Ugazio: Review of Procter & Winter's Personal and Relational Construct Psychotherapy, 2022 (original) (raw)
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In this part of our work about a comparison between Kelly's personal construct theory and phenomenology, we enter the fields of psychotherapy and research. The topic of intersub-jectivity, meant as original recognition of the other's subjectivity, provides a backdrop for both phenomenological clinic and Kellyan psychotherapy. Though Kelly never used the term "intersubjectivity", his theory and the corollary of sociality in particular, reveals a view of interpersonal relationships as intercorporeality, which is much closer to phenom-enological ideas than to the cognitive ones. Depending on such commonality, in either cases clinical relationship is not viewed as an "aspecific factor" of psychotherapy, but as the essential tool for the care of other. Furthermore, the core role of intersubjectivity in scientific knowledge implies a radical revision of the criteria of research. Consistently with the intent of a science of experience, it is no more a matter of collecting data, as of accepting meanings. Psychological research has to refound itself in continuity with life and recognize the need for a real involvement and real interaction with the subjects, as far as to reverse the traditional relation between clinic and research. It is nonsense to conceive clinic as an applicative sector of a pure science because clinic, on the contrary, is the place where one can know, in first-person, those meaningful realities which take shape in the intersubjective exchange of ideas, in order to make them comprehensible and controllable.
Transformative Aspects of Our Own Analyses and Their Resonance in Our Work With Our Patients
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2009
As psychoanalysts, our own relational stories, our "wounds that must serve as tools" (Harris, 2009), represent both our greatest liabilities and potential for change, at times facilitating and at times impeding our capacity to engage deeply in the analytic process. Transformative aspects of our personal analysis dwell, often unconsciously or preconsciously, in the analyst, generating unanticipated opportunities in our work with our patients. In this paper, the author describes how a profound piece of work in her own analysis around healing in her relationship with her young son resonated in her work with a long-term patient, enlivening and deepening the treatment. The author explores how she drew on the interpenetrating experiences of analyst, patient, mother, and child, helping her to deconstruct a complex enactment with her patient, and opening up potential space. In the process, her patient discovered new places within herself, which enabled her to reach out to her vulnerable teenage son in new and reparative ways.
Book reviews: Personal and Relational Construct Psychotherapy
Personal and Relational Construct Psychotherapy - Reviews Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Presented here arefour published reviews of Personal and Relational Construct Psychotherapy by Harry Procter and David Winter (2020): Green, D. (Dec 2020) Book Review of PRCP, Clinical Psychology Forum, 336, 11. Treacher, A. (Feb 2021) Review of Harry Procter and David W Winter, PRCP. Context, 173. 36-37. O'Sullivan, (Dec 2020) Book Review, PRCP, The Irish Psychologist, 46 (6), 157-8. Harding, K. (May, 2021) Book Review, PRCP, Journal of Critical Psychology, Counseling, and Psychotherapy, WInter, 2020, pp. 68-9. Koch, H (2021) Book Review: PRCP. British Journal of Mental Health Nursing | 2021 | https://doi.org/10.12968/bjmh.2021.0024\. The book can be obtained from Palgrave Macmillan: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030521769 Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=procter+winter+personal&i=stripbooks&ref=nb\_sb\_noss\_1 Bookshop.org: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/personal-and-relational-construct-psychotherapy/9783030521769.
Countertransference and Oedipal Love, 2021
In this essay, the author will explore the use of countertransference in the therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on Oedipal love. We begin with countertransference as conceptualized by interpersonal psychoanalytic theorists, who immediately pointed out the technical relevance of the therapist as a person, and the importance of the use of the therapist's feelings, thoughts, life experiences, and states of mind in the therapeutic relationship. Just as dreams, slips of the tongue, peripheral thoughts, and physical gestures are useful in reading the patient's unconscious experience, accepting, examining, and exploring countertransference become useful in reading the analyst's unconscious experience. The author will then identify a more radical and contemporary conception of countertransference as representative of the analyst's unconscious receptivity to the patient within the enactments in which transference and countertransference reciprocally affect each other. Finally, the author will concentrate on the Oedipal feelings experienced by the therapist and their importance in treatment. A clinical case will illustrate the clinical ramifications of these hypotheses.
