On the Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

On The Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is an operating manual for the challenging, often lonely and confusing work of doing therapy. It locates clinical method in a historical tradition of many contributory workers including: Freud, Breuer, Klein, Segal, Ferenczi, Waelder, Katan, Tausk, Sullivan, Lacan, Green, Rapaport, Winnicott, Bion, and Ogden. In this way, the book links contemporary clinicians within a broad, inter-textual range of psychoanalytic thinking and thinkers. In so doing, it addresses the many areas of blockage and foreclosure that challenge progress in our field, including those rooted in historical eras, cultural assumptions of practice in particular places, exclusionary scholastic orientations and psychoanalytic politics. The authors outline a clinical methodology based in interpretive reflection that has been demonstrated actively from the earliest period of psychoanalysis, toward the therapeutic influence of mind upon mind.

On The Daily Work of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy explores how clinicians orient themselves in the clinical setting, moment by moment. It develops a route of fundamental therapeutic action, applicable under all clinical situations, from the single session consultation to intensive, long term psychoanalytic psychotherapy. At its centre is the daily arrival at a construction we call “d”, the transient and evolving understandings co-created by therapist and patient - realisations critical to the generation of therapeutic insight, conviction and the patient’s experience and testing of therapy’s utility.