Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
A practical guide to the stance and craft of psychoanalytic therapy.
Addresses the most important questions about facilitating the therapeutic process.
Nancy McWilliams sets out the working stance of psychodynamic treatment and the reasoning behind it. She treats therapy as a craft learned through attention rather than technique applied by formula, and she names what the analytic clinician actually does: how to listen and how to speak, how to hold a frame, how to keep a patient emotionally safe, and how to read the countertransference as clinical information rather than noise.
Much of the book concerns matters that training often leaves implicit. McWilliams discusses preparing a patient for the work, educating them about how therapy proceeds, and the tangled boundary decisions that arise when rules meet particular people. She draws on ego psychology, object relations, self psychology, and relational thinking without forcing them into a single system, and she argues for a therapist's ongoing self-care as a condition of the work rather than a luxury. Case material and candor about her own errors carry the argument.
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
- 2004
- Guilford Press
- Guilford Press
- 353
- 9781593850098