Learning from Experience: A Guidebook for Clinicians

by Marilyn Charles

An important task facing all clinicians, and especially challenging for younger, less experienced clinicians, is to come to know oneself sufficiently to be able to register the patient's experience in useful and progressively deeper ways.  In an effort to aid younger clinicians in the daily struggle to "know thyself," Marilyn Charles turns to key ideas that have facilitated her own clinical work with difficult patients.  Concepts such as "container" and "contained," transitional space, projective identification, and transference/countertransference are introduced not as academic ideas, but as aspects of the therapeutic environment that elicit greater creativity and vitality on the therapist's part.  In Charles's skillful hands, the basic ideas of Klein, Winnicott, and Bion become newly comprehensible without losing depth and richness; they come to life in the fulcrum of daily clinical encounter.

Genres: Psychoanalysis

142 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

Reviews

[Gregory Kaplan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A concise but elegantly written primer for the psychoanalytic clinician. The book draws mainly on Bion and Winnicott. It has excellent chapters on the container, projective identification, transference, and countertransference. Charles employs the concepts of models and patterns to unravel self and free it up for new possibilities.

[Jamie Roach]

I struggled to keep up. Much of the psychodynamic vernacular is still foreign to me….

[Wesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book aimed at beginning psychodynamic clinicians. I particularly liked her discussions (using case examples) of the container and the contained, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and projective identification, as these concepts can be pretty confusing. She also challenges the clinician to be aware that any theory can be useful in grounding you and alleviating your own anxiety, but it can also serve to blind you to other possibilities a client might present. Overall, a good book which I will probably at least glance over again in the future.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite thing regarding this book is the way Charles conceptualizes using so many nonverbal experiences, and the felt experience of the therapist. It is a great way to explain to clinicians the way our own reactions can moderate the treatment. She also makes Bion and Winnicot very accessible. I highly recommend this book to any clinician regardless of their orientation or developmental path.