Psychoanalytic Diagnosis
The most useful single book for a trainee. Character understood rather than merely coded.
A good diagnostic formulation will inform the therapist's choices in the crucial areas of style of relatedness, tone of interventions, and topics of initial focus.
Nancy McWilliams sets out a working typology of character, moving through psychotic, borderline, and neurotic levels of organisation and then across the paranoid, depressive, narcissistic, hysterical, obsessional, and other personality styles. For each, she describes the drive and affect climate, the characteristic defences, the relational patterns that follow, and the transference and countertransference a clinician can expect to meet.
The book treats diagnosis as a clinical instrument rather than a filing exercise. McWilliams reads the DSM categories against a developmental and structural picture, and shows how a formulation shapes the therapist's stance: how closely to hold the frame, when interpretation lands and when it wounds, what to take up first.
Written for practitioners at any stage, it draws on Freudian, object relations, self psychology, and relational sources without allegiance to one school. Case vignettes ground each type, and the second edition folds in attachment and neuroscience work published since 1994.
About the author
Nancy McWilliams
Nancy McWilliams is an American psychoanalytic psychologist. She is Visiting Professor Emerita at Rutgers University's Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, where she teaches, and she maintains a private practice in New Jersey. Working within the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic tradition, she is known for accessible, integrative writing on psychoanalytic diagnosis, personality structure and character, and clinical technique. Her books, published by Guilford Press, include Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and Psychoanalytic Supervision.
Details
- 1994
- English
- Guilford Press
- Guilford Press, 2nd edition, 2011
- 426
- 9781609184940