Routledge Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

2015 Gradiva Award Winner Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience explores how leaders in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy address the phenomena of the psychoanalyst’s personal life and psychology. In this edited book, each author describes pivotal childhood and adult life events and crises that have contributed to personality formation, personal and professional functioning, choices of theoretical positions, and clinical technique. By expanding psychoanalytic study beyond clinical theory and technique to include a more careful examination of the psychoanalyst’s life events and other subjective phenomena, readers will have an opportunity to focus on specific ways in which these events and crises affect the tenor of the therapist’s presence in the consulting room, and how these occurrences affect clinical choices. Chapters cover a broad range of topics including illness, adoption, sexual identity and experience, trauma, surviving the death of one’s own analyst, working during 9/11, cross cultural issues, growing up in a communist household, and other family dynamics. Throughout, Steven Kuchuck (ed) shows how contemporary psychoanalysis teaches that it is only by acknowledging the therapist’s life experience and resulting psychological makeup that analysts can be most effective in helping their patients. However, to date, few articles and fewer books have been entirely devoted to this topic. Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience forges new ground in exploring these under-researched areas. It will be essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, those working in other mental health fields and graduate students alike. Review "...very little light has been shone on the sometimes-dark recesses of the lives of therapists and how these lives might inform their work. That is, with only a few exceptions, until now. With contributions from 18 analysts across 288 pages this intimate book invites the reader into the frank and often-vulnerable real life narratives of some of the leading relational psychoanalysts of the day...It opens the door and offers permission for therapists to step into the light and do so in the service of both their own development and that of their clients or patients." - Brad McLean, Contemporary Psychotherapy "In this stunning volume of eloquent contributions by senior psychoanalysts, Steven Kuchuck provides a space for the timely exploration of how our personal life events inevitably saturate the uniquely personal therapeutic ethos we each struggle to develop. His prose are fresh and engaging, the choice of contributors is wise, and the papers themselves are, at times, nothing short of inspiring. This is a book brimming over with the personal insights of those who have spent a lifetime writing about others. It has been a long time coming, and its arrival is most welcome!" - Jody Messler Davies, Ph.D, Clinical Professor of Psychology of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. "Perhaps psychoanalysts are finally ready to admit their need to know what actually goes on in other analysts' minds as they work through their own painful pasts and live through their own tragedies and conflicts. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know how others reflect on these struggles and integrate them with their clinical work? Fortunately Steven Kuchuck has produced this book, and assembled a set of such reflections from a diverse and thoughtful group of analysts. The result is immensely stimulating and often profound, an aid to all of us who have imagined a more complex role for analytic subjectivity, a more compassionate and honest version of the practice to which we are dedicated."- Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D. author, Shadow of the Other (Routledge, 1998), Clinical Professor of Psychology of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psycho