On the Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Book excerpt: On the Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is an operating manual for the challenging, often lonely and confusing work of doing therapy. It locates clinical method in a historical tradition of many contributory workers including Freud, Breuer, Klein, Segal, Ferenczi, Waelder, Katan, Tausk, Sullivan, Lacan, Bion, and Ogden. In this way, the book links clinicians with psychoanalytic thinkers across the foreclosures of scholastic orientation and politics, to arrive at a methodology, based in interpretive reflection, and demonstrably active from the period of psychoanalytic origins as an application of the influence of mind upon mind. The authors provide the reader with a methodology of clinical thinking, of how clinicians orient themselves in clinical registration, moment by moment. It develops a route of fundamental therapeutic action, applicable under all clinical situations, from the single session consultation to intensive, long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy.