Routledge Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Passion: Meanings and Manifestations in the Clinical Setting and Beyond

Passion! The word brims with and exudes power, movement, intensity, vitality, desire, and fulfillment. Its multifaceted meanings include eroticism, rage, sex, suffering, drive, commitment, dedication, and love. On the one hand, it embodies a quality to be embraced and lived fully, to make life meaningful and worthwhile. On the other, it is sometimes to be treated with suspicion, reined in, subjected to the dictates of reason. While it brightens existence and its departure makes life dull, many passions may prove unbearable. The manifold connotations of passion make it highly relevant to psychoanalysis, yet, so far, no book has explored the many facets of this pervasive theme. This book provides a comprehensive guide that will sensitize readers to the omnipresent importance of passionate emotion in the clinical setting, and throughout all areas and times of life. It bursts with thought-provoking ideas. Challenging cases are illuminated by penetrating reflections and novel applications and combinations of theoretical perspectives. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Passion explores the many ways in which very strong emotions – passions – can be understood and worked with in clinical contexts. The contributions cover such key topics as psychosis and violence, emotions in childhood, sexuality, secure and insecure attachments, the role of passion in seeking meaning, passion and transition space, and transference and countertransference. This book will be of great help to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists struggling to assist patients (and perhaps themselves) in locating their passions, channeling and expressing them in meaningful ways, and overcoming obstacles to their fulfillment. Review "The antithesis between reason and passion is as old as human thought. Reason tends to benign but oddly bloodless results: passion to intense but often-disastrous outcomes. This agonistic contrast necessarily pervades psychoanalytic thinking and, although implicit in the earliest psychoanalytic terminology―drive, ego, super-ego, death instinct― seems to have become vitiated in our current expansions of theory and practice. This wide-reaching and magisterial book redresses this issue. Passion, in all its clinical ramifications, is explored by a very eclectic and sophisticated spectrum of therapists. It should be of great interest and value to anyone, in or out of the field, for its sophisticated and enlightening exploration of what is ultimately at the root of the human dilemma."-Edgar A. Levenson, M.D, Fellow Emeritus, Training, Supervisory Analyst and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute; Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, NYU Graduate Studies Division. About the Author Brent Willock is Founding President of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Board Member of the Canadian Institute for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and on the faculty of the Institute for the Advancement of Self Psychology. Rebecca Coleman Curtis is Professor of Psychology at Adelphi University, Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute, and Supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Lori C. Bohm is Supervising Analyst, Faculty, and former Director at the Center for Applied Psychoanalysis and Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Programs at the William Alanson White Institute. She is Psychotherapy Supervisor in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at the City University of New York.