Main description:

This fascinating book explores how traumatic experience interacts with unconscious phantasy based in folklore, the supernatural and the occult. Drawing upon trauma research, case study vignettes, and psychoanalytic theory, it explains how therapists can use literature, the arts, and philosophy to work with clients who feel cursed and manifest self-sabotaging states.
The book examines the challenges that can arise when working with this client population and illustrates how to work through them while navigating potent transferences and projective identifications. It's an important read for students, psychotherapists, and counselors in the mental health field.

Contents:

Introduction

1. Magic and the Supernatural: The Historical Context for the Curse Position

2. Mythopoetic Hysteria: The fin de siecle

3. The Curse Position (1). Unconscious Phantasy

4. The Curse Position (2). The Uncanny

5. The Ancestral Curse

6. Imposters of Love: Introjection and Identification

7. Redemption and Conditionality: Fairbairn and Relational Trauma

8. The Devil's Culpa: Shame, Guilt and Evil

9. The Evil Eye and the Limited Good

10. An Alien Seed: Fear and Desire in Psychotherapy