A New Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory, Practice and Supervision: Talking Bodies - Paperback

by Doris Brothers (Author), Jon Sletvold (Author)

By viewing psychoanalysis through the lens of embodiment, Brothers and Sletvold suggest a shift away from traditional concept-based theory and offer new ways to understand traumatic experiences, to describe the therapeutic exchange and to enhance the supervisory process.

Since traditional psychoanalytic language does not readily lend itself to embodied experience, the authors place particular emphasis on the words I, you, we and world, to describe the flow of human attention. Offering new insights into trauma, this book demonstrates how traumatic experiences and efforts to regain certainty in one's psychological life involve profound disruptions of this flow. With a new understanding of transference, resistance and interpretation, the authors ultimately show how much can be gained from viewing the analytic exchange as a meeting between foreign bodies.

Grounded in detailed case material, this book will change the way therapists from all disciplines understand the therapeutic process and how viewing it in terms of talking bodies enhances their efforts to heal.

Author Biography

Doris Brothers is a co-founder of the Training and Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology Foundation. She serves on the council of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and has previously published three books, including Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis. She practices in New York and Oslo.

Jon Sletvold is the founding board director of the Norwegian Character Analytic Institute. He has published books and articles on the role of the body in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He is the author of The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality (2014), winner of the Gradiva Award in 2015.