Inner Strengths

Book excerpt: However it is conceived and described by psychotherapists with different orientations, a stronger ego is a universally-acknowledged goal of therapeutic work. Inner Strengths is the first book to meet the need for a comprehensive treatment of approaches to ego-strengthening in psychotherapy. It provides contemporary psychodynamic, object relations, self-psychology, ego state, and transpersonal theoretical models for understanding how and why ego-strengthening occurs. The authors are experienced psychotherapists who integrate hypnosis into their own practice of psychotherapy. They have been active in developing the newer, projective-evocative ego-strengthening techniques emphasizing the utilization of patients' inner resources. They survey the history of ego-strengthening efforts and show how that which has been considered intrinsically hypnotic connects with the great traditions of psychotherapy. Additionally, they offer step-by-step instructions for a diversity of ego-strengthening methods that can be used for patient self-care, internal boundary formation, and personality maturation in a wide range of clinical conditions. Their discussion of the fundamental concepts of ego-strengthening draws on their theoretical and clinical explorations of dynamic internal resources such as memory, strength, wisdom, self-soothing, and love. Throughout the book, theory is balanced by an unusual richness of extended clinical examples and a wide variety of practical ego-strengthening scripts. Clinicians need not be trained in hypnosis to find Inner Strengths clarifying and helpful reading; the fundamental points so vividly made by the authors are relevant to many nonhypnotic-therapeutic interventions and issues.