ABSTRACT

There are moments of connection between analysts and patients during any therapeutic encounter upon which the therapy can turn. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis explores how analysts and therapists can experience these moments of meeting, shows how this interaction can become an enlivening and creative process, and seeks to recognise how it can change both the analyst and patient in profound and fundamental ways.

The theory and practice of contemporary psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has reached an exciting new moment of generous and generative interaction. As psychoanalysts become more intersubjective and relational in their work, it becomes increasingly critical that they develop approaches that have the capacity to harness and understand powerful moments of meeting, capable of propelling change through the therapeutic relationship. Often these are surprising human moments in which both client and clinician are moved and transformed. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis offers a window into the ways in which some of today’s practitioners think about, encourage, and work with these moments of meeting in their practices. Each chapter of the book offers theoretical material, case examples, and a discussion of various therapists’ reflections on and experiences with these moments of meeting. 

With contributions from relational psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and Jungian analysts, and covering essential topics such as shame, impasse, mindfulness, and group work, this book offers new theoretical thinking and practical clinical guidance on how best to work with moments of meeting in any relationally oriented therapeutic practice. Moments of Meeting in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, workers in other mental health fields, graduate students, and anyone interested in change processes.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

part I|54 pages

Background/context

chapter 1|32 pages

My journey in infant research and psychoanalysis

Microanalysis, a social microscope

part II|58 pages

Jungian approaches to relational work

chapter 3|17 pages

Moments of complexity

Non-local aspects of moments of meeting

chapter 4|16 pages

The aesthetics of being

chapter 5|23 pages

States of grace

Eureka moments and the recognition of the unthought known

part III|142 pages

Relational analysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy

chapter 6|20 pages

Moments of meeting and the problem of shame

A brief history of relational therapy

chapter 7|15 pages

The therapist’s capacity to tolerate the intolerable

My tears, not his

chapter 8|17 pages

Living inside the moment

A view from self psychology

chapter 9|20 pages

Where did that happy ending come from?

Dreaming moments of meeting

chapter 11|11 pages

You, me, and us

chapter 12|12 pages

Sleeping/dying

“Now moments” in clinical space

chapter 14|17 pages

Retirement from psychotherapy practice

A mutually generative rite of passage

part IV|59 pages

Alternative relational modalities

chapter 15|26 pages

Something more than “‘something more’ than interpretation”

Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) works the experiential edge of transformational experience to transform the internal working model

chapter 16|15 pages

Mindfulness, intimacy and presence

Moments of meeting in psychotherapy

chapter 17|16 pages

Finding each other in a crowded room

Internal family systems and group psychotherapy

chapter |5 pages

Afterword