Treating Dissociative and Personality Disorders: A Motivational Systems Approach to Theory and Treatment

Treating Dissociative and Personality Disorders draws on major theorists and the very latest research to help formulate and introduce the Relational/Multi-Motivational Therapeutic Approach (REMOTA), a new model for treating such patients within a clinical psychoanalytic setting.

Supported by her fellow contributors, Antonella Ivaldi provides an overview of existing theories and evidence for their effectiveness in practice, sets out her own theory in detail and provides rich clinical detail to demonstrate the advantages of the REMOTA model as applied in a clinical setting. The narratives in this book show how it is possible to integrate different contributions within a multidimensional aetiopathogenic treatment model, which considers the mind as a manifestation of the relationship between body and world. From a conceptual perspective, according to which consciousness emerges and develops in the interpersonal dimension, this book shows how it becomes possible to understand, in the therapeutic space, what stands in the way of sound personal functioning, and how to create the conditions for improving this.

Treating Dissociative and Personality Disorders will be highly useful in addressing the particular clusters of symptoms presented by patients, stimulating therapists of different backgrounds to explore the complexity of human nature. On reading this book, it will become clear that theories can truly become useful instruments, if approached with a critical mind and with humbleness, in order to venture into what we do not know and will never know completely: the relationship with the other, unique and irreplaceable.

Treating Dissociative and Personality Disorders provides an integrative and comparative new approach that will be indispensable for combining relational clinical knowing and motivational theories. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, especially those in training, clinicians of different backgrounds interested in comparative psychotherapy, as well as social workers and graduate and postgraduate students.

Antonella Ivaldi is a training analyst at the psychotherapy postgraduate program of the LUMSA University, the Institute of Relational Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology (ISIPSÉ), and the School of Cognitive Psychotherapy. She is also Member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and the Italian Society of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy.