Twenty-nine years since the first edition was released, Frank Summers has renewed hislucid and thorough clarification of the various object relations theories to demonstratetheir evolution and continued significance for therapeutic practice.This volume includes elucidation of the major scholarship that has advanced the ideasof object relations theorists such as Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut,since the publication of the first editio...

Psychoanalytic therapy is distinguished by its immersion in the world of the experiencing subject. In The Psychoanalytic Vision, Frank Summers argues that analytic therapy and its unique epistemology is a worldview that stands in clear opposition to the hegemonic cultural value system of objectification, quantification, and materialism. The Psychoanalytic Vision situates psychoanalysis as a voice of the rebel, affirming the importance of the subjective in...

In Object Relations Theories and Psychopathology: A Comprehensive Text, Frank Summers provides thorough, lucid, and critically informed accounts of the work of major object relations theorists: Fairbairn, Guntrip, Klein, Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut. His expositions achieve distinction on two counts. First, the work of each object relations theorist is presented as a comprehensive whole, with separate sections expounding the theorist's ideas and assumptions about metapsychology,...

"Insight" and "Change." The problematic relationship between these two concepts, to which the reality of psychoanalytic patients who fully understand maladaptive patterns without being able to change them attests, has dogged psychoanalysis for a century. Building on the integrative object relations model set forth in Transcending the Self (1999), Frank Summers turns to Winnicott's notion of "potential space" in order to elaborate a fresh clinical approach for transforming insight ...

Despite the popularity of object relations theories, these theories are often abstract, with the relation between theory and clinical technique left vague and unclear. Now, in Transcending the Self: An Object Relations Model of Psychoanalytic Therapy, Summers answers the need for an integrative object relations model that can be understood and applied by the clinician in the daily conduct of psychoanalytic therapy.Drawing on recent infancy research, developmental psycholog...

This volume is the first concentrated effort to offer a philosophical critique of relational and intersubjective perspectives in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The distinguished group of scholars and clinicians assembled here are largely preoccupied with tracing the theoretical underpinnings of relational psychoanalysis, its divergence from traditional psychoanalytic paradigms, implications for clinical reform and therapeutic practice, and its intersection with alternative psychoanal...

This comprehensive, introductory text makes the concepts of self psychology accessible for students and clinicians. It begins with an overview of the development of Kohut's ideas, particularly those on narcissism and narcissistic development and explains the self object concept that is at the core of the self psychological vision of human experience. It also includes brief overviews, of the allied theoretical perspectives of intersubjectivity and motivational systems theory. Numerous clini...

Building on the innovative work of Unformulated Experience, Donnel B. Stern continues his exploration of the creation of meaning in clinical psychoanalysis with Partners in Thought.The chapters in this fascinating book are undergirded by the concept that the meanings which arise from unformulated experience are catalyzed by the states of relatedness in which the meanings emerge. In hermeneutic terms, what takes place in the consulting room is a particular kind of ...

This important and innovative book explores a new direction in psychoanalytic thought that can expand and deepen clinical practice. Relational psychoanalysis diverges in key ways from the assumptions and practices that have traditionally characterized psychoanalysis. At the same time, it preserves, and even extends, the profound understanding of human experience and psychological conflict that has always been the strength of the psychoanalytic approach. Through probing theoretical analysis...

In this important new book, the noted theoretician Fred Pine provides a synthesis of the four conceptual domains of psychoanalysis: drives, ego functioning, object relations, and self experience. He argues that a focus on the clinical phenomena themselves, and not on the theoretical edifices built around them, readily illuminates the inevitable integration of the several sets of phenomena in each person's unique psychological organization. With superb clarity, Pine shows how one or another...

W. R. D. Fairbairn (1889-1964) challenged the dominance of Freud's drive theory with a psychoanalytic theory based on the internalization of human relationships. Fairbairn assumed that the unconscious develops in childhood and contains dissociated memories of parental neglect, insensitivity, and outright abuse that are impossible the children to tolerate consciously. In Fairbairn's model, these dissociated memories protect developing children from recognizing how badly they are being treat...

'Perhaps the acid test for any book on psychoanalytic theory is the light it sheds on the complex problems that a therapist faces. This book passes that test with flying colors. I now see my patients in a different light and I have changed my approach with beneficial results.' -Samuel L. Bradshaw, Jr. The Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic A Jason Aronson Book