Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process: A Dialectical-Constructivist ViewThe psychoanalytic process is characterized by a complex weave of interrelated polarities: transference and countertransference, repetition and new experience, enactment and interpretation, discipline and personal responsiveness, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, construction and discovery. In Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, Irwin Z. Hoffman, through compelling clinical accounts, demonstrates the great therapeutic potential that resides in the analyst's struggle to achieve a balance within each of these dialectics. According to Hoffman, the psychoanalytic modality implicates a dialectic tension between interpersonal influence and interpretive exploration, a tension in which noninterpretive and interpretive interactions continuously elicit one another. It follows that Hoffman's "dialectical constructivism" highlights the intrinsic ambiguity of experience, an ambiguity that coexists with the irrefutable facts of a person's life, including the fact of mortality. The analytic situation promotes awareness of the freedom to shape one's life story within the constraints of given realities. Hoffman deems it a special kind of crucible for the affirmation of worth and the construction of meaning in a highly uncertain world. The analyst, in turn, emerges as a moral influence with an ironic kind of authority, one that is enhanced by the ritualized aspects of the analytic process even as it is subjected to critical scrutiny. An intensely clinical work, Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process forges a new understanding of the curative possibilities that grow out of the tensions, the choices, and the constraints inhering in the intimate encounter of a psychoanalyst and a patient. Compelling reading for all analysts and analytic therapists, it will also be powerfully informative for scholars in the social sciences and the humanities. |
Contents
Death Anxiety and Adaptation to Mortality in Psychoanalytic Theory | |
The Intimate and Ironic and Authority of the Psychoanalysts Presence 4 The Patient as Interpreter of the Analysts Experience | |
Toward a SocialConstructivist View of the Psychoanalytic Situation | |
Conviction and uncertainty in Psychoanalytic Interactions | |
Expressive Participation and Psychoanalytic Discipline | |
Dialectical Thinking and Therapeutic Action | |
Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process | |
Constructing GoodEnough Endings in Psychoanalysis | |
Other editions - View all
Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process: A Dialectical ... Irwin Z. Hoffman Limited preview - 2014 |
Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process: A Dialectical ... Irwin Z. Hoffman No preview available - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
affect ambiguous American Psychoanalytic Association analysand analyst analyst's experience analyst's personal analytic frame analytic process analytic situation anxiety Aron aspects associated asymmetry attitude awareness behavior castration anxiety chapter child clinical concept conscious construction constructivism constructivist Contemporary Psychoanalysis context countertransference course critical death death instinct dialectic discussion ego psychology example existential exploration expressive fact father feel Freud Gill Greenberg Hoffman Hogarth Press human idea identified implications important inevitably influence integration interaction internal interpersonal interpretation intrapsychic involvement issue kind Kohut meaning Merton Gill Mitchell narcissistic neurosis object objectivism objectivist one's paradigm parents participation particular patient patient's experience perception perspective position possible potential preconscious Psychoanalytic Dialogues psychoanalytic process psychoanalytic situation psychoanalytic theory psychological psychotherapy Racker reality recognize reflection regard relation relationship relatively response ritual Robert Langs role sense social social-constructivist spontaneous superego theoretical theorists theory therapeutic action therapist therapy thought transference unconscious Winnicott