Making a Difference in Patients' Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting
Part of Psychoanalysis in a New Key series - more in this series
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : 2008
- Cover : Paperback
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 27115
- ISBN 13 : 9780881634945
- ISBN 10 : 0881634948
Also by Sandra Buechler
Erich Fromm: A Contemporary Introduction
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Within the title of her book, "Making a Difference in Patients' Lives", Sandra Buechler echoes the hope of all clinicians. But, she counters, experience soon convinces most of us that insight, on its own, is often not powerful enough to have a significant impact on how a life is actually lived. Many clinicians and therapists have turned toward emotional experience, within and outside the treatment setting, as a resource. How can the immense power of lived emotional experience be harnessed in the service of helping patients live richer, more satisfying lives? Most patients come into treatment because they are too anxious, or depressed, or don't seem to feel alive enough. Something is wrong with what they feel, or don't feel. Given that the emotions operate as a system, with the intensity of each affecting the level of all the others, it makes sense that it would be an emotional experience that would have enough power to change what we feel. But, ironically, the wider culture, and even psychoanalysts, seem to favour "solutions" that aim to mute emotionality, rather than relying on one emotion to modify another. We turn to pharmaceutical, cognitive, or behavioral change to make a difference in how life feels. Because we are afraid of emotional intensity, we cut off our most powerful source of regulation. In clear, jargon free prose that utilizes both clinical vignettes and excerpts from poetry, art and literature, Buechler explores how the power to feel can become the power to change. Through an active empathic engagement with the patient and an awareness of the healing potential inherent in each of our fundamental emotions, the clinician can make a substantial difference in the patient's capacity to embrace life.
About the Author(s)
Sandra Buechler is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, USA. Her many books include Making a Difference in Patients' Lives (2008), which won the Gradiva award, Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career (2012), Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons from Literature (2015), and Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living, (Routledge, 2019).
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