Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference

Book excerpt: Every day, clinicians encounter challenges to empathy and communication while struggling to assist patients with diverse life histories, character, sexuality, gender, psychopathology, cultural, religious, political, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Most writing pertaining to ideas of similarity, discrepancy, and ‘the Other’ has highlighted differences. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide offers a different focus, emphasising points of contact, connection, and how divisions between people can be transcended. In-depth case material, astutely elucidated by diverse theoretical approaches, furnishes stimulating ideas and valuable suggestions for facilitating a meeting of minds and psychological growth in patients who might otherwise be difficult or impossible to engage. Exploring how psychoanalysts can navigate obstacles to understanding and communicating with suffering individuals, topics covered include: internal experience of likeness and difference in the patient; in the analyst; and how analysts can find echoes of themselves in patients. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists will appreciate the importance and value of this wide-ranging, groundbreaking exploration of these insufficiently addressed dimensions of human experience.