Download or read book On the Couch written by Nathan Kravis and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, transgression, and healing. The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. It has been this way since Freud, although, as Nathan Kravis points out in On the Couch, this practice is grounded more in the cultural history of reclining posture than in empirical research. Kravis, himself a practicing psychoanalyst, shows that the tradition of recumbent speech wasn't dreamed up by Freud but can be traced back to ancient Greece, where guests reclined on couches at the symposion (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman convivium (a banquet at which men and women reclined together). From bed to bench to settee to chaise-longue to sofa: Kravis tells how the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing. Kravis draws on sources that range from ancient funerary monuments to furniture history to early photography, as well as histories of medicine, fashion, and interior decoration, and he deploys an astonishing array of images—of paintings, monuments, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, New Yorker cartoons, and advertisements. Kravis deftly shows that, despite the ambivalence of today's psychoanalysts—some of whom regard it as “infantilizing”—the couch continues to be the emblem of a narrative of self-discovery. Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one's own.

Download or read book In the Shadow of Freud s Couch written by Mark Gerald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Offices uses text and images to form a complex portrait of psychoanalysis today. It is the culmination of the authors 15-year project of photographing psychoanalysts in their offices across 27 cities and ten countries. Part memoir, part history, part case study, and part self-analysis, these pages showcase a diversity of analysts: male and female and old-school and contemporary. Starting with Freud’s iconic office, the book explores how the growing diversity in both analysts and patient groups, and changes in schools of thought have been reflected in these intimate spaces, and how the choices analysts make in their office arrangements can have real effects on treatment. Along with the presentation of images, Mark Gerald explores the powerful relational foundations of theory and clinical technique, the mutually vulnerable patient-analyst connection, and the history of the psychoanalytic office. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as psychotherapists, counsellors, and social workers interested in understanding and innovating the spaces used for mental health treatment. It will also appeal to interior designers, office architects, photographers, and anyone who ever considered entering a psychoanalyst's office.

Download or read book On the Couch written by Nathan Kravis and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, transgression, and healing. The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. It has been this way since Freud, although, as Nathan Kravis points out in On the Couch, this practice is grounded more in the cultural history of reclining posture than in empirical research. Kravis, himself a practicing psychoanalyst, shows that the tradition of recumbent speech wasn't dreamed up by Freud but can be traced back to ancient Greece, where guests reclined on couches at the symposion (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman convivium (a banquet at which men and women reclined together). From bed to bench to settee to chaise-longue to sofa: Kravis tells how the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing. Kravis draws on sources that range from ancient funerary monuments to furniture history to early photography, as well as histories of medicine, fashion, and interior decoration, and he deploys an astonishing array of images—of paintings, monuments, sculpture, photographs, illustrations, New Yorker cartoons, and advertisements. Kravis deftly shows that, despite the ambivalence of today's psychoanalysts—some of whom regard it as “infantilizing”—the couch continues to be the emblem of a narrative of self-discovery. Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one's own.

Download or read book Lying On The Couch written by Irvin D. Yalom and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Love's Executioner and When Nietzsche Wept comes a provocative exploration of the unusual relationships three therapists form with their patients. Seymour is a therapist of the old school who blurs the boundary of sexual propriety with one of his clients. Marshal, who is haunted by his own obsessive-compulsive behaviors, is troubled by the role money plays in his dealings with his patients. Finally, there is Ernest Lash. Driven by his sincere desire to help and his faith in psychoanalysis, he invents a radically new approach to therapy -- a totally open and honest relationship with a patient that threatens to have devastating results. Exposing the many lies that are told on and off the psychoanalyst's couch, Lying on the Couch gives readers a tantalizing, almost illicit, glimpse at what their therapists might really be thinking during their sessions. Fascinating, engrossing and relentlessly intelligent, it ultimately moves readers with a denouement of surprising humanity and redemptive faith.

