Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

Drawing on the writings of Freud, Fairbairn, Klein, Sullivan, and Winnicott, Spezzano offers a radical redefinition of the analytic process as the intersubjective elaboration and regulation of affect. The plight of analytic patients, he holds, is imprisonment within crude fantasy elaborations of developmentally significant feeling states. Analytic treatment fosters the patient's capacity to keep alive in consciousness, and hence reflect on, these previously warded-off affective states; it thereby provides a second chance to achieve competence in using feeling states to understand the self within its relational landscape.

Charles Spezzano, Ph.D., is a member of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and the International Psychoanalytic Association.  He is a contributing editor to Psychoanalytic Dialogues and is on the editorial board of JAPA.  He is coeditor, with Gerald J. Gargiulo, of Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Analytic Press, 1997).