Thinking For Clinicians

by Donna M. Orange

Thinking for Clinicians provides analysts of all orientations with the tools and context for working critically within psychoanalytic theory and practice. It does this through detailed chapters on some of the philosophers whose work is especially relevant for contemporary theory and clinical Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Orange presents the historical background for their ideas, along with clinical vignettes to help contextualize their theories, further grounding them in real-world experience. With a hermeneutic sensibility firmly in mind, Thinking for Clinicians rewards as it challenges and will be a valuable reference for clinicians who seek a better understanding of the philosophical bases of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D., holds two doctorates: one in Philosophy from Fordham University and the other in Clinical Psychology from Yeshiva University. A faculty member of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity and a supervisor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, she maintains a private practice in New Jersey.

Reviews

[Lauren Bernstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best summer reading book to date! I am so grateful to have found a program that thinks the way I do. Donna Orange so gracefully bridges her philosophical and clinical lives. When I tell people about my program, they are oftentimes surprised by the combination. And Orange has helped me articulate how they infuse each other with meaning and purpose. Grappling with the existence of these philosophers’ ivory towers, she showed me how their theories are deeply rooted in lived experience and driven by ethical questions.

Despite knowing what I want and love, I am always taken aback by how much I want and love this. Orange exemplifies what it means to be a psychoanalyst in the vocational sense in a way that I deeply revere and resonate with.

It makes me so excited to get started. I wouldn’t want my PhD in anything else. My copy is filled with fervent marginalia and has inspired my map of human sciences (in progress). The big ideas in this book have been weaving in and out of my conversations since I started it in May. I will be reading it forever.

Some good quotes:

“The wounds of the order-of-being can be healed in infinitely many other places than those at which they were inflicted” (Buber).

“The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question” (Wittgenstein, 1953).

“It is this perceptual faith that psychological trauma destroys. Where some patients can point to the moment of annihilation of their “sense of things,” of their “innocence,” others inhabit a world so precarious they can remember no time of perceptual faith. At its best, perceptual faith is the only fragile faith—not knowledge—but it makes possible to develop development of capacities for coping in a world” (66).

“My situation is always already filled with sedimented meanings—the opaque past becomes present—and with projects for getting this maximum grasp, the future become present. There is no atomic present, there is no isolated instances” (67).

“We have here a double asymmetry within our common world: The other sees and feels me as I cannot possibly feel myself, and I feel myself as the other cannot possibly feel me” (70).

“The task of bringing people to a self understanding of themselves may help us gain our freedom in relation to everything that has taken us in unquestioningly” (Gadamer, 1982).

The biggest takeaway lies in this quote: “I must accept my own powerlessness to help. I must simply stay close to their experience” (116). When I think about taking on patients in my second semester, I come back here. Psychoanalysis is not about being an expert and knowing, but possibly about not knowing so the analysand can begin to know.

[Hiu Ching · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book with a lot of expectation as a person who loves psychology, psychotherapy, and philosophy.

She did a great job in summarizing and synthesizing different philosophers' thoughts into clinical context. However, it takes me a month to actually digest it as this seems a bit difficult for readers who do not have prior knowledge/ foundation on philosophy.

This book gives a general overview of these concepts and can be approached with mental preparation that you would need to do a lot of extra reading in order to get the most out of it.

It is fair to say this is neither therapeutic and philosophical given how short the book is. However, will recommend after all as a starting point.

[Susan Boulware · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear amd concise articulation of the humanistic, phenomological philosophical,foundation s of c9 temporary psychoanalysis.

[Leonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very brief overview of phenomenologist philosophy as it might undergird certain psychoanalytic clinical technique. A good get acquainted with Buber, Levinas, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. It neither gives enough philosophy nor psychoanalysis (or psychotherapy) to be truly satisfying. Dr. Orange does provide helpful further readings.

[Larry]

Excellent book
Provides the philosophical grounding of relational forms of education and psychology