Download or read book The Couch in the Marketplace written by H. Shmuel Erlich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book bridges the conceptual and practical gap between a psychoanalytic focus on the internal world and the dynamics of external reality by examining an array of junctures in which the two perspectives combine to enrich each other. Starting from the inherent bias of the psychoanalytic immersion in working with the internal world, the book deals with a wide array of phenomena in which a binocular perspective is potentially contributing. One such bridge is exemplified by the Group Relations approach, which richly combines psychoanalytic insights with systemic ones. This unique merger is valuable in studying a variety of phenomena both within psychoanalysis and outside it. The work of the analyst in the psychoanalytic setting implies situating oneself on several boundaries - internal and external, love and admiration as well as death and destructive impulses - and the courage and sacrifice demanded by taking up this role. This binocular perspective has significant implications for the formation and maintenance of identity and particularly for the psychoanalytic identity.

Download or read book Who s Behind the Couch written by Kerry L. Malawista and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it like to be a working psychoanalyst? And what is it like to be held in the mind of one? These were the questions that led Winer and Malawista to interview seventeen notable analysts from around the world. Who's Behind the Couch?: The Heart and the Mind of the Psychoanalyst explores the analyst's mind at work, not so much from a theoretical perspective, but rather from the complexities and richness inherent in every moment-to-moment clinical encounter. As analysts we are all continually challenged to find what might work best with a particular patient. Yet we don't often hear senior analysts share their personal struggles, feelings, and sensibilities. To understand the internal experience of analysts the authors posed questions such as: What is it like for analysts to manage rough spots, to lose ground and try to recapture it? To feel appreciated and then to feel devalued? To feel betrayed? To feel responsibility for someone's life while working to maintain their own balance?

Download or read book Critique on the Couch written by Amy Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on the Couch, Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning. Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims of critique.

Download or read book Soul on the Couch written by Charles Spezzano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Freud put religion on the couch in "The Future of an Illusion," there has been an uneasy peace, with occasional skirmishes, between these two great disciplines of subjectivity. As prime meaning givers, God and the unconscious have vied for supremacy in our thinking about ourselves, especially our thinking about our human nature, our moral stature, and our destiny. Freud, in his bold manner, found projection, fear, and denial to be the wellspring of religion's domination over man. In analogous fashion, those giving primacy to the soul over the unconscious have long dismissed psychoanalysis as mechanistic, reductionistic, and hence inadequate to the examination of spirituality. Soul on the Couch is premised on the belief that discourse about the soul and discourse from the couch can inform, and not simply ignore, one another. It brings together scholars and psychoanalysts at the forefront of an interdisciplinary dialogue that is vitally important to the growth of both disciplines. Their essays are not only models of reflective inquiry; they also illuminate the syntheses that emerge when analysts and scholars of religion bridge the gap that has long separated them and speak to one another.

Download or read book Mad Men on the Couch written by Stephanie Newman and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mad Men has captured the imaginations of millions of viewers, winning fifteen golden globes and four Emmys. Perhaps more than the gorgeously stylized visuals and impeccably re-created history, it's the show's richly drawn characters stumbling through their personal and professional lives that get under our skin and keep us invested. In Mad Menon the Couch, Dr. Stephanie Newman analyzes the show's primary characters through the lens of modern psychology. Lending her trained professional eye, she poses and expertly answers pressing questions such as: Why does Don constantly sabotage himself? Why is Betty such a cold mother and desperately unhappy housewife? (Hint: It's not just because her "people are Nordic.") Why does Pete prevail in adversity when Roger crumbles? Why is Peggy able to rise profesionally in the male jungle of Madison Avenue when Joan can't? Can these characters ever really change? With critical commentary that is both entertaining and insightful, Mad Men on the Couch will provide viewers with a unique persepctive on the show.

Download or read book Couch Tales written by Roger Kennedy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychoanalyst sits in his consulting room waiting for the next patient. Thoughts, feelings and anxieties about his own current life begin to assault him. Partly as a way of dealing with the crisis in his own life, he begins to write fictional stories loosely based upon his patients' stories. Between each story the analyst produces a journal which comments upon the stories as well as his own developing personal situation. Couch Tales is a work of pure fiction, for the psychoanalyst and the patients are imaginary. However, they also reflect Roger Kennedy's work as a psychoanalyst, and the way that psychoanalysis reflects in depth on peoples' lives and narratives.

