Reviews the book, Healing psychiatry: Bridging the science/humanism divide by David H. Brendel (see record 2006-07160-000). Early in his book, David Brendel asks, “Is psychiatry an empirical science that aims to diagnose and treat abnormal human behavior, or is it a form of humanism that addresses the inner workings and meanings of people’s subjective experiences and existential concerns?” (p. 3). He thus signals clearly, from the very beginning, that he is engaging a debate that has been hotly pursued by advocates of one stripe or another under a wide range of terms and rubrics—with one side characterized by labels such as positivism, empiricism, or evidence-based practice, and the other under banners such as hermeneutics, postmodernism, or narrativism. In contrast to the more str…

This paper introduces two related measures that can be used to evaluate, describe, and track changes in personality functioning. Both are derived from the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP-200). The first measure is the Personality Health Index…

Reviews the book, A disturbance in the field: Essays in transference-countertransference engagement by Steven Cooper (see record 2010-09125-000). At the beginning of this book, Cooper states that he is interested in finding the common ground, clinically, between the relational approach and other schools such as the Kleinian, Freudian, Kohutian, and others. In the introduction, Cooper states he will be examining the moments of transition, change, and newness that occur in psychoanalytic treatment. He alerts us that although he is very interested in countertransference as a clinical tool and the analyst’s imagination as helpful in the therapeutic work, he warns us to not see these elements in any heroic or idealistic manner. Cooper promises to explore the areas of unconscious conflict, fan…

This paper describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a man involved in an unusual, but prolific form of white-collar crime. Unlike the majority of narcissistic and overtly antisocial individuals who comprise the heterogeneous group of white-collar offe…

The psychoanalytic exploration of group relations requires an orientation to the intersubjective nature of mental life. The Tavistock model of group relations provides a preliminary framework for thinking intersubjectively about the nature of experienc…

There are transformational possibilities in the family when presented with a child who is transgender or gender nonconforming. Challenging orthodox psychoanalytic thinking that these children’s gender presentations are a consequence of poor parental re…