What do therapists not talk about? What do we ignore/miss/sidestep? What factors—personal, social, political—inform our areas of blindness? This book names and explores what psychoanalytic theory often skips over or simplifies—how, when, and why we fail to uphold the professional ideal.
Turning a critical eye on her own theory, Slochower reflects on how it, she, and the field have evolved and what remains unspoken. In so doing, she pushes us to do the same.
With its sharp focus on both theory and clinical work, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
Part 1. Beyond Binaries: Holding in a Relational Context 1. Bridging the Gap: Developing a Relational Holding Model 2. Revisiting the maternal metaphor: A Long View 3. Resist this 4. Going too Far: Relational Heroines and Relational Excess 5. A few regrets Part 2. Pushing the Envelope: How Far is Too Far? 6. The analyst's secret delinquencies 7. Ghosts that haunt 8. Sequels Part 3. Beyond the Consulting Room: mourning, illusions, and actuality 9. Getting better all the time? 10. Out of the analytic shadow: on the dynamics of mourning and commemorative ritual 11. The Absent witness: mourning, virtually 12. Who needs theory when we can fight about politics? 13. Creating Inner Space: The Psychoanalytic Writer
Biography
Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita at Hunter College, CUNY; Faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, NTP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & PINC. She is the author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Psychoanalytic Collisions, and is co-Editor (with Lew Aron and Sue Grand), of De-idealizing Relational Theory and Decentering Relational Theory.
"Open this book and accompany an exceptional clinician as she revisits her own evolution with compassion and courageous self-confrontation. Open this book and listen to a superb psychoanalytic mind sharing itself without defensiveness, without idolizing any theoretical gods. Open this book if you are willing to confront your own unformulated assumptions and coax elephants out of their hiding places in your office. Open this book to encounter my nominee for World’s Most Honest Analyst."
Sandra Buechler, Wiliam Alanson White Institute
"Joyce Slochower’s engaging personal presence suffuses every page of this beautifully written volume. You come away from it with a deeply felt sense of the relational/Winnicottian integration that lies at the heart of Slochower’s thinking, and with an appreciation of qualities that are often in short supply: wisdom, unflinching examination of the analyst’s foibles, and—zounds!—humor. Clinicians of every stripe and level of experience will enjoy and learn from Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken."
Donnel B. Stern, William Alanson White Institute
"Joyce Slochower’s Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken is a self-reflective and affectively connected volume whose immediacy makes you feel as if you are in the room with her. Exploring theoretical and clinical complexities, we see Slochower change and grown over time. The book makes you want Joyce Slochower as a colleague and friend."
Judy Kantrowitz, Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
"Joyce Slochower's work provides both an accompaniment and a counterpoint to the relational turn. Slochower is known for her important role in challenging and clarifying basic assumptions and clinical theory in relational psychoanalysis. Her thoughtful interpretation and application of Winnicott helps overturn the old paternal bias toward interpretation."
Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Routledge 2018.
"Too few psychoanalytic writers have the ability to skillfully deconstruct and explicate highly complex theoretical and practice issues. Fewer still can accomplish this in clear, concise prose. That Slochower can do both is a rare gift. Nowhere does she manage this feat more elegantly and compellingly than in this newest work, her most important and timely to date. I have no doubt that Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken will be a thought provoking and invaluable addition to every clinician’s bookshelf."
Steven Kuchuck, DSW, Author of The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and Past President of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
"In this brilliant volume, Joyce Slochower skillfully uncovers what we would rather hide, mute or whisper. Fascinating, well-written and poignant, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken opens our eyes as well as our minds, exploring our secret collusions, illusions, idealizations and violations."
Galit Atlas, Ph.D. Faculty NYU Posdoc. Author of Emotional inheritance.
