Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Practice, Theory and Prevention

by Briggs; Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780415422574
• ISBN10: 0415422574
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-05-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide presents original studies and research from contemporary psychoanalysts, therapists and academics focusing on the psychoanalytic understanding of suicide and self-harm, and how this can be applied to clinical work and policy. This powerful critique of current thinking suggests that suicide and self-harm must be understood as having meaning within interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships, offering a new and more hopeful dimension for prevention and recovery. Divided into three sections, the book includes: a theoretical overview examples of psychoanalytic practice with self-harming and suicidal patients applications of psychoanalytic thinking to suicide and self-harm prevention. Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide will be helpful to psychoanalytic therapists, analysts and mental health professionals wanting to integrate psychoanalytic ideas into their work with self-harmers and the suicidal. This text will also be of use to academics and professionals involved in suicidalprevention.

Author Biography

Stephen Briggs is Professor and Director of the Centre for Social Work Research in the University of East London and Vice Dean in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic. He has worked as a clinician, teacher and researcher in the Tavistock's Adolescent Department since 1991 and has written widely on infancy, adolescence and suicide. Alessandra Lemma is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist working in the Adolescent Department of Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust where she is also the Head of Psychology. She teaches widely and has a particular interest in trauma and body image disturbances. She trained as a psychoanalyst and is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. William Crouch is a Clinical Psychologist in the Adolescent Department, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, with a training post in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He has worked with young people in community mental health teams and inpatient units; he has set up a mental health service in an inner city youth offending team.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. x
Foreword	p. xvi
Preface	p. xxi
Acknowledgements	p. xxiii
Introduction	p. 1
Developments in theory	p. 11
Psychoanalysis and suicide: process and typology	p. 13
The father transference during a pre-suicide state	p. 25
Self break-up and the descent into suicide	p. 38
Who is killing what or whom? Some notes on the internal phenomenology of suicide	p. 45
A psychoanalytical approach to suicide in adolescents	p. 61
Treatment priorities after adolescent suicide attempts	p. 72
Mental pain, pain-producing constructs, the suicidal body, and suicide	p. 80
Practice	p. 93
Hostility and suicide: the experience of aggression from within and without	p. 95
Attacks on life: suicidality and self-harm in young people	p. 109
Suicidality and women: obsession and the use of the body	p. 128
Violence to body and mind: infanticide as suicide	p. 139
Suicidal thoughts during an analysis	p. 150
Applications in practice, prevention and postvention	p. 161
On suicide prevention in hospitals: empirical observations and psychodynamic thinking	p. 163
On being affected without being infected: managing suicidal thoughts in student counselling	p. 175
Suicidality in later life	p. 187
Skin toughening and skin porosity: addressing the issue of self-harm	p. 189
Psychological safety: a missing concept in suicide risk prevention	p. 210
Postvention: the impact of suicide and suicidal behaviour on family members, professionals and organisations	p. 224
Name index	p. 238
Subject index	p. 242
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