Main description:

Reflections on Long-Term Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis explores how relational analysts think about and pursue long-term therapeutic relationships in their practices. Many therapists work intensively with their clients over many years and don't necessarily talk about their work. More exploration is needed into what is taking place inside of these long-term relationships.

The chapters cover a range of topics that focus on aspects of the therapeutic relationship that are unique to long-term psychoanalytic work. They include work with various issues such as trauma, death and dying, cross-cultural issues, suffering, mourning, neuropsychoanalysis, unique endings, attachment, intimacy, and the many ways in which therapists change along with their clients as they go through life stages together.

Reflections on Long-Term Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychodynamic psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, workers in other mental health fields, graduate students, and anyone who is interested in change processes.

Contents:

Introduction

Part I: The Terrain

An Interview with Joyce Edward JOYCE EDWARD & SUSAN LORD

Long-Term Psychotherapy: Whyever Not? (A Question of Assumptions) PATRICIA DEYOUNG

It Takes as Long as it Takes: Therapists' Subjective Experiences of Long-Term Therapy JEAN KOTCHER

In Defense of Long-Term Treatment: On the Vanishing Holding Environment WILLIAM S. MEYER

Long-Term Treatment in the Rearview Mirror WILLIAM S. MEYER
Part II: Trauma and Issues of Attachment

Mourning the Melancholy Object: Giving Voice to Traumatic Experience CAROL GANZER

The Role of Ethnicity and Culture in the Long-Term Treatment of Childhood Trauma SHOSHANA RINGEL

It Takes a Long Time to Grow Young: Working Relationally with Developmental Trauma NATALIE PEACOCK-CORRAL

Masks, Walls and Metaphors: Reflections on Long-Term Treatment KATHY FARGIONE
Part III: How Could It Be Otherwise?

Being Still: Sitting with Suffering in Long-Term Relational Practice JOAN BERZOFF

Till Death Do Us Part: Relational Work and Terminal Illness SUSAN LORD

Looking Back Through 38 Years of Practicing Relational Psychoanalysis in Search of Answers to the Question of Interminability STEFANIE SOLLOW GLENNON

Neuropsychoanalysis and the Repressed: Rendering What is Possible in Long-Term Psychotherapy JANE ABRAMS

The Longest Goodbyes: Analysis Everlasting ANTHONY BASS