Psychoanalytic Diagnosis ─ Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process

McWilliams (applied and professional psychology, Rutgers U.) offers a guide for mental health practitioners and graduate students that overviews psychoanalytic personality theory and its implications for clinical practice. She outlines a rationale for character diagnosis, influential psychoanalytic theories pertaining to character structure, individual differences that embody different maturational challenges, therapeutic implications, and how analytic theory provides tools for seeing patients as complex wholes, rather than collections of symptoms. In the second part, she focuses on major personality types and the clinical problems presented by patients of each, their drives, affect, and temperament; defensive and adaptive processes; early relational patterns; experiences of the self; differential diagnosis; and transference and countertransference. This edition incorporates advances in attachment theory, neuroscience, and the study of trauma; covers the contemporary relational movement in psychoanalysis; and has new case examples, an expanded section on somatization, and a revised review of defenses. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, teaches in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and has a private practice in Flemington, New Jersey. She is a former president of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association and is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Psychology. Dr. McWilliams’s books have been translated into 14 languages, and she has lectured widely both nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of honors including the Rosalee Weiss Award for contributions to practice from the Division of Independent Practitioners of the American Psychological Association; Honorary Membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association; and the Robert S. Wallerstein Visiting Scholar Lectureship in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at the University of California, San Francisco. A graduate of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Dr. McWilliams is also affiliated with the Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of New Jersey and the National Training Program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City.