Psychotherapy: Essence, Experience, and Examination
Was wir wirklich brauchen: Erfahrungen eines Psychoanalytikers, 2024
Foreword to Dieter Adler: What we Truly Need – Experiences of a Psychoanalyst. In any serious, scientific, and ethically justified healthcare profession, the focus should be always on the overall health, treatment, improvement, and amelioration of the patient. What clinical and professional background should therefore a mental health professional have? In his book, Adler does not want to simply offer a quick guide to self-help. In fact, he is clear about the fact that this is not the purpose of the book: “Maybe I’ll write one sometime: How you can reliably become independent of self-help books.” In fact, this book is a reflection on a 30-year-long professional career in which the author has learned to ask questions, to listen attentively, and to help shed light on some of the most complex and hidden aspects of what makes us human. To be sure, this does not mean that this book does not present a practical approach to well-being, quite the contrary. The author lists a series of areas the patient can focus on, in order to achieve a higher state of balance, healing, and happiness. Amongst these we find socialization, upbringing, and community, making friends, understanding and working on one’s emotions and the emotions of others, staying physically and mentally active, finding a sense of security and confidence, maintaining a sense of curiosity, finding a work-life balance and rediscovering peace and calmness, having goals, purposes, and meaning in life, and of course, understanding those negative, self-sabotaging mechanisms and processes which hinder such developments.
From Id to Intersubjectivity: Talking about the Talking Cure with Master Clinicians
From Id to Intersubjectivity: Talking about the Talking Cure with Master Clinicians, 2013
ABSTRACT FOREWORD In this book Dianna Kenny sets out to discover what remains of Freud in contemporary psychoanalytic practice. To do this, she engages us in an intensive dialogue with four eminent practitioners. While no four people can be said to be representative of an entire community of practitioners they are each distinctive and different with respect to their theoretical framework and the cultural milieu within which they operate. After the interviews, she lets them loose on a therapy transcript, which acts as a kind of Rorschach inkblot onto which they project their fantasies about the patient and the therapist. Before we meet the four clinicians, Professor Kenny sets the scene with an unusually lucid exposition of the core ideas of Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This is an heroic task to accomplish in two chapters but she achieves it with remarkable fluency. Inevitably some detail is missing but the core ideas are so clearly enunciated that these chapters alone will prove to be invaluable to any person seeking to navigate this complex and jargon-infested territory. The four interviews that follow are themselves outstanding exemplars of psychoanalytic enquiry. I cannot put it more clearly than Robert Stolorow, who said at the end of the interview ‘Your questions were very thoughtful and incisive.’ It is clear that Professor Kenny had a plan that she brought to each interview. Her plan was informed by a close reading of the published work of each clinician and curiosity about how their ideas and approaches related to other strands of psychoanalytic thinking. However, she never allowed the plan to get in the way of the conversation and many of the questions were stimulated by the thoughts of the person she was interviewing. Indeed, there were times when the questions were as interesting and informative as the responses. This is a scholarly work, with all the key ideas assiduously footnoted or referenced. The reader will have no difficulty further exploring any of the many thought- provoking fragments that the conversations weave together. However, it is much more than scholarly. There is an intimacy to the interviews, which enables each clinician to tell a very personal story. We are constantly reminded that an intellectual journey is shaped by life experience and not just by reading and ideas. For clinicians this is in part vicarious life experience through constant engagement with patients. However, through these interviews we also learn about formative personal life experiences such as the death of a spouse, working in an overburdened health system, or the search for a father. When it comes to the transcripts, each of the therapists adopts the position of the ‘master clinician’ or therapy supervisor. Here we encounter something of the superego of each clinician. They are not always in agreement as to what the therapist might do better but they share what might best be described as a clear vision for how the work should proceed. Stolorow put it most graphically when he said in response to one of the therapist’s interventions, “The therapist is still pursuing a cognitive behavioural approach, which is not, at this point, helpful to the patient”. Each of the clinicians felt strongly about both therapist and patient and were emphatic in their advice-giving to the therapist which was motivated by an unwillingness to provide tacit endorsement of interventions that they considered less than ideal from their perspective. However, after the thoughtful and sometimes humble communication in the four interviews, the assumption of the role of expert came as something of a shock. There is a lot we can learn about therapeutic technique from the responses to the transcript. It also reminds us how strongly identified clinicians are with the patient and how little patience they can have with therapists, who struggle with their patients down difficult byways. A truly unique feature of this book is the textual and thematic analysis of the four interviews that aims to identify the similarities and “real” differences in the conceptualization of the key concepts in psychoanalytic process. This was enriched by the application of textual and conceptual analyses of the psychotherapists’ commentaries on the transcript of the analytic session, followed by the identification of commonalities in the overall case formulation. In these three processes, Professor Kenny demonstrated that underneath the somewhat unique vocabularies and concepts of these four branches of psychoanalytic practice were common core concepts that inform therapist behaviour in the session. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have. It did not set out to provide you with a complete or fully integrated picture of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking; it does, however, provide you with an excellent overview. Furthermore, it will give you more than a glimpse into the world of the practicing clinician. It may also help you understand something…