Browse

This book presents thoughts on the latest psychodynamic developments and insights related to treatment of severe personality disorders. Dividing discussions into two sections—one on psychopathology and the other on psychotherapy—the book examines borderline personality disorder, narcissism, sexual inhibition, transference and countertransference, suicidal behavior, and eating disorders. Each chapter integrates the ideas of European and Latin American psychoanalytic thinkers, bringing them to the attention of English-speaking readers. The book includes a selection of recently published journal articles.

This book reviews some of the recent developments and controversies in psychoanalytic theory and technique. Gathering together both previously published articles and extensive new material, it examines such issues as the new psychoanalytic views of homosexuality, bisexuality, and the influence of gender in the analytic relationship. The author explores the application of psychoanalysis to non-clinical fields, including the problem of psychoanalytic research and its clinical implications, the validation of psychoanalytic interventions in the clinical process, and the challenges of psychoanalytic education. He shows how psychoanalysis can be helpful in addressing such cultural problems as socially-sanctioned violence, and asserts the continued relevance of object relations theory and its compatibility with Freud's dual drive theory.

This book examines the legal, psychological, and cultural issues relevant to understanding antisocial behavior in adolescence. Based on personal research and a broad analysis of recent work in the field, the book identifies the factors that are common in cases of delinquency. The discussion considers the long-term effects of social issues such as poverty as well as psychological issues such as the high levels of stress and anxiety suffered during childhood by many delinquents. The book shows how a failure to meet the developmental needs of children—at both the family level and at a broader social and political level—is at the core of the problem of juvenile delinquency. It concludes with an inquiry into how best to prevent delinquency, arguing that programs that address the developmental needs of children are more effective than policing, juvenile courts, or incarceration.

This book presents an early psychoanalyst's session-by-session notes on a case of hysteria caused by severe sexual trauma and incest, offering a vivid portrait of psychoanalytic practice in the second decade of the twentieth century. Accompanying these notes are insightful commentaries by Elizabeth Lunbeck and Bennett Simon that situate the case historically and throw light on the many difficulties that both analyst and patient encountered in the treatment.

In his highly praised book The Nostalgia Factory, the author explored the puzzling logic of memory in later life with humor and deep insight. In this compelling new book the author turns to the “miracle” of forgetting. Far from being a defect that may indicate Alzheimer's or another form of dementia, the book claims, forgetting is one of memory's crucial capacities. In fact, forgetting is essential. Weaving together an engaging array of literary, historical, and scientific sources, the author considers forgetting from every angle. He pierces false clichés and asks important questions: Is a forgotten memory lost forever? What makes a colleague remember an idea but forget that it was yours? The author explores “first memories” of young children, how experiences are translated into memory, the controversies over repression and “recovered” memories, and weird examples of memory dysfunction. The book movingly examines the impact on personal memories when a hidden truth comes to light. In a persuasive conclusion the author advocates the undervalued practice of “the art of forgetting”—a set of techniques that assist in erasing memories, thereby preserving valuable relationships and encouraging personal contentment.

Sixty years ago, a group of prominent psychoanalysts, developmentalists, pediatricians, and educators at the Yale Child Study Center joined together with the purpose of formulating a general psychoanalytic theory of children's early development. The group's members composed detailed narratives about their work with the study's children, interviewed families regularly and visited them in their homes, and over the course of a decade met monthly for discussion. This book considers the significance of the Child Study Center's landmark study from various perspectives, focusing particularly on one child's unfolding sense of herself, her gender, and her relationships.

This book examines why some people are resistant to change, even when it seems to promise a change for the better. Drawing on a lifetime of clinical experience as well as wide readings of world literature, the book shows how early childhood relationships with parents can lead to a powerful conviction that change means loss. The book continues previous explorations into the consequences of early psychological injury and loss. In the examples of real patients and in the lives and work of such figures as Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Wordsworth, and Henrik Ibsen, it looks at the different ways in which unconscious impressions connected with early experiences and fantasies about parents are integrated into individual lives. The book shows the difficulties that have been encountered with patients in raising these memories to the conscious level where they can be known and owned; and it also shows, in a survey of literary figures, how these memories can become part of the creative process. The book offers a deeply humane reflection on the values and limitations of therapy, on memory and the lingering effects of the past, and on the possibility of recognizing the promise of the future.

