Jason Aronson, Inc.
Pages: 128
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7657-0483-2 • Paperback • September 2007 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
Donald M. Marcus, M.D. is a training and supervising analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and also at the Psychoanalytic Center of California where he was a founding member. He had his premedical studies at NYU and MIT and received his M.D. from Indiana University School of Medicine. Following residencies in Internal Medicine and Psychiatry, he had his psychoanalytic training at what was then the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. After becoming a graduate analyst he had a Kleinian analysis and supervision with Wilfred Bion, who had a powerful influence on his thinking. He is now in private practice in Los Angeles.
In this unique and pioneering work, Don Marcus substantiates his conviction that careful and skillful self-disclosure enhances the analytic work. The details of two deeply insightful, sensitive and empathic analysts further the cause of intersubjectivty as a modern tool of psychoanalytic therapy.
— Victor Bloom M.D., Wayne State University Department of Psychiatry
Among the most important steps that psychotherapists need to take is to find meaningful ways to obtain feedback from patients about how they experienced the therapeutic work. For psychoanalysts this is an especially difficult and tricky problem since we cannot take conscious responses at face value and because we must always consider the transference. In this trailblazing book, Donald Marcus and his patient, "Hope," make a first brave effort to collaborate so as to explore a rather unconventional and innovative analysis from both sides of the couch. Exploring self-disclosure, interpreting from the unconscious, erotic countertransference, dual-relationship, and post-analytic contact, this moving narrative will present a clinical and ethical challenge to all clinicians.
— Lewis Aron, Ph.D., director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
By challenging many of our assumptions about analytic technique, this innovative, daring book makes a valuable contribution to the debate on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. The joint collaboration of patient and analyst provides rare insights into the healing process in a successful analysis and raises many intriguing questions about the way that therapy works. This is a book that should be read by all those engaged in the field of analytic therapy.
— Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D, training and supervising analyst, New York Psychoanalytic Institute and New York University Psychoanalytic Institute
This is a remarkable account of an analysis that in its frankness probably violates orthodoxy and ethical rules. The authors are to be commended for their openness in describing how they worked. Such truthful reports of what actually takes place in an analysis will allow us to make comparisons of a variety of techniques....This book is recommended to all who are interested in psychoanalysis and to ethics committees who want to keep informed as to where psychoanalytic practice may be heading.
— The Journal Of Nervous and Mental Health, September 2008
This is an incredible work. It is the well-organized, superbly presented story not only of a highly successful and intimate analysis, but also of an analysis conducted in a most unusual way while remaining solidly within legitimate boundaries and frame. In this analysis, Dr. Marcus and his patient, "Hope," took great risks to achieve intimacy with one another and succeeded, so much so that their relationship amounted to a virtual analytic love affair that was conducted within legitimate bounds. What is new about Dr. Marcus's technique in this analysis is that his approach and interventions issued directly from the unconscious, in the style of Bion. This book is beautifully organized into the author's clinical notes, to which are added the patient's and the analyst's retrospective views about each session. This is a book about a wondrous, technical approach that asks for legitimacy and that causes us to pause and to consider it as a technique on the cutting edge of psychoanalysis. The authors are to be congratulated.
— James S. Grotstein, clinical professor of psychiatry, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; author, A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion's Lega
—The focus is on the clinical material itself, with the analysis of it being in the form of commentary by both analyst and analysand.
—The co-author patient is also an analyst who presents her own history and her own view of whattranspired in the analysis.
—The most effective interpretations and interventions were made directly from the analyst's unconscious responses without first being processed consciously. In this he yielded to his patient's desire that his responses revealhis "true self," so that their "true selves" could meet.
—The analyst freely disclosed his responses to his patient, contrary to what is generally taught in psychoanalytic training.
—A new kind of enactment takes place, based on implicit relational knowing. Analyst and patient take dramatic risks in expressing spontaneous passionate feelings in psychodrama play arising directly from the unconscious.