Ghosts in the Consulting Room ─ Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time, while acknowledging, witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past.

Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Ghosts in the Consulting Roomfeatures accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways that surprise both patient and therapist. In the book, distinguished psychoanalysts examine how to work with a variety of ‘ghosts’, as they manifest in transference and countertransference, in work with children and adults, in institutional settings and even in the very founders and foundations of the field of psychoanalysis itself. They explore the dilemma of how to process loss when it is unspeakable and unknowable, often manifesting in silence or gaps in knowledge, and living in strange relations to time and space.

This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.

Adrienne Harris is on the Faculty and Supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She published Gender as Soft Assembly in 2005. She writes about gender and development, about analytic subjectivity, about ghosts, and about the analysts developing and writing around the period of the First World War.

Margery Kalb is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is on the faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She also teaches and supervises clinical work for the doctoral psychology program at Pace University. Dr. Kalb is the author of several papers on ghosts.

Susan Klebanoff is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is on the faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Center and an adjunct clinical supervisor at the Ferkauf School of Yeshiva University. Klebanoff has previously co-authored a book on depression for middle school aged children and a chapter in a book on uncertainty in psychoanalysis.