The Past in the Present: Therapy Enactments and the Return of Trauma

The Past in the Present brings together, for the first time, contemporary ideas from both the psychoanalytic and humanistic therapy traditions, looking at how trauma and enactments affect therapeutic practice.

Enactments are often experienced as a crisis in therapy and are understood as symbolic interactions between the client and therapist, where personal issues of both parties become unconsciously entwined. This is arguably especially true if the client has undergone some form of trauma. This trauma becomes enacted in the therapy and becomes a turning point that significantly influences the course of therapy, sometimes with creative or even destructive effect.

Using a wealth of clinical material throughout, the contributors show how therapists from different therapeutic orientations are thinking about and working with enactments in therapy, how trauma enactment can affect the therapeutic relationship and how both therapist and client can use it to positive effect.

The Past in the Present will be invaluable to practitioners and students of analytic and humanistic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytic psychology and counselling.

David Mann is a consultant psychotherapist for an NHS Trust in Tunbridge Wells and also works in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor. His previous books include: Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship (1997), Erotic Transference and Countertransference (1999), and Love & Hate: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2002).

Valerie Cunningham works in private practice as a qualified art psychotherapist and transactional analysis psychotherapist and supervisor in Tunbridge Wells. She has 12 years' experience as a core tutor on both humanistic counselling and psychotherapy courses and is registered with the HPC, UKCP and the BACP.