Routledge Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide

Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide demonstrates that the concept of the unconscious is profoundly relevant for understanding the mind, psychic pain, and traumatic human suffering. Editors Paula L. Ellman and Nancy R. Goodman established this book to discover how symbolization takes place through the "finding of unconscious fantasy" in ways that mend the historic split between trauma and fantasy. Cases present the dramatic encounters between patient and therapist when confronting discovery of the unconscious in the presence of trauma and body pain, along with narrative. Unconscious fantasy has a central role in both clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. This volume is a guide to the workings of the dyad and the therapeutic action of "finding" unconscious meanings. Staying close to the clinical engagement of analyst and patient shows the transformative nature of the "finding" process as the dyad works with all aspects of the unconscious mind. Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide uses the immediacy of clinical material to show how trauma becomes known in the "here and now" of enactment processes and accompanies the more symbolized narratives of transference and countertransference. This book features contributions from a rich variety of theoretical traditions illustrating working models including Klein, Arlow, and Bion and from leaders in the fields of narrative, trauma, and psychosomatics. Whether working with narrative, trauma or body pain, unconscious fantasy may seem out of reach. Attending to the analyst/ patient process of finding the derivatives of unconscious fantasy offers a potent roadmap for the way psychoanalytic engagement uncovers deep layers of the mind. In focusing on the places of trauma and psychosomatic concreteness, along with narrative, Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma, and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide shows the vitality of "finding" unconscious fantasy and its effect in initiating a symbolizing process. Chapters in this book bring to life the sufferings and capacities of individual patients with actual verbatim process material demonstrating how therapists and patients discover and uncover the derivatives of unconscious fantasy. Finding the unconscious meanings in states of trauma, body expressions, and transference/countertransference enactments becomes part of the therapeutic dialogue between therapists and patients unraveling symptoms and allowing transformations. Learning how therapeutic work progresses to uncover unconscious fantasy will benefit all therapists and students of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy interested to know more about the psychoanalytic dialogue. Review "Reading this book leads to deeper and more secret levels of the psychoanalytic experience, those that allow a contact with the Unconscious and its fantasies which, from obscurity, steer and powerfully influence the destiny of individuals, groups and sometimes entire nations. The path of exploration chosen by the authors is the most effective and convincing: the clinic, presented here at a high quality level and complemented by refined and harmoniously consistent theoretical reflections. This publication has a decidedly international flavor and provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive view on the subject of unconscious fantasies, a dimension of the human psyche about which Psychoanalysis has developed a specific and absolutely unparalleled expertise."-Stefano Bolognini, President, International Psychoanalytical Association. "Nancy Goodman and Paula Ellman propose a creative structure for revisiting the concept of Unconscious Fantasy. A dialogue is developed among excellent clinicians/authors belonging to different psychoanalytic cultures, based on clinical presentations. They focus on 'finding the unconscious fantasy in the psychoanalytic encounter' which 'brings processing a