From Inner Sources: New Directions in Object Relations Psychotherapy (The Library of Object Relations) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0876685408 ISBN 13: 9780876685402

Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1977

Synopsis

"This volume is a collection of 14 previously published papers, chronicling a modern position on object relations theory in its clinical rather than theoretical aspects. The editor, along with a number of contributors, including Glen O. Gabbard and Thomas Ogden, are members of a group of brilliant young American psychoanalysts who are forging aggressively into fields initially explored by the British psychoanalytic adherents. Hamilton, formerly a Menninger Foundation staff member, has moved to Oregon, where he is taking a vigorous role in the education of psychoanalysts. The papers in the volume are in the main well known and written by authoritative clinicians. Hamilton's editing is excellent; he provides a useful brief rationale for each paper. After a brilliant dissertation on the whole field of object relations theory, the book's three sections cover the differences among theories and therapists and their techniques; the relationship between therapist and patient; and clinical accounts of work with severely disturbed patients.
Hamilton clearly is committed to the object relations approach and takes pains to delineate how it varies from traditional ego-psychological, drive-defense approaches. He has published on this subject in the past and uses literary metaphors and intense and passionate language to convey how important he considers this particular branch of psychoanalysis to be and how different it is from the American and Freudian schools. He points out that the parallel development between object relations theory and ego psychology in the British Psycho-Analytical Institute came from the treatment of patients more disturbed than those their American counterparts were seeing, people whose primary issues had to do with difficulties in establishing, internalizing and externalizing relationships, who had problems with reciprocity and mutuality.
This book will have wide usefulness both to busy clinicians and to academically oriented psychotherapists who want a collection of papers for teaching purpo

About this title

From the Back Cover

Clinical theory is becoming a way of understanding oneself and one's patients rather than a tool for determining the best technical intervention as a thing in itself. This change has brought increased recognition that different therapists need different theories with their patients, and that even the same clinician may need different theories at different times. As a result there is a new tolerance for and even an encompassing of divergent viewpoints. Today is an age of multiple models in psychotherapy. From Inner Sources: New Directions in Object Relations Psychotherapy includes chapters by the most prominent contributors to this change - Kernberg, Adler, Ogden, McDougall, Pine, and the Scharffs. These clinicians, among others included, originally laid the base for object relations theories in the United States. Their ideas about how individuals grow and change by internalizing and externalizing experience were derived from psychoanalytic investigations into severe mental disorders. As these concepts have been more widely understood and accepted, they have been applied to a wider range of disorders and problems. Each chapter reflects in a different way how object relations psychotherapies are moving in new directions while maintaining their connection with the original inner source. The central concepts such as empathy, containment, object identification, splitting, counter-transference, and the examination of internal object relations' newness are emphasized in each of the contributions. The chapters are clinically relevant and contain significant case material. Although it is not an introduction to object relations theory, this book is understandable to beginning therapists, whilecontaining sufficient depth and controversial discussion for advanced clinicians. The focus of this book is on individual psychotherapy with emphasis on examination of the therapist's intersubjective experience in relation to the patient, as opposed to focusing on the patient's experience alone.

About the Author

N. Gregory Hamilton, M.D. is director of both the Adult Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic and the Medical Student Education for Psychiatry, and associate director of Residency Education for Psychotherapy, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, Oregon.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc.
• Publication date: 1977
• ISBN 10: 0876685408
• ISBN 13: 9780876685402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: N. Gregory Hamilton