In his new book, Transformational Processes in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Dreaming, Emotions and the Present Moment (Routledge, 2018), Lawrence J. Brown offers a contemporary perspective on how the mind transforms, and gives meaning to, emotional experience that arises unconsciously in the here-and-now of the clinical hour. Brown surveys the developments in theory and practice that follow from Freud’s original observations and traces this...

Driven to Survive: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis is a new book by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD, published by IPBooks in 2018. “Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau has given us a work of deep scholarship and original thought. Fully engrossing and forceful in presentation, it is a bold and necessary reworking of Freudian drive theory. Her new formulations will reshape our thinking and our way of listening. ” ~ Dan Jacobs, MD, Director of...

Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts (Routledge, 2017) recently published by BPSI’s faculty member Ellen Pinsky, PsyD, considers psychoanalysis from a fresh perspective: the therapist’s mortality―in at least two senses of the word. That the therapist can die, and is also fallible, can be seen as necessary or even defining components of the therapeutic process.  At every moment, the analyst’s...

Engaging Primitive Anxieties of the Emerging Self: the Legacy of Frances Tustin (Karnac, 2017) is a a new book co-edited by Howard B. Levine and David G. Power. Frances Tustin was a pioneering child psychotherapist who broke new ground in working with autistic children in the latter half of the twentieth century. This book amplifies and extends contributions by Tustin to the study and treatment of autism, autistic spectrum disorders and...

Consciousness, Language, and Self: Psychoanalytic, Linguistic, and Anthropological Explorations of the Dual Nature of Mind is a new title by BPSI’s member, Michael Robbins, MD, published by Routledge in 2018. The book proposes that the human self is innately bilingual. Conscious mind includes two qualitatively distinct mental processes, each of which uses the same formal elements of language differently. The “mother tongue,”...

Guided Enactments in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A New Look at Therapy With Adults and Children (Lexington Books, 2017) is a new book by Sebastiano Santostefano, a retired associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a BPSI Member. Thirty five percent of persons who are provided psychotherapy do not benefit from treatment, or drop out of therapy prematurely because they fail to establish a...