Shows how therapists can help individuals suffering from character disorders. Views their symptoms as an attempt to cope with inner and external pain. Through a safe and respectable therapeutic relationship, they can transform their unhappy character traits and personality disorders into a less painful stance toward the world.

The mechanism of emotional change is central to the field of mental health. Emotional change is necessary for healing the long-standing pain of character pathology, yet is the least studied and most misunderstood area in psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. Changing Character at its heart is about emotion—how to draw it out, recognize it and make it conscious, follow its lead and, equally important, use cognition to guide, control, and direct our emotional lives. This treatment manual teaches therapists time-efficient techniques for changing character and helping their patients live mindfully with themselves and others through adaptive responses to conflictual experiences.Leigh McCullough Vaillant, a nationally recognized expert on short-term dynamic psychotherapy, shows therapists how to identify and remove obstacles in one's character (ego defenses) that block emotional experience. She then illustrates how the therapist can delve into that experience and harness the tremendous adaptive power provided by emotions. The result? She shows us how to have emotions without emotions “having” their way with us. Vaillant's integrative psychodynamic model holds that the source of psychopathology is the impairment of human emotional experience and expression, which includes impairment in drives and beliefs but is seen fundamentally as the impairment of affects.In this short-term approach, psychotherapists are shown how to combine behavioral, cognitive, and relational theories to make psychodynamic treatment briefer and more effective. Vaillant illustrates how affect bridges the gap between intrapsychic and interpersonal approaches to psychotherapy. Affect, she argues, has the power to make or break relational bonds. Through the regulation of anxieties associated with affects in relation to self and others, therapists can help their patients undergo meaningful character change. A holistic focus on affects and attachment has not been adequately addressed in either traditional psychodynamic theory or cognitive theory. Clearly and masterfully, Vaillant shows therapists how to integrate the powers of cognition and emotion within a dynamic short-term therapy approach.

The field of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy has tended to fragment into disparate theoretical orientations that often find little in common with each other, though each sheds light on important aspects of the psyche. This book addresses the question, how can these disparate orientations best be brought together in the service of interpretation? Starting from the conviction that treatment becomes more effective and comprehensive if as many aspects of the psyche as possible are addressed, Robert Hooberman proposes that character structure - an aspect of psychic functioning traditionally given short shrift in psychoanalytic discourse - can provide a framework in which multiple theoretical perspectives can have their say. Numerous case examples are used for illustration.

Psychotherapeutic Change through the Group Process discusses the relation between the properties of groups and therapeutic change. The purpose is to develop a view of groups that accounts for the diversity, complexity, and fluidity of the group situation. The view examines the group in depth, attending not only to overt events, but also to covert aspects of specific situations. The work addresses manifest behaviors, underlying motivations; and the cognitive, rational aspects of the group. It explores the intense affect which may be generated under conditions of group interaction; not merely to the group or individual, but to the individual in the group and to the group as the context for personal experience and change.The research presented here was initially explored in small group studies. Separate investigations considered the ways in which patients and therapists view group events, the nature of deviation, and the development of group standards. They consider factors associated with therapeutic improvement and therapeutic failure; and characteristic concerns of early sessions. These, plus several discussions of theory and methodology have been published separately.The authors' working procedure has been to study intensively a relatively small number of groups, relying upon careful observation of natural groups rather than upon laboratory experimentation. The overall effort has been to understand the processes of therapy groups in all their clinical richness and intricacy and yet to impose a scientific discipline and control on our analyses. This has meant a continuing attempt to develop appropriate analytic procedures so that clinical analyses can be as firmly rooted as possible in concrete data and reproducible methods. This book is a unique effort at the scientific grounding of social work practice.

Integrate spiritual traditions with psychological healing! In this fascinating volume, clinical practitioners of different religious traditions examine the same clinical case, offering insights, interventions, and explanations of transformation and healing. This practical approach allows them to explore broader issues of personality theory and psychology from the perspectives of various spiritual traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religious Theories of Personality and Psychotherapy addresses both the practical issues of doing psychotherapy and the deeper need to relate psychology and theology. After providing a thorough introduction to the spiritual tradition, each author presents a critical psychological theory of personality and psychotherapy grounded in that tradition. The authors address the questions of what it means to be a person, what causes human distress, and how individuals experience healing. Religious Theories of Personality and Psychotherapy offers profound insights into the urgent issues of human suffering and psychological transformation, including: theories of personality structure and human motivation the nature of experience and processes of change the dialectical relation of theology and psychology convergences and difference among the religious psychologies Marrying theory and practice, spirit and psyche, Religious Theories of Personality and Psychotherapy offers profound insights and effective interventions. Mental health professionals, clergy, and scholars in religion, cross-cultural studies, personality, counseling, and psychotherapy will find this breakthrough book a life-changing experience and an invaluable resource.

How do people change? Longing for personal growth and transformation is a central theme of our times. Psychotherapy seeks to change the dynamics behind people's symptoms and conflicts. Writers, too, are fascinated by this theme, and have explored it frequently in their stories and characters. In this book, Barbara and Richard Almond, both psychoanalysts, explore a variety of novels that describe internal, personal change. They discover that there are fascinating parallels between the processes that lead to change in literary characters and the mechanisms observed in psychotherapeutic change. From Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden to Anne Tyler's IThe Accidental Tourist, the plot begins with a character struggling with personality limitations. A new person appears in the story; a bond is formed with the central character. In the relationship that follows, the two struggle. Confrontational and loving interactions lead the protagonist through a process of gradual change. The authors delineate a therapeutic narrative: the plot of change in both psychotherapy and literature. By comparing a variety of novels, they elaborate the elements of this therapeutic narrative and draw provocative conclusions about the mechanisms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Offers insights into a spectrum of approaches within body psychotherapy, showing how it can be healing, reparative and rewarding.