Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change
Landmark Kleinian papers on total transference and the analytic present moment.
What he brings in can best be gauged by our focusing our attention on what is going on within the relationship, how he is using the analyst, alongside and beyond what he is saying.
This volume gathers papers Betty Joseph wrote between 1959 and 1988, arranged by her editors into four stages of a single developing argument about how analytic work actually proceeds. Joseph turns attention away from the content of what a patient reports and towards what is happening in the room: the pressures the patient exerts, the roles the analyst is drawn into, the subtle ways an interpretation is used or deflected.
Her wager is that a patient's whole psychic organisation, its defences and habitual manoeuvres, is enacted in the immediate relationship rather than merely recounted, and that change occurs only when this present-moment activity is registered and worked with as it happens. The papers track her concepts of the total transference, psychic equilibrium, and the near-imperceptible movements between defensive stasis and genuine shift.
For the clinician, the value is procedural: close models of how to listen for enactment, and how to hold interpretation to what the patient is doing now.
About the author
Betty Joseph
Betty Joseph (1917 to 2013) was a British psychoanalyst and one of the leading Kleinian clinicians of her generation. A training and supervising analyst and child analyst in the British Psychoanalytical Society, she practised there for over sixty years. Her work centred on transference as a total situation, on close attention to what the patient does as well as says in the here and now of the session, and on how patients maintain a defensive psychic equilibrium through subtle enactments and projective identification.
Details
- 1989
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 240
- 9780415041171