Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice

by Galit Atlas, Lewis Aron

In Dramatic Dialogue, Atlas and Aron develop the metaphors of drama and theatre to introduce a new way of thinking about therapeutic action and therapeutic traction. This model invites the patient’s many self-states and the numerous versions of the therapist’s self onto the analytic stage to dream a mutual dream and live together the past and the future, as they appear in the present moment. The book brings together the relational emphasis on multiple self-states and enactment with the Bionian conceptions of reverie and dreaming-up the patient.

The term Dramatic Dialogue originated in Ferenczi’s clinical innovations and refers to the patient and therapist dramatizing and dreaming-up the full range of their multiple selves. Along with Atlas and Aron, readers will become immersed in a Dramatic Dialogue, which the authors elaborate and enact, using the contemporary language of multiple self-states, waking dreaming, dissociation, generative enactment, and the prospective function.

The book provides a rich description of contemporary clinical practice, illustrated with numerous clinical tales and detailed examination of clinical moments. Inspired by Bion’s concept of "becoming-at-one" and "at-one-ment,"　the authors call for a return of the soul or spirit to psychoanalysis and the generative use of the analyst’s subjectivity, including a passionate use of mind, body and soul in the pursuit of psychoanalytic truth. Dramatic Dialogue will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and　psychotherapists.

193 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 22, 2017

Reviews

[Mark O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book is an exciting, illuminating, fun experiential tour through the history of psychoanalysis, (and all psychotherapy really), in terms of the inevitable dramatic exchanges between client and therapist. Atlas and Aron do a marvelous job illustrating felt clinical examples of how various analysts throughout time have found their own unique ways of engaging clients and helping them to embody their various versions of self. The authors' brilliant and accessible writing not only highlights an integral part of the therapeutic process that has always been present, though often unnamed, but at the same time they help therapists and clients to think of the work of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as a collaborative, dramatic, process, that invites each participant to be a full, multifaceted person. Highly recommend!!!