What is animal intelligence? In what ways is it similar to human intelligence? Many behavioral scientists have realized that animals can be rational, can think in abstract symbols, can understand and react to human speech, and can learn through observation as well as conditioning many of the more complicated skills of life. This book explores the mysteries of the animal mind even further, identifying an advanced level of animal behavior—emergents—that reflects animals' natural and active inclination to make sense of the world. The authors unify all behavior into a framework they call Rational Behaviorism and present it as a new way to understand learning, intelligence, and rational behavior in both animals and humans. Drawing on years of research on issues of complex learning and intelligence in primates (notably rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, and bonobos), the authors provide examples of animal ingenuity and persistence, showing that animals are capable of very creative solutions to novel challenges. They analyze learning processes and research methods, discuss the meaningful differences across the primate order, and point the way to further advances, enlivening theoretical material about primates with stories about their behavior and achievements.

Longing for Home explores the psychological, social, and theological impact of forcibly losing one’s home place and asks two questions: What is it about home that makes its loss so profound? And, How should we think about this theologically? This book explores the notion of home and its loss from the perspectives of four very diverse groups who have suffered forced displacement: an indigenous tribe of Batwa in Uganda, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Congo and Sudan, American soldiers struggling with PTSD, and homeless persons in the United States. The author uses her own experiences in the Ugandan mountains, ethnographic research in refugee camps in Congo and Sudan and internally displaced persons, published stories of American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and life in a transitional facility for homeless persons as windows into these contexts and stories of forced displacement. Through these intense, sometimes tragic encounters, the psychological, social, and theological impact of living without home becomes clear as does the often exclusionary response of the communities in which they seek care. The author suggests that a moral obligation of care grounded in relational postures of hospitality—or predispositions toward the other that precede practices—are at the heart of breaking through social exclusion and helping each to lean into God in ways that invite home of a different kind. The book’s concrete experiences of communities of displacement add a unique element that both challenges and complements psychological and social theories. The end result is a constructive contribution to both practical and public theology.

This book challenges two basic assumptions that orient much contemporary social scientific thinking. Offering theory and empirical research, it rejects the classic liberal view that people share a basic “common sense” or rationality. At the same time, it questions the view of contemporary social theory that meaning is simply an intersubjective or cultural product. Through in-depth interviews, it explores the underlying logic of cognition and, rather than discovering a common sense or rationality, finds that people reason in fundamentally different ways and that these differences affect the kind of understandings they craft and the evaluations they make. As a result, people actively reconstruct culturally prevalent meanings and norms in their own subjective terms. The book provides a comprehensive description of three types of socio-political reasoning and the full text of three exemplary interviews. Its findings help explain such puzzling social phenomena as why people do not learn even when it is to their advantage to do so, or why they fail to adapt to changed social conditions even when they have clear information and motivation. The book argues that this kind of failure is commonplace and discusses examples ranging from the crisis of modernity to the classroom performance of university students. Building on the ideas of Jean Piaget, George Herbert Mead, and Jurgen Habermas, it offers a new orienting vision, structural pragmatics, to account for these social phenomena and personal research in cognition. The concluding chapter discusses the implications of this work for the study of social cognition, political behavior, and democratic theory.

Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? This book offers a new answer to these time-worn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. It argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, the book argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. The book ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it.

This book is an illuminating study of the complex relationship between children and media in the digital age. Now, as never before, young people are surrounded by media, thanks to the sophistication and portability of the technology that puts it literally in the palms of their hands. Drawing on data and empirical research that cross many fields and continents, this book examines the role of media in the lives of children from birth through adolescence, addressing the complex issues of how media affect the young and what adults can do to encourage responsible use in an age of selfies, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The book looks at both the sunny and the dark side of media use by today's youth, including why and how their preferences change throughout childhood, whether digital gaming is harmful or helpful, the effects of placing tablets and smartphones in the hands of toddlers, the susceptibility of young people to online advertising, the legitimacy of parental concerns about media multitasking, and more.

