Description
In the complex fabric of feeling woven between therapist and analysand lie the threads that lead to self-understanding. This useful study, solidly based on the author’s clinical and personal experience, traces these threads to their archetypal and personal sources and explores their many manifestations in both the analytic setting and everyday life.
Transference and countertransference phenomena, including an overview of Jung’s ideas, are presented with clarity and precision, There is special attention to recurrent themes in analysis- idealization, narcissistic character disorders, borderline conditions, envy, separation anxiety and depression -with detailed discussions of the transference-countertransference dynamics operating in each.
Barriers to productive therapy, both those built by the analysand and those that arise in the analyst, are examined at length. A special bonus is a chapter on gender issues and masculine identity conflicts including homoerotic anxiety.
This is a living work, scholarship mediated by compassion and an empathic dedication to honest self-assessment.
