Passions of the Mind: Unheard Melodies: A Third Principle of Mental Functioning - Hardcover

Harold N. Boris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814712045 ISBN 13: 9780814712047

Publisher: NYU Press, 1993

Synopsis

As social animals, each of us can only be partly understood through insights into our individual psychodynamics. There is, within us, another principle at work: to preserve the group, even at the expense of the individual.

In this innovative synthesis of classical psychoanalysis and recent interpersonal and object relations psychology, Harold N. Boris constructs a necessary bridge between individual psychodynamics and group dynamics. This bridge rests upon two, complementary foundations: the egoistically- defined pleasure principle of The Couple and the socially defined selection principle of The Pair.

Unheard Melodies shows how these two states of mind often compete, each being a distinct mental state seeking its own objectives. When analyzed, both mental states reveal their own characteristic themes and feelings, presences and absences, all of which are intertwined in the unique, patterned music of psychoanalysis. To demonstrate the patterning of these mental states, Boris presents the transcription of a composite analysis, an astonishing documentation of his own clinical experience, showing The Couple and The Pair playing together in the analytic setting. These clinical transcripts, complete with commentary, provide rare glimpses into the psychoanalytic process that will interest psychoanalysts, sociologists, and casual students of the mind and society.

About this title

About the Author:

Harold N. Boris has worked as an analyst in many settings—in day and overnight schools for normal and disturbed children, in rural villages and urban centers, in governmental and industrial research facilities, in hospitals and training centers, and in offices and home consulting rooms. His research has been sponsored by NIMH and the Field and Ford Foundations. The author is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and is in private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0814712045
• ISBN 13: 9780814712047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312