Clinical Dicta and Contra Dicta is a series of reflections that the author has pondered in one form or another over the past thirty-five years of practice. Some are more theoretically or philosophically based while the others tend to be more clinically specific. The book looks at the therapy process from both the inside out and the outside in. The thoughts and brief clinical scenarios that are included are those that the author believes to be of fundamental importance when one considers what one does as a psychotherapist/analyst. They are written to stimulate consideration of their content. Over many years of sitting with patients and supervisees, the author found that the themes represented here kept emerging in one form or another: Are we winsome or loathsome? Are we self-knowing or self-concealing? Psychoanalysis is a psychic pilgrimage, that reveals both the depths of our capacity to love and of our depravity. As these pages suggest, life is not clean and is fraught with temptations to undermine those behaviours which are in our own best interests, the greatest perhaps being those deceptions about what we reveal of who we really are. Part One explores these dynamics in the form of laconic adages; Part Two considers contradiction in clinical vignettes; while Part Three examines how serial killers, one of the author's specialised areas of research, use projective-identification to groom and ultimately ensnare their victims. The author's insights here into how a serial perpetrator uses projective-identification are both insightful and compelling. About the Author: John C. Espy, PhD, LCSW, has been practicing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for the past thirty-five years. He was supervised by R.D. Laing for many years and conducted a weekly supervision group with Sheldon Kopp. He has worked extensively in the area of primitive and psychotic personalities and has interviewed more than twenty serial murderers and pedophiles in the United States and Europe as part of his research on the manifestation of malignant projective-identification. His current practice primarily focuses on clinical and forensic consultation and long term treatment. He was previously a neurotoxicologist with NASA and has taught at numerous universities throughout the United States. Dr Espy is also a long standing member of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work and northwestern United States group moderator for the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.
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