Description - Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation by Karen J. Maroda
What are the actual clinical implications of a relational approach to psychoanalytic therapy? Does recent theorizing about "mutuality" and "intersubjectivity" really change the way analysts work with patients? In her theoretically articulate and clinically sophisticated answer to these questions, Karen Maroda calls on analytic therapists to "show some emotion!" This volume aims to demonstrate how interpersonal psychoanalysis obliges analysts to engage their patients with genuine emotional responsiveness, so that not only the patient but analyst too is open to ongoing transformation through the analytic experience. In so doing, the analyst moves from the position of an "interpreting observer" to that of an "active participant and facilitator" whose affective communications enable the patient to acquire basic self-trust along with self-knowledge. Here, Maroda develops her interpersonal approach by grounding her technical recommendations in a clinical theory of affect. Drawing on literature on affect, Maroda argues that psychological change occurs through affect-laden interpersonal processes.
Given that most patients in psychotherapy have problems with affect management, the completing of cycles of affective communication between therapist and patient becomes a vitally important aspect of the therapeutic enterprise. Through emotionally open responses to their patients and careful use of patent-prompted self-disclosures, analysts can facilitate affect regulation responsibly and constructively, with the emphasis always remaining on the patients' experience. Moments of mutual surrender - the honest emotional giving over of patient to analyst and analyst to patient - epitomize the emotionally intense interpersonal experiences that lead to enduring intrapsychic change. Maroda's work is profoundly personal. She does not hesitate to share with the reader how her own personality affects her thinking and her work. Indeed, she believes her theoretical and clinical preferences are emblematic of the way in which the analyst's subjectivity necessarily shapes theory choice and practice preferences in general.
The book is not only a brief for emotional honesty in the analytic relationship but also a model of the personal openness that, according to Maroda, psychoanalysis demands of all its practitioners.
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