The Difficult Art: A Critical Discourse on Psychotherapy

by Aldo Carotenuto

Margritte is a poet of dreams. His painting present to the eye of the observer an enigma having the same coded density as the oneiric world. In a frenetic society that has given up dreams and fantasy, that is characterized by people rushing vertiginously ahead, like guinea pigs continually bombarded with stimuli rushing madly around their cage, the analyst's task is to recover the imaginary, the poetry of the soul, of the psyche. In this sense, the therapist must necessarily be portrayed as a wayfarer who lives life as if it were a never ending voyage. Every stop is marked by an encounter, at every stop a face awaits. And in that lost and bewildered stranger who asks to be shown the way, one begins traveling down a new stretch of the road. It is in the patient that the analyst finds the eagerly awaited fellow traveler. Table of Contents Introduction Searching for a Response Romantic Roots The Paradox of Rules As You Are (With the Kind Permission of Pirandello) The Difficult Art of Being Subjective The Lonely Path of the Individual An Excursion into the Analytical Cultivating the Relationship In Search of the Primary Relationship Ties That Do Not Bind A Starless The Road to Desire The Analyst's Knowledge of Sentiment Gentle Repose Banished Jung in Unexplored Territory More Talk About Sentiments Science Moves, But Reluctantly Homeless, Outlawed, and on the On Our Own If This Be Madness An Magritte's "Therapist" Bibliography Index

Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Professor of personality theory at the University of Rome and the director of the Review of Analytical Psychoanalysis and the Historical Journal of Dynamic Psychology.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love behind the scenes accounts of work life, especially of little understood work lives like those of Jungian analysts.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to know what analysis is like from the perspective of the analyst and this certainly answered that question very well.