Getting from Here to There: Analytic Love, Analytic Process

Guided by the conviction that work with extremely challenging patients promotes the psychological growth and increased self-knowledge of patient and analyst alike. The author chronicles the movement of psychoanalysis itself from the dissection of love into component parts to a synthetic grasp of its role in psychoanalytically informed treatment. It is clinical work with the most difficult patients - those with severe narcissistic, sadomasochistic, and borderline disorders - that poses the greatest challenge to the therapist's guiding assumptions about clinical process; indeed, such work often leads therapists to question beliefs and expectations that formerly seemed self-evident. In "Getting from Here to There: Analytic Love, Analytic Process", Sheldon Bach elaborates the holistic vision that guides him in work with just such patients. He dwells especially on the "attentive presence" through which the analyst effects a "meeting" with patients that invites the latter's trust in the analyst and