Psychotherapy in the Wake of War: Discovering Multiple Psychoanalytic Traditions

Psychotherapy in the Wake of War presents the ways in which differing views of various psychoanalytic schools and traditions—spanning developments for more than one hundred years—may affect theoretical and technical issues in psychoanalytic treatments. Colleagues representing different traditions of psychoanalytic thinking comment on a selection of nine cases and suggest ways of managing these both technically and theoretically. They have a variety of theoretical structures and axioms in their minds, a range of understandings of the symptoms of patients and of which type of interventions to make. This is based on their own internal reflective processes, their trainings and their personal development within their particular ‘schools’ over time. These different approaches reflect the evolution and divergences of psychoanalytic thinking. Some of the writers write in the language of their school, while others have developed their own style. Still others show that there can be issues that arise in clinical work which cannot be easily and fully conceptualized within the confines of one single and particular theoretical orientation. Interesting convergences and divergences are demonstrated in the comments of the practitioners in this present book. Clinical experience may be approached in different ways, as the commentators say, and unexpected ideas thought previously to be incompatible may converge.