1st Edition
Innovations in Psychoanalysis Originality, Development, Progress
From its very inception, psychoanalysis has been a discipline encompassing two contradictory tendencies. This dualistic tendency – tradition alongside disenchantment and the will to improve knowledge – is likely responsible for psychoanalysis’s powerful capacity to survive. In Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress, Aner Govrin and Jon Mills bring together the most eminent and diverse psychoanalysts to reflect upon the evolution, vitality, and richness of psychoanalysis today.
Psychoanalysis is undergoing significant transformations involving the entire spectrum of disciplinary differences. This book illuminates these transformations, importantly revealing the innovations in technique, the evolving understanding of theory within existing schools of thought, the need for empirical resurgence, innovations in infant research, neuropsychoanalysis, in the development of new interventions and methods of treatment, and in philosophical and metatheoretical paradigms. Uniquely bringing together psychoanalysts representing different fields of expertise, the contributors answer two questions in this collection of ground-breaking essays: "What are the most important developments in psychoanalysis today?" and "What impact has your chosen perspective had on conducting psychoanalytic treatment?" Their thought-provoking and challenging answers are essential for anyone who wants to fully understand the field of psychoanalysis in our changing, current world.
Innovations in Psychoanalysis brings a whole array of differing schools of thought in dialogue with one another and will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists, philosophers, and historians of the behavioral sciences worldwide.
About the Contributors
Introduction
Aner Govrin and Jon Mills
1. Contemporary Freudian theory: perspectives on synthetic ego functions and the paradox of punishment fantasies
Stephen J. Miller
2. The most innovative ideas in psychoanalysis: a kleinian approach
Rachel B. Blass
3. Cultural complexes in the psyche of individuals and groups: revisioning analytical psychology from within
Thomas Singer
4. The subject in the age of world-formation (mondialisation): advances in Lacanian theory from the Québec Group
Jeffrey S. Librett
5. Existential psychoanalysis: the role of freedom in the clinical encounter
M. Guy Thompson
6. Moving forward: new findings on the right brain and their implications for psychoanalysis
Allan N. Schore
7. The impact of the interpersonal innovations on contemporary psychoanalysis
Irwin Hirsch
8. Relational self-psychology: a contemporary self-psychological approach to the practice of psychoanalysis
Estelle Shane
9. Relational psychoanalysis: origins, scope, and recent innovations
Steven Kuchuck
10. Phenomenology speaks: from intersubjectivity to the ethical turn
Donna M. Orange
11. Self-medication, anaclitic and introjective personality styles, drug of choice, and the treatment of people with substance use disorders: theoretical and clinical implications of the empirical research
William H. Gottdiener
12. Bodies and screen relations: moving treatment from wishful thinking to informed decision-making
Gillian Isaacs Russell and Todd Essig
Appendix
Index
Biography
Aner Govrin, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and director of the doctoral program Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics in the Department of Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Author of many publications in psychoanalysis and ethics, he maintains a private practice in Tel Aviv and is a member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP, is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is a faculty member in the postgraduate programs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University; is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis at Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto; and is the author of numerous works in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural studies. He runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada.
"An extraordinary feat: To encompass the dynamic, creatively unsettling and pluralist tensions between the schools of psychoanalysis and depth psychology, and also within each of the main schools in one volume. The Editors have briefed their authors perfectly, and the authors have risen to the occasion. It is a mine of information, both reliable and challenging. Could stimulate an international road show of conferences based on the book. The field needed this, and it will hugely benefit the widest possible range of practitioners, those in training, and those engaged with the area." - Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex, UK; Former Chair, UK Counsel for Psychotherapy
"This timely book will surprise people outside of psychoanalysis who think that nothing much has changed in it since the pioneering work of Freud, and it will broaden the perspectives of those within the field who have kept abreast of just one or another ‘school’. Psychoanalysis still remains the richest and most rewarding firmament of ideas about the lived life of the mind." - Mark Solms, Research Chair, IPA; Science Director, APsaA
"Innovations in Psychoanalysis is an outstanding, singularly unique contribution to the psychoanalytic literature. Astute, scholarly, fresh, Govrin and Mills have brought together a most impressive and eclectic group of psychoanalytic voices. Here, in one volume, are the most important developments in psychoanalysis today." - Galit Atlas, PhD, NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis; author of The Enigma of Desire
