A Volume (19) in the series The New Library of Psychoanalysis Published in Association with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London Psychic Retreats discusses the problem of patients who have withdrawn to avoid anxiety and mental pain and with whom it is difficult to make meaningful contact. Using current Kleinian theory, experienced psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Steiner examines how these retreats are constructed and how analysis can treat them. He examines the way object relationships and defenses can be organized into complex structures which lead to a personality and an analysis becoming rigid and stuck, with little opportunity for development or change. These systems of defenses are pathological organizations of the personality:John Steiner describes them as `psychic retreats', into which the patient can withdraw to avoid contact both with the analyst and reality. Psychic Retreats is written with practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in mind, the emphasis is therefore clinical throughout the book, which concludes with a chapter on the technical problems which arise in the treatment of such severely ill patients. Table of Contents: 1. A theory of psychic retreats 2. Psychic retreats 3. The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions 4. Review:Narcissistic object relations and pathological organisations of the personality 5. The recovery of parts of the self lost through projective identification:The role of mourning 6. The retreat to a delusional world:Psychotic organisations of the personality 7. Pathological organisations as a defence against depressive pain and guilt 8. The relationship to reality in psychic retreats 9. Perverse relationships in pathological organisation 10. Two types of pathological in Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus 11. Problems of psychoanalytic technique:Patient-centred and analyst-centred interpretations
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