Download or read book From the Couch to the Circle written by John Schlapobersky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of the 2017 Anne Alonso Award for Excellence in Psychodynamic Group Therapy, conferred by the Group Foundation for Advancing Mental Health, part of the American Group Psychotherapy Association. From the Couch to the Circle: Group-Analytic Psychotherapy in Practice is a handbook of group therapy and a guide to the group-analytic model - the prevailing form of group therapy in Europe. The book draws on both John Schlapobersky’s engagement as a practitioner and the words and experience of people in groups as they face psychotherapy’s key challenges - understanding and change. This book provides a manual of practice for therapists’ use that includes detailed descriptions of groups at work; accounts of therapists’ own experience and the issues they face in themselves and in their groups. The book is devoted to the Group-Analytic model but the other principally psychodynamic models of group therapy - the Tavistock, Interpersonal, Psychodynamic, Modern Analytic and Structural/Systemic models - are brought into a comparative discussion and drawn upon to create an integrated and coherent approach. The book is divided into three sections: Foundations – aimed at practitioners using groups of any kind and working at every level, including those providing supportive psychotherapy and providing groups for psychosis, trauma, the elderly, people at risk, the elderly and children; The Group-Analytic Model – defines the group-analytic model at a basic and advanced level; The Dynamics of Change – aimed at group analysts, psychotherapists and psychologists providing short-term psychotherapy and long-term group analysis The book is illustrated with clinical vignettes including incisive, instructive commentaries to explain the concepts in use. It is intended for those seeking psychotherapy, whether to resolve personal problems or to find new sources of meaning in their lives. It is also intended for policy-makers in mental health, students of different models of psychotherapy and the psychosocial field. The comparative discussion running through the text about methods and models of practice will likely be of interest to the wider mental health and psychotherapy fields. The author draws together the inherited wisdom of group analysis since Foulkes’ time and makes his own lasting contribution. From the Couch to the Circle will be an invaluable, accessible resource for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, family therapists, academics, psychologists, mental health practitioners, academics and teachers in psychotherapy.

Download or read book The Analyst s Analyst Within written by Lora H. Tessman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Analyst's Analyst Within is the most illuminating study to date of how psychoanalysts' experiences with their own analysts affect their lives, their loves, and their evolving professional identities. A gifted interviewer with equally gifted interview subjects, Tessman samples different gender combinations and age ranges in showing how the values typifying different eras of psychoanalytic theorizing enter into the meaning and impact of training analyses. Tessman's findings are striking, and they do not end with her discovery of startling differences according to the decade during which a training analysis took place. She also found that neither the theoretical orientation of the training analyst nor his or her technical preferences predicted whether, years later, the analysis would be remembered as satisfying or dissatisfying, as growth promoting or thwarting. Rather, it was the quality of affective engagement that became reliably present, with the figure of the training analyst, inscribed in all his or her particularity, accounting for the perceived sense of a truly productive analytic experience. Tessman's research program, which encompasses her methodology, her skill as an interviewer, and the wisdom and clarity of thought of her participants, lifts this work well beyond the perfunctory debates about psychoanalytic training that recur in the journal literature. The power of The Analyst's Analyst Within resides in compelling individual narratives in which analysts revisit their own treatment past - and the analyst within - with candor, vividness, and often great poignancy. The result is a book that not only supersedes previous studies of the training analysis but also opens a new vista on how and why analysis works when it works and fails when it fails.

Download or read book Off the Couch written by Alessandra Lemma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alessandra Lemma - Winner of the Levy-Goldfarb Award for Child Psychoanalysis! The contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis is being increasingly questioned; Off the Couch challenges this view, demonstrating that psychoanalytic thinking and its applications are both innovative and relevant, in particular to the management and treatment of more disturbed and difficult to engage patient groups. Chapters address: clinical applications in diverse settings across the age range the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking to the practice of CBT, psychosomatics and general psychiatry the contribution of psychoanalytic thinking to mental health policy and the politics of conflict and mediation. This book suggests that psychoanalysis has a vital position within the public health sector and discusses how it can be better utilised in the treatment of a range of mental health problems. It also highlights the role of empirical research in providing a robust evidence base. Off the Couch will be essential reading for those practicing in the field of mental health and will also be useful for anyone involved in the development of mental health and public policies. It will ensure that practitioners and supervisors have a clear insight into how psychoanalysis can be applied in general healthcare.

