The Psychoanalytic Encounter and the Misuse of Theory - Paperback

by Lee Grossman (Author)

In clear, accessible language, Lee Grossman addresses the disjuncture between analytic literature and clinical work in an effort to render analytic theorizing more representative of clinical experience.

Pointing out the ways in which analytic literature can fail to capture the intensity of feeling and the stumbling, lurching, working in the dark that captures much of clinical engagement, Grossman shows how incomprehensibility is sometimes mistaken for wisdom. As an alternative, Grossman shows how attention to what he calls the syntax of thought can naturally define three different broad categories of life experience: the omnipotence of the neurotic, the wishful, short-sighted thinking of the perverse, and the concrete, disordered thinking of the psychotic. Using rich clinical material, interspersed with detailed exposition and artful satire, Grossman departs from conventional theoretical writing to provide new ways of conceptualising analytic therapy.

Addressing analytic therapy as an encounter between two people, both governed by forces about which they know very little, this book provides essential insights for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other clinical practitioners both in training and in practice.

Author Biography

Lee Grossman is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He served on the editorial board of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly for 15 years. He lives in Oakland with his analyst wife, Jan Baeuerlen, and a goofy English bulldog named Frank.