Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis

by Adrienne Harris (Editor), Susan Klebanoff (Editor), Margery Kalb (Editor)

Ghosts in the Consulting Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time, while acknowledging, witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Ghosts in the Consulting Room features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways that surprise both patient and therapist. In the book, distinguished psychoanalysts examine how to work with a variety of ‘ghosts’, as they manifest in transference and countertransference, in work with children and adults, in institutional settings and even in the very founders and foundations of the field of psychoanalysis itself. They explore the dilemma of how to process loss when it is unspeakable and unknowable, often manifesting in silence or gaps in knowledge, and living in strange relations to time and space. This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis.

214 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 31, 2016

Reviews

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Right in the middle of reading this powerful collection of essays, I had the opportunity to hear Adrienne Harris, one of the authors and chief editors speak at the University of Toronto. Her presence, now taken in, accompanied me throughout the reading.
From the opening introduction to the closing and moving words, written by Sam Gerson, I deepened my sense of inter-generational legacies and burdens. The various writers offered a rich perspective on appreciating and exploring moments where I, as both an individual doing my own work, and as a therapist, have come face to face with the uncanny, with the presence of absences, and with the places of pain where no witness is to be found.
Reading History Beyond Trauma, by Davoine and Gaudilliere, I became more interested in the ubiquity of unprocessed historical trauma, especially the trauma of war and genocide, in our world today. Their work provided a new way of seeing and understanding psychosis; on a similar level, Ghosts in the Consulting Room has opened my senses to what fills the silence and the absences in myself and in others, both in those places where we feel pain, or those places where we feel nothing. It illuminates those places where we feel haunted, or drawn to unfamiliar objects and impelled by desires that seem foreign and mysterious.
Freud wrote about the grieving process and the need to transform melancholy into mourning. When this cannot happen, when the traumas of our ancestors were too vast and too painful to be fully experienced and processed, ghosts appear. In the work of depth therapy, we are afforded the powerful journey of travelling to these ghost worlds, stepping into them, and sometimes coming to know their pain and mystery. Sometimes - in this way - we can accomplish, in Loewald's words, the turning of ghosts into ancestors. In this way, we know ourselves better, and come to appreciate these unknown inheritances that lead us unsuspected on to strange and perplexing paths.
Now that I've met the ghosts, I'm looking forward to reading the companion publication, and visiting the demons next. This work has awakened fresh curiosites in me, and has opened up new vistas to be explored.