the objects of psychoanalysis (and similar psychotherapies) are structured like narratives rather than organisms or other natural objects.

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory

Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory
Author: Jay R. Greenberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 462
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0674417003

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Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.

The Future of Invention

The Future of Invention
Author: John Muckelbauer
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2009-01-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791474204

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Examines the concept of rhetorical invention from an affirmative, nondialectical perspective.

The Joy of Suffering

The Joy of Suffering
Author: Shirley Panken
Publisher: Jason Aronson
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1973
Genre: Medical
ISBN:

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Being a Character

Being a Character
Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134967896

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Each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Christopher Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are, and illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this foundation, he goes on to describe some very special forms of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and bathes and the demented ferocity of the facist state of mind. An original interpreter of classical theory and clinical issues, in Being a Character Christopher Bollas takes the reader into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process.

The Revealing Image

The Revealing Image
Author: Joy Schaverien
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-11-18
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1839974311

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Schaverien painstakingly describes and defines "processes which have so far only been intuitively known to art therapists" (p6) by introducing and elaborating the psychoanalytical concepts of transference and countertransference in relation to the use of visual art objects. The authors stated intention in this book is "to attempt to bridge the perceived gap between the practice of art therapy and analytical forms of psychotherapy..."(p 229) The epistemological base of this venture includes the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics, as well as psychoanalysis. Schaverien suggests that analytical art psychotherapy is a way of working analytically with patients who are unsuitable, or unready, for psychotherapy, giving examples of psychotic and borderline patients, children, and patients in psychiatric settings. This is primarily a book about an analytical approach within art therapy, which may be of interest in itself. The material also raises issues of interest to analysts and psychotherapists, whether or not they work with art in the clinical setting. The book clarifies areas of similarity between the disciplines, and also makes areas of difference apparent. For example, most analysts would agree that visual art, like dream material, and other non-verbal representations of the inner world, can at times articulate and communicate meanings which for one reason or another cannot be verbally articulated at the time, and that this can be pertinent to the aim of analysis. However, I think few analysts would include facilities in their consulting rooms for the kind of art processes described in the book. When the analyst is working with materials in this form, the book will be extremely helpful in sorting out the complexity of the transference situation and the role of interpretation. The book is so strongly grounded in experiences emerging in the presence of actual art processes and objects that I think it will be of most interest to those who are interested in the specific clinical issues involved in relating to the making and use of actual art objects within the setting. Schaverien not only describes the processes involved in detail, but also presents technical approaches to the making and handling of art objects within the setting which will inform the capacity of those who are not trained as art therapists to relate to this kind of material in the consulting room.'

Essential Papers on Object Relations

Essential Papers on Object Relations
Author: Peter Buckley
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 503
Release: 1986-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0814710808

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Psychoanalysis and Woman collects for the first time in one volume the most important psychoanalytic writings on female sexuality and women from Freud's contemporaries through French feminisms to postmodernism and post-feminism. These primary texts introduce the reader to a broad spectrum of works by primarily women theorists writing within a number of different psychoanalytic traditions.Psychoanalysis and Woman makes available a number of fundamental, yet obscure and inaccessible early psychoanalytic documents by women and places them within the context of later women psychoanalytic theorists. Editor Shelley Saguaro provides a concise contextual introduction addressing some of the sexual political issues raised by psychoanalysis, while each section of the volume is prefaced with more specific biographical and cultural introductory material. Topics addressed include new reproductive and sexual technologies, cybernetics, androgyny, the third sex, pornography, and psychoanalysis and contemporary media/film theory.Contributors include Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Joan Riviere, Maria Torok, Melanie Klein, Nancy Chodorow, Juliet Mitchell, Noreen O'Connor and Joanna Ryan, Carl G. Jung, Esther Harding, Maria von Franz, Marion Woodman, Jacques Lacan, H l ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeva, Mary Jane Sherfey, Monique Wittig, Jacqeline Rose, Camille Paglia, Judith Butler, and Jane Flax.

The Shadow of the Object

The Shadow of the Object
Author: Christopher Bollas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1315437597

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In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud’s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character. During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts. Aspects of the unthought known --the primary repressed unconscious --will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought -- an experience that has enormous transformative potential. Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker.

Understanding Mental Objects

Understanding Mental Objects
Author: Meir Perlow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 113480735X

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In this definitive guide, Meir Perlow looks in detail at how the various psychoanalytic schools of thought have conceptualised mental objects. A welcome clarification of a complex but central area.