Playing at Work offers a thorough guide to the innovative psychoanalytic practices of Vincenzo Bonaminio, as he draws on the work of Winnicott, Bollas and Tustin to demonstrate an effective method for working with adults, adolescents and children in clinical settings. Using several clinical cases, the book explores central psychoanalytic concepts such as transference and countertransference, identity and self, embodiment, anxiety and the role of parental influence on psychic development. By providing extended commentary on his case material, Bonaminio illustrates the significance of writing about clinical practice to the development of techniques that address patients' varying needs. Simultaneously, this text offers a method that cultivates each patient's capacity for intuition and the use of metaphor to form their own interpretations, and thereby invests a sense of freedom into the analytic situation. By its deeply reflective insights, and its emphasis on the contribution made by the analyst as an active participant in the therapeutic situation, Playing at Work forms essential reading for all practising psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists who wish to improve their clinical practice with patients of any age. Table of Contents Introduction 1. Transference Before Transference 2. Clinical Winnicott: Travelling a Revolutionary Road 3. A Task Which can Never be Accomplished: Dealing with Mother's Mood - Winnicott's Clinical Understanding of Psychic Work Carried out for the [M]other 4. The Analyst Oscillating Between Interpreting and Not Interpreting 5. The Person of the Analyst 6. Imaginative Elaboration 7. The Adolescent's Discourse: New Forms of Civilization's Discontents 8. Parental Pre-Fabrication of the Self. An Account of the Analysis of a Thirty-Year Man. 9. "These Anxieties are Not Mine": Adolescence, the Oedipal Configuration and Transgenerational Factors 10. "A Hundred Times I Died, and a Hundred Times I was Born Again" 11. "Noticing, Understanding and Interpreting": 'The Mother's Madness Appearing in the Clinical Material as an Ego-Alien Factor' (1969) 12. The Burden and Encumberance of the Analyst's and the Analysand's Bodies Within the Confines of the Consulting Room About the Author: Vincenzo Bonaminio is a training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and works in Rome in a private practice with adults, adolescents, and children. For over 25 years he has been Driector of the D.W. Winnicott Institute, and is Director of the Winnicott Centre, Italy. |