1st Edition

Diversity, Discipline and Devotion in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Clinical and Training Perspectives

By Gertrud Mander Copyright 2007
    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book is a selection of papers written over 25 years of practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy, of training and supervising psychotherapists, psychodynamic counsellors and supervisors. It reflects a preoccupation with the growth and diversification of counselling and psychotherapy, with the imperatives of training, supervision and regulation, and with the significant changes in the profession due to the invention of brief, time-limited, intermittent and recurrent psychotherapy. An overall theme is the conviction that what patients and therapists share is vulnerability, and that the therapist is a 'wounded healer', whose reparative tendency informs his professional choice, his therapeutic empathy and his capacity to bear the rigours of therapeutic work. Thus an unconscious connection between the helper and the helped is the driving force of every therapeutic relationship, for better and for worse. Its responsible management requires thorough training, ongoing supervision and a firm frame in order to contain the powerful forces operating when two strangers meet for the purpose of therapy.

    Introduction -- Models and Methods -- Beginnings, endings, and outcome: a comparison of methods and goals -- From free association to the dynamic focus: towards a model of recurrent psychotherapy -- In praise of once-weekly work: making a virtue of necessity, or treatment of choice? -- Dilemmas in brief therapy: referral-on, topping up, extended contracts -- Suitability and context for brief therapy -- Bereavement counselling -- The selection of candidates for training in psychotherapy and counselling -- Clinical and Other Matters -- The stifled cry, or Truby King, the forgotten prophet -- Some thoughts on sibling rivalry and competitiveness -- The absent father and his return: echoes of war -- Fatherhood today: variations on a theme -- Abuse and recovery -- Defiant resistance in the service of the impoverished self -- The burden of being German -- The fear of death

    Biography

    Mander, Gertrud