Overview

Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing is both a personal analytic credo and a multidimensional approach to thinking about clinical interaction. The book’s central theme is that of analytic needed relationships—the science and art of co-creating unique, evolving relational experiences fitted to each patient’s implicit therapeutic aims and needs. Steven Stern argues that, while we need psychoanalytic theories to ""grow the receptors and processors"" necessary to sense, understand, and connect with our patients, these often tend to frame the therapist’s participation in terms of theoretical and technical categories rather than offering a more holistic view of the relationship in all of its human complexity. Stern believes that a new set of higher order constructs is needed to counteract this tendency. In addition to his own concept of needed relationships, he invokes principles from the work of renowned developmental researcher and theorist, Louis Sander: especially his concept of relational fittedness. Stern draws on the work of Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Kohut, and a broad spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic authors, in fleshing out the therapeutic implications of Sander’s (and Stern’s own) vision. The result is a rich, humane, and accessible narrative. Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing offers diverse clinical examples in which you will find Stern engaging with each of his patients in idiomatic, spontaneous ways as he attempts to contour interventions to the evolving analytic situation. This case material will inspire therapist-readers to feel freer to find their own creative voices and idioms of participation, as they seek to meet each patient within the psychoanalytic space. The book is intended for psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists at all levels of experience, including those in training.

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9780415707893

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Reviews

Steven Stern's Needed Relationship and Psychoanalytic Healing is an innovative and erudite work of scholarship and, perhaps more importantly, it is a leading-edged contribution to clinical psychoanalytic practice and education. Focusing especially on the dialectics of understanding and relational engagement, and of conscious and unconscious participation, Stern advocates a holistic relational approach that uses but transcends theory in co-creating forms of engagement contoured to the uniquely evolving aims and needs of each patient. This book will be essential reading for students and sophisticated mental-health practitioners. -Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. Steve Stern has given us a thorough interrogation of the central issues being debated in contemporary psychoanalysis today. His book demonstrates breadth and depth of scholarship at a level of detail that would take our collective breath away if it did not simultaneously breathe fresh new life into almost every psychoanalytic question ever asked. Stern lays out our current theoretical and technical conflicts using densely muscular prose that is at the same time finely chiseled in both style and content. And in his clinical vignettes, not only does each of his patients come achingly alive in her individuality and suffering, but so too does Steve Stern come alive as the struggling psychoanalyst. This book moves 21st century psychoanalytic discourse forward. -Judith Guss Teicholz, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. A unique characteristic of Stern's writing is that he absorbs, draws from, and integrates the best of so many analytic writers. I haven't seen anyone else do this so well. He tries for an integration of what he sees as the best of psychoanalysis, and then uses this integrative vision as the basis for his own original and valuable perspective on the psychoanalytic process and therapeutic action. -James William Anderson, Ph.D., Northwestern University and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Steven Stern has written an amazing book. Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing not only offers the sophisticated, psychoanalytically informed clinician a refreshing and integrating vision of the field, it provides at the same time a thorough-going education for the novice in the profession. If I had my way as an educator, I would insist that every psychoanalytic institute include in its training program for both the psychotherapist and the psychoanalyst-in-training an opportunity to study this book in full. I myself am teaching a course in psychoanalytic technique for the advanced candidates in psychoanalytic training at ICP, and Stern's book is the backbone of my syllabus. -Estelle Shane, Ph.D., Founding member and training analyst, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA.

Author Information

Steven Stern, PsyD, is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Maine Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine, faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and a member of the International Council of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. He practices in Portland, Maine with specializations in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, couples therapy, and clinical supervision.

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