Experience-based Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

An Experience-based Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice looks at each individual as a motivated doer doing, seeking, feeling, and intending, and relates development, sense of self, and identity to changes that are brought about in analytic psychotherapy.Based on conceptualizing experience as it is lived from infancy throughout life, this book identifies three major pathways to development and applies Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage’s experience-based vision to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Using detailed clinical narratives and vignettes, as well as organizational studies, the book takes up the distinction between a person’s responding to a failure in achieving a goal with disappointment and seeking an alternative path, or with disillusion and a collapse in motivation. From the variety of topics covered, the reader will get a broad overview of an experience-based analytic conception of motivation begun with Lichtenberg’s seven motivational systems. This title will be of great interest to established psychoanalysts, as well as those training in psychoanalysis and clinical counselling psychology programs.

"It’s hard to imagine that in this seventh co-authored book, Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage have managed to create a thoroughly fresh vision of the psychoanalytic engagement, distinct not only from what other contributors have brought to us, but also distinct from their own past writings. Presenting, as they themselves write, '...a new synthesis of motivation, development, nonlinear emotional influences, and relational aspects of the psychoanalytic process...' Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and Fosshage now move to an enhanced focus on lived experience, on what it feels like for the 'doer-doing' as he or she moves into relating, creating, living, and breathing. Their novel and expert focus on the nonverbal, their exquisite elaborations on affect-tone and ambiance, generates a new appreciation of what the trio have already brought to us in terms of motivation and development. For example, I call attention to the clinical and conceptual distinction they make between disappointment and disillusionment. And, as always, there is an abundance of beautifully rendered clinical material. In all, this is a fascinating volume. It is groundbreaking and truly interdisciplinary in the best sense of the term. I can only add: these three have done it again!" Estelle Shane, PhD, Board Member and Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, MD, Graduate Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, is Cofounder of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Cofounder Psychoanalytic Inquiry; and Editor-in Chief of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series.James L. Fosshage, PhD, is a Past President of IAPSP; Cofounder, Board Director, Faculty, and Supervisor, National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NYC); Founding Faculty, Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (NYC); Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Frank M. Lachmann, PhD, a psychoanalyst and Founding Faculty of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, and is author or coauthor of more than 160 journal publications and books.Joe Caruso is an author, business advisor, speaker, and an advisor to top leaders on individual and collective behavioral change. Mor Shechory-Stahl, PhD, is a Clinical Psychologist; Lecturer in psychotherapy programs in Israel (Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University; Levinsky College of Education); practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy in private practice; advisory board member of 'In-Between', a nonprofit that supports divorced families.