Philip A Ringstom (USA)

A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy presents an original model of couples treatment integrating ideas from a host of authors in relational psychoanalysis. It also includes other psychoanalytic traditions as well as ideas from the social sciences. This book addresses a vacuum in contemporary psychoanalysis devoid of a comprehensively relational way to think about the practice of psychoanalytically oriented couples treatment.

In this book,Philip Ringstrom sets out a theory of practice that is based on three broad themes:

1) The actualization of self experience in an intimate relationship
2) The partners’ capacity for mutual recognition versus mutual negation
3) The relationship having a mind of its own

Based on these three themes, Ringstrom’s model of treatment is articulated in six non-linear, non-hierarchical steps that wed theory with practice – each powerfully illustrated with case material. These steps initially address the therapist’s attunement to the partners’ disparate subjectivities including the critical importance of each one’s perspective on the “reality” they co-habit.Their perspectives are fleshed out through the exploration of their developmental histories with focus on factors of gender and culture and more. Out of this arises the examination of how conflictual pasts manifest in dissociated self-states, the illumination of which lends to the enrichment of self-actualization, the facilitation of mutual recognition, and the capacity to more genuinely renegotiate their relationship. The book concludes with a chapter that illustrates one couple treated through all six steps and a chapter on frequently asked questions (“FAQ’s”) derived from over thirty years of practice, teaching, supervision and presentations during the course of this books development.

A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy  balances a great range of ways to work with couples, while also providing the means to authentically negotiate their differences in a way which is insightful and invaluable. This book is for practitioners of couples therapy and psychoanalytic practitioners. It is also aimed at undergraduate, graduates, and postgraduate students in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, marriage and family therapy, and social work.

 Reviews
“This outstanding new book is, to put it simply, the best book out there on the application of cutting-edge psychoanalytic thinking to couples therapy. Ringstrom writes in a nonjudgmental, even-handed way about the joint contributions to conflict from both partners. The problems of blame, failure of mutual recognition, and difficulties in self-actualization are clearly laid out. He recognizes the power of unconscious repetitions in intimate relationships, but he writes with an optimism that offers hope to the therapist and to the couple that their conflicts are not etched in granite and ultimately can be negotiated and managed in the service of a more fulfilling relationship. Most of all, he offers a clear and clinically useful road map to guide both the beginning therapist and the experienced clinician. I highly recommend it to all clinicians since even those patients in individual treatments must learn to live in dyads.”
– Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Author, Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting

“Dr. Ringstrom’s book, A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Therapy, perfectly lives up to the promise inherent in its title. It provides not only a step by step, organized model of the clinical process fundamental to Ringstrom’s approach to working with couples, replete with rich case illustrations; its opening chapter also offers a deeply comprehensive, yet eminently readable, theoretical explanation for the Relational framework itself. But the book goes even further than the promise it makes. It is about couples treatment, to be sure, but more, it provides a basis for understanding and conducting treatment in any modality: adult, child, adolescent, and family. What a gift to the clinician!”
– Estelle Shane, is Founding Member, Training and Supervising Analyst, and Faculty Member of Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member of New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles

“Ringstrom approaches couples therapy not with a narrow view of resolving psychological conflict, but with the conviction that we enter couple relations with the hope of a fuller self-development and creativity that can only emerge in robust, mutually recognizing engagement. In this theoretically wide-ranging and ambitious account he offers both a concise guide to relational thought and a vivid account of work in the consulting room that brings theory to life. In a voice that is at once remarkably clear and humane he depicts the core struggle in which two human beings strive to awaken one another, caught between repeating the dreaded past and the hope for fulfillment of deep longings. A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Therapy is a book imbued with deep empathy and thoughtfulness about the purposes and perplexities of love.”
      – Jessica Benjamin, author, Shadow of the Other, Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis,(Routledge, 1998); Supervising Faculty, New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Use code IRK71 at www.routledgementalhealth.com to save 20% 

Philip A. Ringstrom, PhD, PsyD, is a Senior Training and Supervising Analyst and faculty member at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is a member of the editorial boards of both the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is also a member of the International Council of Self Psychologists, and on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. The cover painting is by the author.

Sophia Richman (USA)

Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between trauma and creativity. It is about art in the service of healing, mourning, and memorialization. This book addresses questions such as: How does artistic expression facilitate the healing process: What is the therapeutic action of art? And is there a relationship between mental instability and creativity? It also asks how self-analysis through art-making can be integrated with psychoanalytic work in order to enrich and facilitate emotional growth.

Drawing on four decades of clinical practice and a critical reading of creativity literature, Sophia Richman presents a new theory of the creative process whose core components are relational conceptualizations of dissociation and witnessing. This is an interdisciplinary book which draws inspiration from life histories, clinical case material, neuroscience, and interviews with creators, as well as from various art forms such as film, literature, paintings, and music. Some areas of discussion include: art born of genocide, confrontation with mortality in illness and aging, and the clinical implications of memoirs written by psychoanalysts. Visual images are interspersed throughout the text that illustrate the reverberations of trauma and its creative transformation in the work of featured artists.

