The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma

The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis: Understanding and Working With Trauma is an invaluable and cutting edge resource providing the current theory, practice, and research on trauma and dissociation within psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Howell and Sheldon Itzkowitz bring together experts in the field of dissociation and psychoanalysis, providing a comprehensive and forward-looking overview of the current thinking on trauma and dissociation.

The volume contains articles on the history of concepts of trauma and dissociation, the linkage of complex trauma and dissociative problems in living, different modalities of treatment and theoretical approaches based on a new understanding of this linkage, as well as reviews of important new research. Overarching all of these is a clear explanation of how pathological dissociation is caused by trauma, and how this affects psychological organization -- concepts which have often been largely misunderstood.

The Dissociative Mind in Psychoanalysis will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, trauma therapists, and students.

Elizabeth F. Howell, Ph.D., is the author of the award-winning books, The Dissociative Mind and Understanding and Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Relational Approach. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation; Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; faculty, supervisor, Trauma Treatment Center, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; faculty, National Institute for Psychotherapies, faculty, Psychotherapy Training Program: International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, and an Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society. She has written extensively and lectured nationally and internationally on various aspects of trauma and dissociation, as well as on gender and trauma/dissociation. She is in private practice in Manhattan.

Sheldon Itzkowitz, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology and Clinical Consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Guest Faculty, William Alanson White Institute, Eating Disorders, Compulsions, and Addictions Program; and on the teaching and supervisory faculty of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Program in Psychoanalysis. He has presented his work on the treatment of extremely dissociated patients both nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and a former President of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the New York State Psychological Association. He is in private practice in Manhattan.