Spanning six decades, this collection, Journeys in Psychoanalysis: The selected works of Elizabeth Spillius, traces the arc of her career from anthropology and entering psychoanalysis ‘almost by accident’, to becoming one of her generation’s leading scholars of Melanie Klein. Born in 1924 in Ontario, Canada, Elizabeth arrived at the London School of Economics for postgraduate studies in the 1950s and soon embarked on a groundbreaking study of family life in the East End of London that produced a PhD and her first book, Family and Social Network, under her maiden name Elizabeth Bott. Published by the Tavistock Institute in 1957, it remains one of the most influential works published on the sociology of the family. These papers are a testament to the luminous intellect and understated compassion that Elizabeth has always brought to her work. They vividly map not just the evolution of Elizabeth’s career but the development of Melanie Klein’s thought, often drawing in compelling fashion on the writer’s own experiences with her patients. Each is written with the clarity and concision that makes difficult concepts eminently comprehensible to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and laymen alike.

Developing psychoanalytic credos, a set of beliefs that inform how you listen and approach the analytic enterprise with patients, is in many ways the scaffolding of psychoanalytic training. Drawing upon Mannie Ghent’s original Credo essay, 27 psychoanalysts were asked to write their credos and/or their psychoanalytic journey. This book represents a multi-theoretical and multi-generational grouping, trained at different institutes, during different eras (grouped by decades 1960-2000) and across cultures. They are drawn from analysts identified with Relational, Object Relations, Contemporary Freudians and Kleinian/Bionian perspectives as well as those who don’t easily fit categorization. This book serves to provide companionship to analysts in training, as part of reading lists in institutes as well as analysts post-training and yet still evolving in their psychoanalytic journey.

Daniel is 35, successful, a high level professional and an accomplished academic - yet he is also a virgin, who fears that he will spend the rest of his life alone. More importantly, Daniel has existed in an emotional bubble all of his life, and has had no intimate friendships. In other words, he is not fully alive, and seeks psychotherapy because he is haunted by not understanding what is wrong with him. He is attractive to women, yet as soon as a woman tries to get close to him, he runs away. Lacking an inner foundation, he fears that women will annihilate him, like his overbearing mother who abused him as a child. Quite simply, this book is an unprecedented achievement, taking the reader into actual psychoanalytic sessions and sharing with the reader Michael Shoshani Rosenbaum’s dialogues with Daniel, vividly illustrating his pain and struggle to transcend his existential plight. Furthermore, as the author of two sections of the book, Daniel himself provides a rare, insightful view from the other side of the couch, illuminating the challenge and change experienced within the other half of the therapeutic relationship. It is a compelling psychological adventure, fusing together the intimacy of the therapy with an account of the revolutionary changes that have occurred in the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis over the last decades. Daniel is like no one else, and yet he is everyone, making this book a must for every person searching for self-knowledge, allowing the reader to identify with Daniel and his struggle to become human.

This book is a journey through almost forty years of practice. Each chapter is independent of the others and develops around a specific theme: psychoanalysis in France, the transference, fathers today, psychic bisexuality, the sick body, human destructivity, and so on. The underlying thread is none the less the question of knowing how the drive operates between the biological body and mental functioning consisting of representations and affects, and, especially, how it gives rise to thinking. If thinking is an "act of the flesh", as the author asserts, how can we refine our understanding of the vicissitudes of the "mysterious leap from the mind to the body"? Furthermore, how does Freudian metapsychology still help us today in our encounters with patients? Contemporary clinical practice is sometimes bewildering: acts, violence, pain, and somatization often replace neurotic conflicts and speech. The clinical stories related here have the aim of showing that a psychoanalysis rooted in the Freudian corpus is still alive and can continue to offer creative responses today.

This book describes the personal journey of a collection of contributors, detailing their pathways to becoming psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, with insights from many of the most interesting analysts in the field. The history of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy indicates that the pioneers were individuals who came from different pathways, such as medicine, law, education, and art. The integration of men and women with different educational and career backgrounds enhance the intellectual and clinical evolution of the field. Here, Arnold Rachman and Harold Kooden have invited a diverse group of practicing clinicians to demonstrate that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy continues to welcome and integrate individuals with a wide variety of intellectual interests and atypical career pathways. In showing how varied and personalized the route into analysis can be, this book will be of great interest to clinicians of all levels and experience, and will offer inspiration to those just entering the profession.

Once a journey for self-understanding has begun, there is inevitably a struggle against real change. Inner roadblocks on both sides of the couch impede the journey of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The pressure to repeat the past in the present, including the attachments to pain and the difficulty of letting go of abusive relations (both internal and external) are enemies of growth and change. These roadblocks (resistances) and the forms they take are explored and illustrated in Roadblocks on the Journey of Psychotherapy. Book jacket.

Freud’s Italian Journey takes the psychoanalytical texts of Freud on the visual arts and literature as its objects for analysis. While the biographical figure of Freud appears throughout its pages, it is not simply a psychobiographical reading of Freud, his personal circumstances and their relationship to his texts. Rather the processes of interpretation begun by Freud are turned on Freud himself, thus eventually displacing and questioning his theoretical mastery. Freud’s Italian Journey also argues that Freud’s interest in, frequent journeys to, and obsession with Italy profoundly shaped and informed his elaboration of psychoanalysis. The volume organizes its material around the major Italian cities which were the destinations of Freud’s travel, and the sites of the artworks he examined. Freud’s many Italian holidays were crucial for his self-analysis and methodology, but it is also argued here that his papers on Italian subjects must be read as texts marked by fascination and allurement, crossed with anxiety and resistance, inscribed by memory and forgetting. Journeys to Italy heightened Freud’s sense of the visual, and it is contended that the visual dimension of Freud’s writing is crucial to an understanding of his elaboration of the theory of psychoanalysis. The relation between image and text is at the heart of Freud’s analysis of works of art as he founds a critical methodology in which the two are interrelated, image illustrating idea and idea needing to express itself in image, but neither finally resolvable into the other. Thus the argument of Freud’s Italian Journey follows as its model the famous elaboration of the fort:da game by Freud, moving back and forth between Freud’s life and his texts, between psychoanalytical and philosophical systems, between the written and the visual. This leads to the broader conclusion that Freud might provide the key to a new practice of criticism, and a new way of ‘seeing’ and understanding visual images.