Posted by twinleaf on November 26, 2007, at 1:11:51
I don't know if anyone here reads "Psychoanalytic Dialogues". It's a quaerterly journal with a lot of very up-to-date articles. It has an interesting format. There will be an article, then three or four extended commentaries, followed by a reply from the original author. You get a real dialogue!
In the current issue, there are three commentaries on Philip Bromberg's book "Waking the Dreamer". The book itself is about trauma, dissociation, and the way to best use psychotherapy to treat them. It's about how the analyst enters into the patient's world- enough so that the patient knows that he is truly understood, but not so much that he gets lost himself. There are wonderful illustrations of the work he does with patients- how he uses himself, his feelings and personal recollections, how difficult emotionally it is for him at times, and how suddenly dissociation can dissolve when the right conditions are there. It's a beautifully written, very compassionate and fascinating book. The commentaries are excellent, too. The reason I posted about it, besides the fact that I can really recommend the book, is that one of the commentators is Allen Schore. He gives an excellent, concise summary of the work he has done on the neurobiology of trauma. In addition to the traumas we are all familiar with- sexual and physical abuse, neglect, loss- he focuses especially on what he calls relational trauma. By this he means having a misattuned mother during the first two years of life- one who isn't sensitive to the infant's changing needs- who may be intrusive one moment and detached the next. It's not what anyone would ever be able to remember, although we can all remember similiar behaviors happening years later. He feels that these misattunements cause major unfavorable changes in the baby's developing right hemisphere. He also feels that repair occurs in the moment-to-moment interchanges which occur in relational psychotherapy. He also says he practices therapy just the way Bromberg does. So, here are two of the best psychoanalysts of the relational, post-classical school- one telling how he does it, and the other telling what is happening in the brain while he's doing it!
poster:twinleaf
thread:797092
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20071120/msgs/797092.html