Betty Joseph's work has become an outstanding influence in the development and theory of psychoanalytic technique in the Kleinian tradition. This collection of her most important papers examines the development of her thought and shows why a crucial part of her theory and practice is concerned with the detailed, sensitive scrutiny of the therapeutic process itself. Fundamental and controversial topics explored and discussed include projective identification, transference and countertransference, unconscious phantasy, and Kleinian views on envy and the death instinct.

This book explores how a successful analyst can help patients to utilise mourning for past troubles to move them forward to a lasting change for the better, emotionally, psychically and erotically.

This book is a celebration of Betty Joseph's work, and the work of a group of analysts who have joined her to think about particular kinds of difficulties encountered in the analytic situation, and to think about technical issues.

Coen (training and supervising analyst, Columbia U. Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) offers advice to psychoanalysts working with extremely difficult patients. His central premise is that both patients and therapists have difficulty tolerating intense affects (such as loving and hating) and that the clinician needs to "feel with and for his patient, over a prolonged time, what she finds so terrifying" (emphasis in original). Also stressed is the need for clinicians to confront their own fears and doubts about treatment. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Over the course of his distinguished career, Edward Weinshel has been a moral and intellectual force in contemporary psychoanalysis and an outspoken opponent of current trends in and out of the field toward dehumanization and deindividualization. Commitment and Compassion in Psychoanalysis, under the editorship of Robert Wallerstein, brings together 14 of Weinshel's major papers. The six clinical papers reprinted in this collection address the kaleidoscope of common personality organizations and propensities which, in their extreme variants, motivate individuals to seek psychoanalytic assistance, covering topics that include "neurotic equivalents" of necrophilia, negation, lying, "gaslighting" (brainwashing), perceptual distortion during analysis, and inconsolability. These clinical expositions are supplemented by eight theoretical papers in which Weinshel gives expression to the metapsychological paradigm of ego pyschology as it existed in the 70s and 80s. Four of the papers from the early 70s cover "the ego in health and normality," the transference neurosis, and various aspects of the training analysis. The remaining four papers, published between 1984 and 1992, chronicle Weinshel's notion of resistence as the clinical unit of the psychoanalytic process, his elucidation of specifically "psychoanalytic change" as it grows out of the psychoanalytic process, and his affirmation of modern conflict theory in the face of theoretical pluralism. Carefully edited by Robert Wallerstein and including an introductory essay by Leonard Shengold, Commitment and Compassion in Psychoanalysis brings to contemporary debates the voice of a principled exemplar of the psychoanalytic calling. Balancing intellectual acuity with a profoundly caring temperament, and augmenting respect for the psychoanalytic tradition with a flair for original ideas, Edward Weinshel speaks to all who wrestle daily with the burdens, challenges, and healing promise of the impossible profession.