Ultra-orthodox Jews in Jerusalem are isolated from the secular community that surrounds them not only physically but by their dress, behaviors, and beliefs. Their relationship with secular society is characterized by social, religious, and political tensions. The differences between the ultra-orthodox and secular often pose special difficulties for psychiatrists who attempt to deal with their needs. In this book, two Western-trained psychiatrists discuss their mental health work with this community over the past two decades. With humor and affection they elaborate on some of the factors that make it difficult to treat or even to diagnose the ultra-orthodox, present case studies, and relate their observations of this religious community to the management of mental health services for other fundamentalist, anti-secular groups.

Self-determination theory is grounded in the belief that people work best and are happiest when they feel that they are in control of their own lives. This book explains the ramifications of the theory and provides clinical examples to show that it can be used to motivate patients undergoing treatment for such physical or psychological issues as diabetes management, smoking cessation, post-traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. The first part of the book provides historical background to self-determination theory, showing that it is humanistically oriented and has three decades of empirical research behind it. In the process, the book discusses why humanistic psychology fell out of favor in academic psychology; why “self-help” and New Age books have such perennial popularity; and why it is so important for authorities to support patients' sense of self. The remainder of the book presents many specific case examples to describe the theory's application.

In this book a noted physiologist and neuroscientist introduces the concept of simplexity, the set of solutions living organisms find that enable them to deal with information and situations, while taking into account past experiences and anticipating future ones. Such solutions are new ways of addressing problems so that actions may be taken more quickly, more elegantly, and more efficiently. In a sense, the history of living organisms may be summed up by their remarkable ability to find solutions that avoid the world's complexity by imposing on it their own rules and functions. Evolution has resolved the problem of complexity not by simplifying but by finding solutions whose processes—though they can sometimes be complex—allow us to act in the midst of complexity and uncertainty. Nature can inspire us by making us realize that simplification is never simple and requires instead that we choose, refuse, connect, and imagine, in order to act in the best possible manner. Such solutions are already being applied in design and engineering and are significant in biology, medicine, economics, and the behavioral sciences.

This book examines the effect of social relationships on physical health. It surveys and assesses the research which shows not only that supportive relationships protect us from a multitude of mental health problems but also that the absence of supportive relationships increases the risk of dying from various diseases. The book discusses the links between social support and mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV/AIDS. It investigates whether social support is more effective for some individuals and within certain cultures. After evaluating existing conceptual models linking social support to health outcomes, the book offers his own broader perspective on the issue, and suggests the implications for intervention and for future research in this area.

Does living a stress-filled life lead to elevated blood pressure? And if so, do strategies to manage better stress effectively lower blood pressure? This book examines more than a half-century of empirical evidence obtained to test the common assumption that stress is associated with the onset and maintenance of essential hypertension (high blood pressure). While the research confirms that stress does play a role in the exacerbation of essential hypertension, numerous other factors must also be considered, among them obesity, exercise, and smoking, as well as demographic, constitutional, and psychological concerns. The book discusses the effectiveness of strategies developed to manage stress and thereby lower blood pressure, and concludes with suggestions and directions for further study.

This evaluation of the research on this topic presents the current state of knowledge about suicidal behaviors in children and adolescents, addressing the trends of the past ten years and evaluating available treatment approaches. The book provides an in-depth examination of the problem of suicidal behavior within the context of child and adolescent behavior. Among the developmental issues covered are the evolving capacity for emotional self-regulation, change and stresses in family, peer, and romantic relationships, and developing conceptions of time and death. It also provides an up-to-date review of the controversy surrounding the possible influence of antidepressant medications on suicidal behavior. Within the context of an integrative model of the suicide crisis, the book discusses issues pertaining to assessment, treatment, and prevention.

Some children are prone to a particular kind of aggression when they are with their peers. For these children, any harm done to them—even something as inconsequential as a jostle in the lunch line—is perceived as intentional. Their style of social information processing, termed “hostile attributional bias,” increases the likelihood of retaliating with excessive and inappropriate physical aggression. In this book, parents and professionals who work with children will learn what can be done to better understand and control children's aggression. Beginning with a review of the literature, the author underscores the substantial risks of long-term problems for elementary-school-age children who demonstrate aggressive behavior. Then, drawing on her work as founder of a successful school intervention program, the BrainPower Program, the author describes methods for reducing children's peer-directed aggression. She concludes with a discussion of the importance of broad social contexts in supporting nonaggressive behavior.