Moving from Grievance to Hope in Psychoanalysis: Applied Case Studies
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : August 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 240
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98609
- ISBN 13 : 9781041110408
- ISBN 10 : 1041110405
Also by Johanna Dobrich
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This volume brings psychoanalytic thinking and practice directly into the social forces that shape our lives, covering intergenerational trauma, cultural difference, divisive ideologies, environmental degradation, and entrenched social hierarchies.
Through clinical case studies from leading thinkers in the field, the contributors each show how analysts work in social and collective spaces to dissolve dissociative barriers, address relational ruptures, and cross-translate across polarizing tensions of difference. Enlisting capacities for collaborative meaning-making and interpersonal recognition, and drawing on empathy, imagination, and emotional expansion, the authors demonstrate how psychoanalytic practice can foster healing in communities navigating complex social and political challenges.
Essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and mental health professionals, this volume also guides students and scholars in applying psychoanalytic presence to urgent contemporary challenges, including social fragmentation, political polarization, and ecological crisis.
Reviews and Endorsements
These wide-ranging and thoughtful essays address a theme most vital in our time, the problem of how people move from the grievance response to collective injuries and their unhealed wounds into the mourning process that attenuates further harm. This excellent volume will be most useful and stimulating reading for all who are interested in widening the social scope of psychoanalysis and deepening its involvement with the reactions to traumatic history.
Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D., author of Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Routledge, 2018.
As contemporary psychoanalysts of all persuasions grapple with the role of the social with regard to both its clinical considerations and its implications for theory, this important and timely book rises to the challenge. This volume comprises a select collection of thoughtful psychoanalytic authors who address questions not of whether the social is part of psychoanalysis but, rather, how the domains of the social and the contextual may be thoughtfully, richly, and fruitfully engaged. Filled with gems of psychoanalytic engagement with social systems, this volume represents a potent response to calls from both within psychoanalysis for theoretical expansion and from a wider world in distress, to which psychoanalytic thinkers are uniquely poised to contribute.
Anton Hart, PhD, FABP, FIPA
A provocative invitation. Dobrich, in an all-hands-on deck approach, provides a multidisciplinary challenge to traditional ways of understanding power, community, and change in our current moment of political crisis. How can practitioners facilitate individuals’ understanding of themselves through their community (un)belonging? How do our concepts of self reflect our group memberships and our individual or group relationships to out-groups? This volume offers a variety of contexts to explore these questions, inviting us to let down our guard and explore who we could be if we risked curiosity.
Anna Mahoney, Ph.D., Executive Director and Senior Policy Fellow, Dartmouth College
Moving from Grievance to Hope in Psychoanalysis: Applied Case Studies, edited by Johanna Dobrich, offers a timely and compelling vision of applied contemporary psychoanalysis as an ethically engaged, socially responsive praxis. Through illuminating essays by psychoanalytic clinical educators and others, the volume expands the psychoanalytic field beyond the consulting room to address fractured socio-political realities—trauma, extremism, racism, displacement, erasure, and collective grief—while maintaining rigorous attention to relational process. These richly textured case studies trace a developmental movement from inchoate exchanges toward mature intersubjectivity, where self and other are held in mutual recognition, shared meaning, and collective witnessing. Dobrich advances a dynamic, co-constructed psychoanalytic matrix that integrates internal and external worlds, enabling movement from binary, paranoid–schizoid positions toward integrative communal minds without sacrificing individual identity. This compellingly readable collection offers a vital new ethic of responsibility and care in psychoanalytic work and has my strongest endorsement.
Maurice Apprey, PhD, DM, FIPA, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia School of Medicine
Contemporary psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic communities are in crisis, shaped by multiple, and at times mutually inflicted, historical traumas. Yet psychoanalysis has always evolved through engagement with novel social and political challenges, particularly in its understanding of trauma and social trauma. Each theoretical revision has sought to correct earlier exclusions, invalidations, or dismissals of traumatic realities. From Freud’s reinterpretation of sexual abuse as fantasy to the misattribution of Holocaust trauma, and later, Vietnam veterans’ suffering, as constitutional vulnerability, psychoanalysis has repeatedly struggled to recognize how massive trauma can undo established psychic defenses. In a contemporary climate where sociopolitical ideologies threaten to flatten psychoanalytic depth, this book offers a vital intervention, affirming the coexistence of multiple trauma legacies within a complex global landscape and within psychoanalytic communities themselves. The plurality of perspectives gathered here underscores psychoanalysis’s ethical responsibility to foster integration amid psychic and social fragmentation.
Irit Felsen, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, and internationally published expert on trauma and intergenerational transmission
Dobrich's timely volume brings together an array of brilliant psychoanalytic thinkers to address with rich clinical illustrations and powerful theory the subject of intergenerational trauma. Viewed through family, community, and collective lenses, this volume is a must-read for clinicians and interested laypeople alike.
Grant H. Brenner, MD, DFAPA, Co-Chair, Disaster, Trauma and Global Health Committee, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry
Table of Contents
Introduction: From Extremism to Intersubjectivity: Applied Psychoanalysis in Social Contexts
Johanna Dobrich
1. Beyond Borders: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Refugee Healing
Ruth Wyatt & Alexander Beznes
2. From Destruction to Growth: Multimodal Psychoanalytic Aid for War-Traumatized Chechen Children
Nina Cerfolio
3. Social Psychoanalysis, Silencing and Racial Violence
Roger Frie
4. Traveling Through Time: A Group Intervention in N. Ireland
M. Gerard Fromm
5. Writing Matrescence: Therapeutic Writing Retreats as Collective Containers for Transgenerational Healing
Tracy Sidesinger
6. Confronting the American Gun Complex: A Jungian Analysis of Mass Shootings
Randi Gross Nathenson
7. Grievance, Grief, and Group Building in Community Psychoanalysis: Addressing the Needs of Asylum-Seeking Children and Students with Disabilities through Collaborative Consultation with Educators in a New York City Public School
Billie Pivnick
8. Ethnocultural Identity and Attachment: Unraveling Legacies of Self-Erasure
Johanna Dobrich
9. Knowing and not knowing about our climate crisis: From eco-neglect to mutual sustenance on Planet Earth
Karen Hopenwasser
Conclusion: The “Field” as Patient: Psychoanalytic Practice Beyond the Individual
Johanna Dobrich
About the Editor(s)
Johanna Dobrich is a licensed clinical social worker and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City specializing in the treatment of dissociative disorders, trauma, and loss/bereavement. She teaches postgraduate courses and supervises those in advanced training at the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center (PPSC), the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City.
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