The Future of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy faces multiple challenges in the new millennium. How can it organize, teach and offer therapy in ways that are relevant to the diverse complex and social and cultural groups of people who seek psychological help? How should it adapt to demands for accountability and evidence? How can it cope in a climate of competition and market share? Should it cleave to medicine or abandon it? Define itself as a science or an art or an ethical practice?|This wide-ranging work takes up some of the pressing cultural, political, organizational and ethical issues for psychoanalytic psychotherapy, placing them firmly in a clinical context. The contributors examine a range of issues from the experiences of a particular group of people in therapy (children, immigrants, gay men, short-term clients), who may challenge psychoanalytic assumptions, to the difficulties psychoanalytic psychotherapy has in organizing itself creatively in a risk-averse culture, and to the openings and connections with other disciplines that may extend and enliven critical work. The contributors write from the critical edge of psychotherapy and offer their own challenges to the profession. Contents: Colonizing the heart - shame and the regulatory project; "Do not dance on top of this refrigerator" - accountability and transparency in psychotherapy; creativity and the soul - dilemmas of training; evidence, legitimacy and validation; ways of knowing - counter-transference, neuroscience and the therapy relationship; do you always listen to what your parents say - the ethics of psychotherapy; no place like Utopia - the inner experience of migration; blue stockings, boiler suits, business suits - is feminism still necessary?; unfamiliar sorts of people - redescribing sexuality; the lure of the norm and the challenge of children, Carol Dasgupta; brief psychoanalytic psychotherapy - a contradiction in terms? Jenny Corrigall; are words enough? - music therapy as an influence in psychoanalytic psychotherapy; the blue river of truth - writer, reader and critic in the consulting room; telling it like it is.