The Concept of Analytic Contact ─ The Kleinian Approach to Reaching the Hard to Reach Patient

The Concept of Analytic Contact presents practitioners with new ways to assist the often severely disturbed patients that come to see them in both private and institutional settings. In this book Robert Waska outlines the use of psychoanalysis as a method of engagement that can be utilised with or without the addition of multiple weekly visits and the analytic couch.
The chapters in this book follow a wide spectrum of cases and clinical situations where hard to reach patients are provided with the best opportunity for health and healing through the establishment of analytic contact. Divided into four parts, this book covers:

the concept of analytic contact
caution and reluctance concerning psychological engagement
drugs, mutilation, and psychic fragmentation
clinical reality, psychoanalysis and the utility of analytic contact.
Analytic contact is demonstrated to be a valuable clinical approach to working analytically with a complicated group of patients in a successful manner. It will be of great interest to all practitioners in the field of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

The Concept of Analytic Contact. Defining Psychoanalytic Treatment. Clinical Reality and the Concept of Analytic Contact. The Kleinian Interpretation: Bringing Theory into a Clinical Stance. Projective Identification, Everyday Life, and the Analytic Situation. Caution and Reluctance Concerning Psychological Engagement. Reality, Phantasy, and the Fragile of Analytic Contact. The Analyst as Translator: Speaking the Unspoken. The Patient’s Desire to be Parented Void of Growth or Change. Drugs, Mutilation, and Psychic Fragmentation: Is Analytic Contact Still Possible? Addictions. Psychic Mutilation and the Struggle for Integration. Fragmented Attachments. Clinical Reality, Psychoanalysis, and the Utility of Analytic Contact. Loss. Looking at Films for Perspective on Structural Change. Psychoanalysis or Psychotherapy: Shifting the Debate to a Clinical Focus. Summary. Bibliography.