Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis

by Spezzano; Charles

• ISBN13: 9780881633986
• ISBN10: 0881633984
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Drawing on the writings of Freud, Fairbairn, Klein, Sullivan, and Winnicott, Spezzano offers a radical redefinition of the analytic process as the intersubjective elaboration and regulation of affect. The plight of analytic patients, he holds, is imprisonment within crude fantasy elaborations of developmentally significant feeling states. Analytic treatment fosters the patient's capacity to keep alive in consciousness, and hence reflect on, these previously warded-off affective states; it thereby provides a second chance to achieve competence in using feeling states to understand the self within its relational landscape.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Knowing and Talking About Affect
The Place of Psychoanalysis in the Conversation About Human Affective Life	p. 3
How Psychoanalysts Talk About Affects Now	p. 35
The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Thinking About Affects
Freud's Alleged Missing Theory of Affects Revisited	p. 59
Affect and Its Regulation in Post-Freudian Theory	p. 84
The Dialectics of Affect
Patients and Their Discontents: Who Or What Is Responsible?	p. 117
Excitement, Certainty, Relational Coordination, and Competence	p. 151
The Technical Implications of Affect Theory
Affects, Resistance, and Character	p. 183
The Struggle to Imagine	p. 209
References	p. 233
Index	p. 243
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