Revenge: Narcissistic Injury, Rage, and Retaliation addresses the ubiquitous human wish to take revenge and settle scores. Featuring the contributions of eleven distinguished mental health professionals, it offers a panoramic and yet deep perspective on the real or imagined narcissistic injury that often underlies fantasies of revenge and the behavioral trait of vindictiveness. It describes various types of revenge and introduces the concept of a ‘good-enough revenge.’ Deftly blending psyc...

What constitutes a lie? What are the different types of lies? Why do people lie? Is dishonesty ubiquitous in human experience? And what should be done with individuals who seek pschotherapeutic help and yet can not reveal important aspects of their lives and even fabricate histories, associations, and dreams? Such questions form the backbone of this exceptional book. Starting with the emergence of the capacity to lie in childhood and the formative influence of the family in children's mora...

While the psychodynamic understanding of play and play's therapeutic potential was long restricted to the realm of children, Winnicott's work demonstrated the profound significance of the capacity to play for healthy mental functioning during adult life. Scattered writings of Erikson, Glenn, and Shopper notwithstanding, the early spark of understanding remained largely ill developed. In Play and Playfulness, the reader is offered an exciting and highly informative set of essays ab...

The essential feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a picture of the trend to superiority, need for admiration, and lack of sensitivity to others. Individuals with narcissistic disorder have, for most of the time, a high self-regard. They routinely exaggerate their skills, often appearing arrogant. They think they're special, superior, have to be satisfied in every request.

The key ideas in Psychology explained, with colour illustrations, in half a minute. Pavlov's Dogs, Psychoanalysis, Milgram's Obedience Study, and Beck's Cognitive Therapy? Sure, you know what they all mean. That is, you've certainly heard of them. But do you know enough about these psychology theories to join a dinner party debate or dazzle the bar with your knowledge? 30-Second Psychology takes the top 50 strands of thinking in this fascinating field, and explains them to the general read...

Self and Others is addressed to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Its 19 chapters are divided into five evenly balanced parts. The first rubric, "Self, Others, and Ego," introduces us to the units of the intersubjective constitution we have come to know as object relations theory. The second rubric, "Developing Object Relations," is a confluence of lessons derived from infant studies and the psychotherapeutic process, specifically from ...

Eating disorders vary in severity from developmental difficulties in adolescence which may be transitory, to serious and chronic mental illnesses. The Anorexic Mind offers a coherent approach to these difficult and demanding problems, always underlining the point that while many of the manifestations are physical, eating disorders have their origins as well as their solutions, in the mind. While anorexia nervosa may be considered the central syndrome in eating disorders, this book...

Failure is a theme of great importance in most clinical conditions, and in everyday life, from birth until death. Its impact can be destabilizing, even disastrous. In spite of these facts, there has been no comprehensive psychoanalytic exploration of this topic. Understanding and Coping with Failure: Psychoanalytic Perspectives fills this gap by examining failure from many perspectives. It goes a long way toward increasing understanding of the numerous issues involved, and...

Paul Genova's finely crafted essays, which proffer a humanistic and humanizing vision of psychiatry in the face of his profession's preoccupation with target symptoms, "correct" thinking, and medication, have won him a wide and appreciative readership in the pages of Psychiatric Times. This expanded edition of The Thaw, the first collection of his writings, adds seven of Genova's recent pieces, along with one older one, his elegiac "Is American Psychiatry Terminally Ill?"...

More people are in psychotherapy than ever before. Yet most of them have no idea of the vast differences between the hundreds of various schools of therapy. Therapy Breakthrough is the first book to clearly explain the theories and practices of the two big camps: Psychodynamic or PD therapy and Cognitive-Behavioral or CB therapy. PD therapists believe that emotional problems are caused by hidden forces in our unconscious minds, forces that cannot be observed directly and that resi...

Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Mesmer, William James, Pavlov, Freud, Piaget, Erikson, and Skinner. Each of these thinkers recognized that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually guide or influence their own thought processes, emotions, and resulting behavior. The lives and accomplishments of these pillars of psychology, expertly assembled by Morton Hunt, are set against the times in which the subjects lived. Hunt skillfully presents dramatic and lucid accounts of the t...

What kinds of questions do experienced therapists ask themselves when facing a new client? How can clinical expertise be taught? From the author of the landmark Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, this book takes clinicians step-by- step through developing an understanding of each client's unique psychology and using this information to guide and inform treatment decisions. McWilliams shows that while seasoned practitioners rely upon established diagnostic categories for re...