Mended by the Muse powerfully articulates how creative action is one of the most effective ways of coping with trauma and its aftershocks—it is in art, in all its forms, that sorrow is given shape and meaning. Here, Sophia Richman shows how art helps to master the chaos that follows in the wake of tragedy, how it restores continuity, connection and the will for a more fully lived life.

Sophia Richman is a psychoanalyst and psychologist in private practice. She is affiliated with the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where she supervises. She is the author of the award winning memoir, A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust (Routledge, 2002) and she is a painter.

Reviews
“In this profound, novel, and moving account of the role of creativity in healing trauma that is, in the very process of developing her ideas–Sophia Richman offers us a living example of being “mended by the muse.” But that is the least of what we learn here. We readers, too, have suffered trauma and dissociation. If we allow ourselves to dwell in Richman’s sense of what creative action can do, we too are mended in reading these pages, and we emerge from them better able than we were before to mend ourselves, and to assist in the mending of others. A stirring and beautiful book.”
    – Donnel Stern, Ph.D., The William Alanson White Institute.

“With this extraordinary book Dr. Richman not only offers a contemporary theoretical explanation of creativity but she also takes the reader into the minds of artists as they experience this enlivening and restorative process. The emphasis on experience makes the book invaluable for clinicians whose work is guided by recognizing the healing power residing in interacting subjectivities. With its breadth and depth, the book is also highly recommended to those who wish to embark on a most satisfying journey that penetrates the mystery of creativity.”
    – Anna Ornstein, M.D. Professor Emerita, University of Cincinnati; Lecturer in Psychiatry Harvard Medical School

“The relationship between creativity and mental illness has been one of the most debated issues in psychology. In this heavily researched volume, Sophia Richman reviews the insights psychoanalysis has contributed to this issue, through the lens of the tragic turmoils of the last century and of her personal experience. In the process, she convincingly argues that as the pearl that forms inside the oyster’s shell to protect it from abrasive sand, creativity is formed to protect us from otherwise intolerable aspects of life.”
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University, CA, USA

published by Routledge in the Psychoanalysis in a New Key Series.

available on amazon.com

Michael Eigen (USA)

Synopsis:
This book picks up where Michael Eigen’s previous work, Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis, left off. It is based on two expanded transcriptions of seminars given for the New York University Postdoctoral Program Contemplative Studies Project. As noted in the previous book, W. R. Bion once said that he uses the Kabbalah as a framework for psychoanalysis. This book enlarges the inner sense of this statement. The seminars depict intricate intertwining of processes in psychoanalysis and Kabbalah, processes important in helping us live more richly. Religious language helps bring out nuances of psychological states and psychology helps make the language of the spirit more meaningful to emotional concerns today.

Bion and Winnicott are the main psychoanalytic heroes of this work, each adding richness to a “root sense” out of which their clinical and written work grow. A felt sense, spans many dimensions, traversing sensory life, vital sensing, common sense, the sense of language, cultural sensing, intuition, Freud’s use of consciousness as a sense organ of psychical perception, and other qualities still unknown.

Case descriptions include extended work with an alcoholic man, opening new paths to living, and a detailed account of helping a creative, tormented woman die well. Aspects of psychosis, creativity, mysticism and everyday life blend and have a say. The main focus is psychic reality, with psychoanalysis and Kabbalah tools in this great enterprise of learning to work with ourselves.

Available at Karnac Books:
http://www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=35047&MATCH=1

Michael Eigen

and at Amazon.com:   http://tinyurl.com/knhhc72

Robin A. Deutsch (USA)

For much of its history, psychoanalysis has been strangely silent about sudden ruptures in the analytic relationship and their immediate and far-reaching effects for those involved. Such issues of betrayal and abandonment – the death of an analyst, a patient’s suicide, an ethical violation – disrupt the stability and cohesion of the analytic framework and leave indelible marks on both individuals and institutions alike.

 In Traumatic Ruptures an international range of contributors present first-person, highly personal and sometimes painful accounts of their experiences and the occasionally difficult yet redeeming lessons they have taken from them. Presented in four parts, the book explores multiple meanings and consequences of the break in the analytic relationship. Part One, Ruptured Subjectivity: Lost and Found, presents accounts of clinical encounters with death. Part Two, Rupture: The Clinical Process, addresses the sudden loss of an analyst, the trauma of patient suicide and the issue of countertransference when working with patients who have suffered the unexpected loss of their first analyst. Part Three, The Long Shadow of Rupture, examines the effects of ethical violations in the short and long term. Finally, Part Four, Ruptures’ Impact on Organizations, looks at the wider impact of ethical and sexual boundary violations in the context of an organization and the effect of trauma on a psychoanalytic institute. By giving voice to issues that are usually silenced, the authors here open the door to understanding the complex nature of traumatic rupture within the analytic field.

This intimate exploration of psychoanalytic treatments and communities is ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, clinical social workers, psychiatrists and family therapists. It is an important text for clinicians working with individuals who have experienced traumatic ruptures and for organizations dealing with their effects.

The text is now available from Routledge:
http://www.routledgementalhealth.com/books/details/9780415539319/

Robin A. Deutsch, Ph.D.
5318 Bryant Avenue
Oakland, California 94618
robindeutsch@earthlink.net
510-547-7543