By Stephen Seligman (USA)
Click [here] for an interview with Stephen Seligman.
Stephen Seligman’s new book (Routledge, 2018) integrates current research about infancy and childhood with both traditional and current psychoanalytic approaches to present a new synthesis: Relational-Developmental Psychoanalysis.
Its first half is a conceptually- and clinically-oriented review of analytic conceptualizations of infancy, childhood, and development, from Freud, Klein, Winnicott and the Ego Psychologists, through the present. Seligman surveys how each psychoanalytic school creates its own “metaphor of the baby.” This review has a historical orientation, too: for example, it considers the role of women who were not included in Freud’s original group, who went on to found child analysis and some of whom would become the most influential analysts of the next generation.
It then summarizes current infancy research and its implications for psychoanalytic theories and clinical work. The developmental and interactional dimensions of today’s Relational-intersubjective approaches are presented, along with “executive summaries” of attachment and intersubjectivity theories and the current status of “the Oedipus complex.”
Finally, Seligman elaborates all of this in a series of clinical and conceptual papers, organized along several core dimensions that point toward a new view of analytic theory:
- Recognition, reflection, and emotional security;
- Vitality, activity, and communication;
- Awareness, uncertainty, confusion, and complexity.
Reviews:
“Stephen Seligman’s new book is a valuable contribution to the psychoanalytic dialogue concerning developmental theory and its implications for analytic practice. His discussion of “relational-developmental psychoanalysis” is without parallel. It seems to me to pick up where Greenberg and Mitchell’s 1983 classic, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, leaves off. He presents in a highly readable way a multi-disciplinary approach that includes direct infant observation, experience with patients in psychoanalysis, as well as social, historical and biological contributions. The result is a compelling study of twenty-first century psychoanalysis, which will enrich the perspectives of psychoanalysts and infant observers, as well as students of any field that takes as its object of study the human condition in all of its complexity.”
– Thomas H. Ogden, author most recently of Reclaiming Unlived Life: Experiences in Psychoanalysis and Creative Readings: Essays on Seminal Analytic Works
“This is an outstanding book. It provides a masterly account of developments in psychoanalysis particularly in relation to its theories of childhood and development. The account leads toward relational analysis yet takes off in highly original directions in its discussion of the importance of puzzled and open attention and the implications for the development of the sense of time and of the future in patients filled with a sense of futility. The chapters on the link between temporality and intentionality are fascinating and need urgently to be read by all clinicians. The whole book is wonderfully clear in the way its links infant observation and psychoanalysis. It is also a great read.”
– Anne Alvarez, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist; retired Co-Convenor, Autism Service, Tavistock Clinic, London; Honorary Member, Psychoanalytic Center of California
“This profoundly integrative work takes us on a remarkable journey through psychoanalysis from the point of view of infancy and child development. Weaving together past and present, directly informing our clinical work with immediacy and energy, this book is superb.”
– Beatrice Beebe, Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry), College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University
About the Author:
Stephen Seligman, DMH, is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco; Joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; and Clinical Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. He is also co-editor of the American Psychiatric Press’ Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Core Concepts and Clinical Practice.
Link: The book is available at https://www.routledge.com/Relationships-in-Development-Infancy-Intersubjectivity-and-Attachment/Seligman/p/book/9780415880022, with a 20% discount available with code IRK71.