Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining terms and building bridges

We no longer teach psychoanalysis, in the singular. These days, we teach psychoanalyses, in the plural. There is now a wide ranging diversity of psychoanalytic schools and perspectives, each featuring their own terms, traditions, principles, and technical implications. With Marilyn Charles' superb collection: Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges, we have a single text that introduces the major orientations. Each chapter is written by an expert in the approach, and a unique feature is that many chapters discuss how the schools relate to each other and how they may be combined by the individual practitioner to suit that clinician's individual personality and idiom. -Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has gone from being a monolithic Truth to a loose congeries of positions that have agreed to disagree-and maybe sometimes agree. How and in what way these contemporary positions align themselves with each other, theoretically, clinically and politically, remains obscure. In this brilliantly edited volume, Dr. Charles allows a series of distinguished authors to explicate their positions, including an assessment of its limitations-a thematic that postulates that every position ultimately becomes a countertransference; and that our success depends more on integrating positions that establishing some new superordinate Truth. This thoughtful, well-organized and informative volume should be indispensible to anyone, in or out of the field, in search of some coherence in our current disorder. - Edgar A. Levenson, Fellow Emeritus, Training, Supervisory Analyst and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute. Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at the NYU Graduate Studies Division, Honorary Fellow at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Life Fellow of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

This book respects all the contemporary schools of thought; psychoanalysis is tribal territory, where controversy is rife and not always respectful. It brings together in the palm of the hand all the strands that currently exist, but which head off in their own direction without concern for the whole. The field of view is also strewn with obstacles as words and ideas subtly change their exact meanings in the course of migration over time. So, such a project is not easy. Nor is it usual, as one frequent answer is a simplistic pluralism; anything goes, and the more ideas the merrier we shall be. Less frequent is the much more important stance we find here. Specialists survey their own frame of reference and deliver the reader the wherewithal to make our own assessments and comparisons. -Bob Hinshelwood, Emeritus Professor, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK