Psychoanalytic Case Studies from an Interpersonal-relational Perspective

Psychoanalytic Case Studies from an Interpersonal-Relational Perspective contains reports of long-term treatments, including many dialogues and dreams, with commentaries following each one. Drawing from theories that have been developed since Freud, the analysts focus on problems in living as opposed to diagnoses and repressed sexual and aggressive urges. They also express their own feelings towards patients and even their own dreams.

The cases themselves include sexual abuse, a man whose father killed his mother, a change in sexual orientation, as well as those of depression, physical problems, and difficulties relating interpersonally, such as fear of rejection and rejecting help. Actual dialogues of sessions are featured, so that readers can see what takes place in psychoanalysis. The analysts here draw from theories of Sullivan, Fromm, Horney, and Fromm-Reichmann, Kohut, Winnicott, and more recently Levenson, Mitchell, Bromberg, Donnell Stern, and Aron, to name a few.

Most contemporary case reports come from short-term therapies and many rely on techniques of changing conscious cognitions and encouraging new behaviors. The treatments in this book, while often including such interventions, explore more in-depth processes that may be unconscious and related to transferential expectations from previous relationships, encouraging new experiences and not simply explanations.

Psychoanalytic Case Studies from an Interpersonal-Relational Perspective will be of great interest to interpersonal and relational psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in clinical practice.

Rebecca Coleman Curtis, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Adelphi University and Faculty, William Alanson White Institute, is author of Desire, Self, Mind and the Psychotherapies: Unifying Psychological Science and Psychoanalysis, editor of Self-Defeating Behaviors and the Relational Self, and co-editor of books on change, death, loneliness, taboos, identity, and failure resilience.