Jacob's Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy

Author(s) : Josephine Klein

Jacob's Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy

Book Details

  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Published : 2003
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 302
  • Category :
    Individual Psychotherapy
  • Catalogue No : 17326
  • ISBN 13 : 9781855759367
  • ISBN 10 : 1855759365
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In this fascinating work, Josephine Klein considers mysticism - a world of ineffable experience - to see if it might have anything to teach those in the therapeutic world and invites the reader to look at newer ways of psychoanalytic thinking. She uses artists and writers of the past to help illuminate contemporary issues.

Reviews and Endorsements

'I have read this book with great interest and enjoyment. It is a work of considerable learning; but learning that is worn lightly and always grounded in real life and everyday experience. It is a book that is provocative and serious - and rich in alusion and reference. [The author's] sensitive use of the artists and writers of the past shows the universality of great art and its capacity to throw light on, and inform, contemporary existence; and the interweaving of psychological and religious motifs will be of interest to any reader who has asked the deepest and most perplexing questions about life.'
- Dr Brian Horne

'Anyone familiar with Josephine Klein's work will know that she approaches every topic with a refreshingly open mind. Here she considers mysticism - a world of ineffable experience - to see if it might have anything to teach us as psychotherapists. Her project is based on the idea that the framework within which psychoanalysis developed effectively excluded words such as love, soul, spirit and ecstasy, replacing them by such concepts as instinct, gratification, dependency and attachment. Klein wonders if this may have restricted our approach to our clients and perhaps diminished their experiences.

'By immersing the reader in a rich tapestry of quotations from the mystics, Klein on the one hand invites us to understand this realm in familiar psychodynamic terms; on the other, she causes us to be caught up in the very texture of ineffable experience so that we experience it first hand and become reluctant to let it go. She then invites us to look at newer ways of psychoanalytic thinking that might allow more room for the ineffable.'
- Dr. Ken Wright, author of Vision and Separation: Between Mother and Baby

About the Author(s)

Josephine Klein was an academic for the first twenty years of her professional life and then a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. She is a Fellow of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and was until recently a member of the British Association of Psychotherapists.

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