Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta: The Therapy Process from Inside Out and Outside In

This book looks at the therapy process from both the inside out and the outside in. Over many years of sitting with patients and supervisees, Dr John Espy found that the themes represented here kept emerging in one form or another: Are we winsome or loathsome? Are we self-knowing or self-concealing? Psychoanalysis is a psychic pilgrimage that reveals the depths of both our capacity to love and our depravity. Life is not clean and is fraught with temptations to undermine those behaviours which are in our own best interests, the greatest perhaps being those deceptions about what we reveal of who we really are.

Part One explores these dynamics in the form of laconic adages; Part Two considers contradiction in clinical vignettes; while Part Three examines how serial killers use projective identification to groom and ultimately ensnare their victims. The author’s insights here into how a serial perpetrator uses projective identification are both insightful and compelling.