Summary The psychoanalytic process is characterized by a complex weave of interrelated polarities: transference and countertransference, repetition and new experience, enactment and interpretation, discipline and personal responsiveness, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, construction and discovery. In Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, Irwin Z. Hoffman, through compelling clinical accounts, demonstrates the great therapeutic potential that resides in the analyst's struggle to achieve a balance within each of these dialectics. According to Hoffman, the psychoanalytic modality implicates a dialectic tension between interpersonal influence and interpretive exploration, a tension in which noninterpretive and interpretive interactions continuously elicit one another. It follows that Hoffman's "dialectical constructivism" highlights the intrinsic ambiguity of experience, an ambiguity that coexists with the irrefutable facts of a person's life, including the fact of mortality. The analytic situation promotes awareness of the freedom to shape one's life story within the constraints of given realities. Hoffman deems it a special kind of crucible for the affirmation of worth and the construction of meaning in a highly uncertain world. The analyst, in turn, emerges as a moral influence with an ironic kind of authority, one that is enhanced by the ritualized aspects of the analytic process even as it is subjected to critical scrutiny. It is Hoffman's achievement to offer a way of thinking and working psychoanalytically that is not only strikingly original but also integrative of the wisdom of existing perspectives, including relational and classical theory. His elegant depiction of the analyst's role as an amalgam of technical expertise, "ironic" moral influence, and a special quality of love and affirmation, all offered up against a backdrop of human fallibility, elevates discussion of "analytic authority" to a new plane. An intensely clinical work, Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process forges a new understanding of the curative possibilities that grow out of the tensions, the choices, and the constraints inhering in the intimate encounter of a psychoanalyst and a patient. Compelling reading for all analysts and analytic therapists, it will also be powerfully informative for scholars in the social sciences and the humanities. -- from the publisher Table of Contents Introduction The Dialectic of Meaning and Mortality in the Psychoanalytic Process Death Anxiety and Adaptation to Mortality in Psychoanalytic Theory The Intimate and Ironic Authority of the Psychoanalyst's Presence The Patient as Interpreter of the Analyst's Experience Toward a Social-Constructivist View of the Psychoanalytic Situation Conviction and Uncertainty in Psychoanalytic Interactions Expressive Participation and Psychoanalytic Discipline Dialectical Thinking and Therapeutic Action in the Psychoanalytic Process Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process Constructing Good-Enough Endings in Psychoanalysis About the Author: Irwin Z. Hoffman, Ph.D. is a supervising analyst and faculty member at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and a Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Dr. Hoffman is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and is an editorial reader for the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. He is coauthor (with Merton M. Gill) of Analysis of Transference, Vol. II: Studies of Nine Audio-Recorded Psychoanalytic Sessions (1982). Dr. Hoffman is in private practice in Chicago. |