Download or read book The Analyst s Vulnerability written by Karen J. Maroda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-19 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book closely examines the analyst’s early experiences and character traits, demonstrating the impact they have on theory building and technique. Arguing that choice of theory and interventions are unconsciously shaped by clinicians’ early experiences, this book argues for greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and open dialogue as a corrective. Linking the analyst’s early childhood experiences to ongoing vulnerabilities reflected in theory and practice, this book favors an approach that focuses on feedback and confrontation, as well as empathic understanding and acceptance. Essential to this task, and a thesis that runs through the book, are analysts’ motivations for doing treatment and the gratifications they naturally seek. Maroda asserts that an enduring blind spot arises from clinicians’ ongoing need to deny what they are personally seeking from the analytic process, including the need to rescue and be rescued. She equally seeks to remove the guilt and shame associated with these motivations, encouraging clinicians to embrace both their own humanity and their patients’, rather than seeking to transcend them. Providing a new perspective on how analysts work, this book explores the topics of enactment, mirror neurons, and therapeutic action through the lens of the analyst’s early experiences and resulting personality structure. Maroda confronts the analyst’s tendencies to favor harmony over conflict, passivity over active interventions, and viewing the patient as an infant rather than an adult. Exploring heretofore unexamined issues of the psychology of the analyst or therapist offers the opportunity to generate new theoretical and technical perspectives. As such, this book will be invaluable to experienced psychodynamic therapists and students and trainees alike, as well as teachers of theory and practice.

Download or read book Wisdom from the Couch written by Jennifer Kunst and published by Central Recovery Press, LLC. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simple yet sophisticated model of personal growth that can lead to lasting change, drawn from the truths of psychoanalysis.

Download or read book The Digital Age on the Couch written by Alessandra Lemma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Digital Age is on the couch. Working today, it is essential that clinicians understand the world we live in. The transition from an industrial economy to an information economy impacts not just the external structure of society and commerce, but also the internal psychic economies of our brains and, inevitably, how clinicians conceptualise the analytic setting in which they practice as therapists and analysts. The Digital Age on the Couch seeks to understand more about how new technologies interact with the prerogatives of an individual’s internal world, how they may alter psychic structure itself in fundamental ways and the implications this may have for the individual’s functioning and for the operation of society. This book attempts, from the perspective of a working clinician, to make some sense of this. The impact of mediation via technology and the consequent disintermediation of the body represent central themes throughout, as they impact on the experience of embodiment, on the ‘work of desire’ and on the way new media influences psychoanalytic practice. New media offer opportunities for increasing accessibility to mental health care, including psychoanalytic interventions. However, this requires a sophisticated understanding of how to best create and safeguard the analytic setting. Alessandra Lemma here guides the clinician through an exploration of the limitations and risks of mediated psychotherapy, illustrated with clinical examples throughout. The Digital Age on the Couch offers an accessibly written guide to combining existing psychoanalytic theory and practice with the challenges presented by digital media. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and counsellors.

Download or read book The Empty Couch written by Gabriele Junkers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Empty Couch is an introduction to the challenges and obstacles inherent in ageing as a psychoanalyst. It addresses the previously neglected issue of ill health, as well as the significance of ageing for psychoanalysts, exploring the analyst’s attitude towards getting older, impermanence and sense of time and space. Covering a wide range of topics Gabriele Junkers brings together expert contributors who discuss the problems of getting physically ill and how to conduct psychoanalysis as an ill therapist. Chapters also address the effects that ageing has on professional stamina, the grief inevitably caused by the losses endured in later life and inquires into the role that institutions (the relevant psychoanalytic institutes or societies) can play in this context. Setting out to encourage discussion on this vital topic, The Empty Couch brings this neglected area into sharp focus. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, gerontologists and trainees in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapy worlds.