Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective for the Discipline's Second Century (Relational Perspectives Book Series) by Brent Willock

by Brent Willock

This exceptionally practical and insightful new text explores the emerging field of comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. It provides an invaluable framework for approaching the currently fractious state of the psychoanalytic discipline, divided as it is into diverse schools of thought, presenting many conceptual challenges. Author Brent Willock considers complex clinical data, making astute inferences and evaluating them with respect to alternative hypotheses, as he articulates the significant problem in the nature of the evolution of analytic thought. Moving beyond the usual borders of psychoanalysis, Willock usefully draws on insights from neighboring disciplines to shed additional light on the core issue. Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis is divided into two sections for organizational clarity. Section One is an intriguing investigation into the nature of thought and its intrinsic problems. It convincingly builds a case for the need, after a century of disciplinary development, to move beyond delineated schools, and proposes a method for achieving this goal. The succeeding section elaborates this desideratum in detail, exploring its implications with respect to theory, organizations, practice, and pedagogy. This second portion of the volume is most applicable to everyday concerns with improving work in the field, be it in the consulting room, classroom, or in and between various psychoanalytic organizations.

Hardcover

First published May 15, 2007