Timeless Grandiosity and Eroticised Contempt: Technical Challenges Posed by Cases of Narcissism and Perversion

This book aims to provide a clinical conceptualization to enhance the understanding of lost and confused patients whose narcissistic struggle against human fate defies reality and truth, challenging the analyst and the analytic situation. The authors combine literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory with real-life case studies to explore these perplexing psychic phenomena.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 338 pages
Publication date: 14 May 2021
Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House

The challenges and crises that repeatedly surfaced in Michael and Batya Shoshanis work with exceedingly difficult patients, driven by anxieties of being, and particularly by perverse psychic organization, motivated them to write this book. It is an attempt to propose a clinical conceptualization aimed at enhancing their understanding of these lost and confused patients, whose narcissistic struggle against human fate defies reality and truth, challenging the analyst and the analytic situation. Analysts, caught between their own perception of reality and truth and the desire to be empathetic to their patients' experiences and views of reality, often feel torn and as if standing on quicksand. Here, the authors are joining a contemporary movement within the psychoanalytic tradition while also turning to other disciplines to better understand and explain the suffering of their patients. The use of literature, particularly the fictional works of Jorge Luis Borges; film, with an in-depth look at Roman Polanskis Bitter Moon (1992) and Denis Villeneuves Incendies (2010); and philosophy, the ideas of Heidegger and how they link to those of Freud, coupled together with a solid grasp of psychoanalytic theory, such as reflections on Neville Symingtons seminal theory of narcissism, interspersed with real-life case studies, bring the chapters alive. Such interplay between the detailed clinical material and conceptual formulations to an interdisciplinary dialogue enables a different outlook that will enrich the ongoing professional discourse on these perplexing and illusive psychic phenomena.

Weight: 548g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781912691616